adversiting benchmarks?

[mudflation]

a little background. i launched my new website a few days ago, and started a yahoo ad campaign to promote it using the $100 credit + $5 activation promotion.

i have no idea how i am doing relative to what is considered "good" and "bad," so i decided to post my results here and see if anybody else had any benchmarks i could compare my results to.

so here goes, for the last two days, 12 ad groups, 3500 keywords

day 1:
imp clks ctr av.cpc cost
a 1113 17 1.53 0.21 3.50
b 2640 03 0.11 0.25 0.75
c 0351 03 0.85 0.20 0.60
d 0711 00 0.00 0.00 0.00
e 2557 03 0.12 0.23 0.69
f 0575 03 0.52 0.16 0.48
g 1600 03 0.19 0.21 0.63
h 0204 05 2.45 0.50 2.48
i 0263 00 0.00 0.00 0.00
j 0696 00 0.00 0.00 0.00
k 0483 00 0.00 0.00 0.00
l 0126 00 0.00 0.00 0.00
tot 11319 37 0.33 0.25 9.13

ad group h had 1 key word that generated 1 clicks for $0.92, which is a lot more than i liked. lowered bid for to .10 (still held #2 listing at .10 so i figured it didnt matter).

unknown click through. generated 1st sale for $0.98 commish (HA?).

day 2:
imp clks ctr av.cpc cost
a 1113 17 1.53 0.21 3.50
b 2640 03 0.11 0.25 0.75
c 0351 03 0.85 0.20 0.60
d 0711 00 0.00 0.00 0.00
e 2557 03 0.12 0.23 0.69
f 0575 03 0.52 0.16 0.48
g 1600 03 0.19 0.21 0.63
h 0204 05 2.45 0.50 2.48
i 0263 00 0.00 0.00 0.00
j 0696 00 0.00 0.00 0.00
k 0483 00 0.00 0.00 0.00
l 0126 00 0.00 0.00 0.00
tot 11319 37 0.33 0.25 9.13

group h still causing problems, with 4 clicks from 1 keyword at $0.60. removed keyword because it was unrelated (have no idea how it got in there, didn't notice it in there the day before). lowered all bids to .10 in group h (pretty low competition there no worries)

added outgoing link tracking so i can track my clickthrough rates from now on. generated 1 sale for $4.26 commission though i have no idea if yahoo ad's generated the sale or some other source.

added a new ad per ad group in hopes of raising clickthrough and qi. had qi of mostly 2-4 and one 5 for previous ads from day before.


how do these numbers look? i think .33% click through is pretty abysmal, but i have nothing to compare it with. i was pretty happy with the qi of some of my ads though. i will post todays results later, but so far its looking like about the same amount, with a much lower cpc thanks to the changes in group h.

comments/critics always welcome

 

[mudflation]

day 3:

imp clks ctr av.cpc cost
a 2138 8 0.37 0.16 1.29
b 142 2 1.41 0.14 0.27
c 76 0 0.00 0.00 0.00
d 705 1 0.14 0.12 0.12
e 1583 2 0.13 0.28 0.56
f 546 3 0.55 0.14 0.42
g 1254 7 0.56 0.17 1.24
h 63 1 1.59 0.10 0.10
i 196 1 0.51 0.15 0.15
j 214 2 0.93 0.15 0.30
k 70 1 1.43 0.20 0.20
l 154 2 1.30 0.18 0.44
tot 7141 30 0.42 0.17 5.09

best day so far, not sure if its because of tweaks or just statistical error. increased my impressions, clicks and ctr; decreased cpc and cost total.

got my outgoing links tracking, had 5 people click through out of a total of 50 according to google analytics, so about a 10% ctr.

my affiliate says that i made 2 sales of the same price, but shows $0 in commission from both, so its a little suspicious. it also isn't showing any orders in the current orders page. i can only find my leads through a previous orders link burried in their affiliate report, so the whole thing is a bit suspicious to me. cut out below:

[FONT=Tahoma, Verdana]Order #[/FONT][FONT=Tahoma, Verdana]Amount[/FONT][FONT=Tahoma, Verdana]Date of Order[/FONT][FONT=Tahoma, Verdana]Status[/FONT][FONT=Tahoma, Verdana]Processed[/FONT][FONT=Tahoma, Verdana]Commission [/FONT][FONT=Tahoma, Verdana]xxxx[/FONT][FONT=Tahoma, Verdana]$41.81[/FONT][FONT=Tahoma, Verdana]8/23/2007[/FONT]
[FONT=Tahoma, Verdana] No [/FONT][FONT=Tahoma, Verdana]$0.00[/FONT][FONT=Tahoma, Verdana]xxxx[/FONT][FONT=Tahoma, Verdana]$41.81[/FONT][FONT=Tahoma, Verdana]8/23/2007[/FONT]
[FONT=Tahoma, Verdana] No [/FONT][FONT=Tahoma, Verdana]$0.00[/FONT][FONT=Tahoma, Verdana]xxxx[/FONT][FONT=Tahoma, Verdana]$42.62[/FONT][FONT=Tahoma, Verdana]8/22/2007[/FONT]
[FONT=Tahoma, Verdana] No [/FONT][FONT=Tahoma, Verdana]$4.26[/FONT][FONT=Tahoma, Verdana]xxxx[/FONT][FONT=Tahoma, Verdana]$9.83[/FONT][FONT=Tahoma, Verdana]8/21/2007[/FONT]
[FONT=Tahoma, Verdana] No [/FONT][FONT=Tahoma, Verdana]$0.98[/FONT]
order processed: no?
status: blank??

i plan to email them about this tomorrow for sure. *if*, and thats looking like a big if, everything is okay, then yesterday was my first day of profit. $8.36 in commissions - $5.09 ad costs = $3.27

a few more days like this, and some straightening out of my affilliate and i'll be ready to scale up.

 

[mudflation]

day 4:

impressions: 6042
ctr: .56
clicks: 34
cpc: 0.17
cost: $5.75

day 4 was much like the day before. fiddled with bids and ads, and had 2 ads declined. ctr is improving, fewer impressions with more clicks with the same cost. cant complain about that. not sure if its my doing or theirs but i'll take it.

had 10 clickthroughs that generated 2 sales out of 45 uniques. for a total of $8.23. $2.48 profit woohoo

day 5:

impressions: 3848
ctr .62
clicks: 24
cpc: .14
cost: $3.44

half way through the day, i decided to lower all bids to the minimum .10. added 2 ad groups also, one of which is preforming very well.

generated 9 clickthroughs and 1 sale out of 42 uniques for a total of $2.69 (they rounded 10% of 26.99 down...) -$0.75 for the day

day 6 (as of 10pm today - not over yet but too excited to wait):

impressions: 1464
ctr .82
clicks: 12
cpc: .10
cost: $1.20

first full day of minimum bids across the board. about 1/3 the clicks and 1/3 the cost of my previous days. cost seems to scale linearly because my previous bids were fairly low already.

generated a monster 6 click throughs and 5 sales out of 19 uniques. a total of $25.20 - $1.20 = $24 profit. 2000% ROI... if only this was sustainable/scalable.



days not over, but today was a good morale booster. I'm still having problems with my main affiliate showing $0.00 under some of my commisson for sales i've generated, and if they dont get that sorted out pretty quick, i'll end up dropping them.

next step is to code a program to check all my affiliate stats for me since after adding 3 more affiliate programs today, checking 9 different affiliates for link/order data is taking more time that anything. also going to try to start scaling up a bit by adding different advertising sources at the minimum bids. i think google is still very cheap for my keywords