Recap of first month trying PPC, need guidance.

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1. Stop advertising on MySpace.
2. Data is your friend. I hope you've got some sort of analytics so you can start analyzing your data.
3. Start using search only, save the content network for later. It's trickier and can be an easy way to blow capital.
4. You've got a landing page, great. Are you split testing?
5. Pay absolutely no attention to what others post on this board for their CPC. They may be telling the truth, they may not - doesn't matter. Your results will vary depending on the keyword, quality score, account history, etc.

Hmmm... without seeing your LP's that's all I can recommend.
 


Maybe you should try Cost-per-click placement instead if your CTR is too low?

How about using banners as ads? I've got like 1-2% CTR using that 400x40.. or was it 800x100, i dont remember.. but those long banner type ads you see at the WF ads above. I used the keyword-targeted content network and I was pushing an email submit offer.
 
When you are learning make damn sure you have 1) an affiliate offer that works and 2) a landing page that converts.

What you are doing now is shuffling around a bunch of different variables. This is like trying to cross a busy street with a blindfold on while drunk.
 
This is like trying to cross a busy street with a blindfold on while drunk.


Also known as the 4 years I spent in college....

Thank you for the info, you're 100% correct. I'm going to reengineer the way I'm doing things and post back when I think I'm ready.
 
When you are learning make damn sure you have 1) an affiliate offer that works and 2) a landing page that converts.

Quick question about this...

When you're considering an offer, do you take the reported network EPC into consideration to see if the offer 'works'? How would you mark it as 'works', send some money into a test campaign? What's the normal effective process for qualifying offers that you super affiliates use?
 
Great read so far, interested to see your results as you test and tweak.

Andrews right on the money -- try to test one variable at a time and keep the others consistent, then move on to the next variable.

I'd also recommend choosing your neverblue offers by looking at the EPC, network earnings, and target audience... stamps.com might be a fantastic offer with a good conversion rate but the myspace crowd is far from the right audience. Try something along the lines of ringtones, games, or giveaways (Purses, Cellphones etc.)
 
Did a new campaign today, $.25 CPM to only women's sites via adwords. Baby sites, pregnancy sites, and mother/preschool sites only. Baby photo contest.

$25 daily limit. 8000 impressions so far at $2.xx, one click.

Will keep trying copy over the next week.

Thank you all for your criticisms. Guess I was too cocky about it the first time around. Will post back the results of this current one.

I've been accused of "analysis paralysis" on more than one occasion, but I gotta say you need to spend more time thinking and less time spending.

Why the hell would you target pregnancy sites for baby photo contests? Pregnant women don't have babies yet!

I know it's tough to analyze potential when you're new and you don't have much data to base your estimates on, but you have to try to use whatever you have available.

Stop doing CPM, stop doing fly-by-night campaigns, and stop restricting yourself to the "hotlist" of Neverblue campaigns. If you keep doing this, you're going to nuke your adwords account entirely.
 
I've been accused of "analysis paralysis" on more than one occasion, but I gotta say you need to spend more time thinking and less time spending.

Why the hell would you target pregnancy sites for baby photo contests? Pregnant women don't have babies yet!

I know it's tough to analyze potential when you're new and you don't have much data to base your estimates on, but you have to try to use whatever you have available.

Stop doing CPM, stop doing fly-by-night campaigns, and stop restricting yourself to the "hotlist" of Neverblue campaigns. If you keep doing this, you're going to nuke your adwords account entirely.



Pregnant women certainly may have existing babies, unless I suppose if they're in China.

As of now, I've cancelled my campaigns and am taking the route you all suggest.


I get the "spend before think" disease from 4 years of marriage I think!
 
Quick question about this...

When you're considering an offer, do you take the reported network EPC into consideration to see if the offer 'works'? How would you mark it as 'works', send some money into a test campaign? What's the normal effective process for qualifying offers that you super affiliates use?

Find of friend who has been or is promoting an offer, and have them give you the thumbs up. Hell, just ask your AM what the top 5 hottest offers of the month are. Network reported EPC can be a guide to prevent your from avoiding the worst offers, but don't count on the number being what you'll be making.

Eventually you'll be able to look at an offer and figure out if it will work for you (generally a balance between ease of conversion path & payout.) At the very least, at that point in the future you have good traffic sources & techniques so that when you do test a brand new offer out, and it blows, you know its the offer and not you because the traffic source is proven.
 
Right, but network EPC is a volume measurement. It doesn't take into account traffic sources or promotion methods. Someone could be putting a banner on their organic site while another is blasting massive amounts of spam email, and both are treated the same in computing the EPC.
 
Right, but network EPC is a volume measurement. It doesn't take into account traffic sources or promotion methods. Someone could be putting a banner on their organic site while another is blasting massive amounts of spam email, and both are treated the same in computing the EPC.

Yeah EPC data can be way off so you can't just go by that. I run offers with all different traffic sources most of the time and my epc's are all over the board depending on the source of traffic. My overall epc looks horrible if when in reality the epc on my quality traffic sources is actually triple my overall epc for the offer. Hopefully that's scaring others away from running that offer if they just ask their am to pull up epc numbers since they will be much lower that they are in reality...:evil_laughter:
 
Learn at least the fundamentals of copywriting. Actually, I think there should be a forum section dedicated to that here since it's such a critical part of your marketing success...

I recommend the book "make your words sell".
 
Instead of doing CPM immediately, try CPC on the content network. When you find certain sites get you good traffic, then that's when you should run CPM on them.

- Use keywords that will likely appear on pages the demographic you target will be reading
- Keep each adgroup small (5 to 10 keywords is what I do)
- Bid high
- Install your tracking

If you find any adgroup getting considerable traffic (especially if the adgroup is converting), check the placement report for the sites they are appearing on. Then target those sites instead of blindly choosing whatever url comes to mind.
 
You need to research better on the intent of the traffic.

Keep yourself at the place of the traffic. "Who are they?" .. "What are they doing online ?" ... "What are they looking for ?".

Myspace has traffic which go there for leisure, finding friends or talking to new people. Those people will not convert that well.

See some site where the traffic is made up of professionals, educated and people who are inclined towards the product you are promoting.
 
Get your hands on the following ebooks... read and understand them and follow them to a friggin T

They are all based on Keyword and Site Targeting on the Content Network

Adwords 180
Plan C
Rockstar Affiliate (The Adwords Section)

Read them like they're god....:bowdown:
 
uhhhh

Pregnant women certainly may have existing babies, unless I suppose if they're in China.

Think you missed Dogfighter's point, which is an important one when considering a source of TARGETED traffic...

The only thing you KNOW FOR SURE about prospects at a pregnancy site is that they have a baby who CAN'T BE PHOTOGAPHED.

Think about what kind of sites a mother with a 6 month old baby, or one year old might frequent. As a father I can tell you the most likely would be related to feeding them, diagnosing thyem and making them sleep.
 
So I read through all of this and wow lots of good points but also I didn't see any about the actual Adwords campaign settings, if your doing PPC marketing and you have everything perfect, you will still fail if you don't know how to use Adwords.

Here are some tips when doing PPC.

- Listen To Andrew.

- Listen To AIM.

- Don't be afraid to loose money because trust me you will, its just a matter of not loosing all your money before you start earning.

- Find Jon's barried threads on PPC.

- Pick 1 Offer and start there.

- Stay far away from the content network

- Do CPC then move onto CPM and the content network once you've got your foot in the door.

- Split Test 1 Variable on your landing pages at a time

- Set your Adwords settings to a daily budget of whatever you can afford but don't set it so high you will be broke in a week.

- Don't get scared and pause the campaign when you don't make any conversions the first few days.

- Don't get over excited and start to raise the fuck out of everything just to get in spot 1 if you do start making money the first few days.

- Don't use a million, or a thousand, or a hundred keywords per adgroup, in an adgroup the MAX and I mean MAX amount of keywords you want to use is 14 to 16 but thats only after you get a little experience under your belt. Instead when your just starting out at your stage try to use 1 keyword per adgroup, make the adgroup name the name of your keyword, and put the name of your keyword in your ad and have that keyword on your landing page somewhere, then use broad, phrase, and exact match, so you have 1 keyword in your adgroup with 3 variations, broad, phrase, and match, then you use that keyword in your adgroup name, on your landing page and in your google ad.

- Don't ever only use 1 ad per campaign, split test with at least 2 ads per campaign, let it go a week or two and compare which one has a higher CTR and make small changes to the one with a lower CTR and re-compare and keep doing so throughout the life of your campaign.

- Make sure your keywords are targeted to your offer.

- Use the Google Conversion Tracker or Use a custom Conversion Tracker that will tell you which keyword led to the conversion because you'll find some keywords will convert more and those are the keywords you should focus more on and create variations of those keywords.

- Don't take the advice of someone on the boards who say they raised there bid to $1 and then lowered it to .07 cents and made a million even if they are telling the truth and trust me I've seen that method and it can work if done correctly but you can also trust me that they are not telling you the whole story.


Let me pause from the tip list for a second and see if I can put into words that you will understand how those guys make money from upping the bid to a crazy price then dropping it right down but I won't completely lay it out for you.

Most of the time they already know which keywords convert, which landing pages work the best, which ad copies work the best, ect.... they don't go in blind and guessing, the ones who do are the ones who loose there money and get mad and say this is all a joke and no one can earn money online.

The system behind it is CTR, Google uses a shit wack of things to determine your Quality Score, they take into account Keyword relevency, the keywrods on your landing page, the keywords in your adgroup, the adgroup name, the ad itself, ect...

All of these things don't have to be 100% perfect and can be changed and updated when the campaign is rolling, they just have to be close, from there the hardest thing to do is to raise your CTR so these guys will up there bid to whatever to get the top spot in the rankings and will loose some money in the process but once they CTR is high enough and everything else is complient with the QS and there QS is good they will drop there bids to the min and Google now see's everything is good and will take it another step and lower the keywords even more giving them low clicks, they then run the campaign and earn the money back they lost plus there profits.

That isn't the entire story but its the jist of it, this is a strategy like everything else, and let me tell you the best strategy to develop.......ready......ready......its......YOUR OWN which is developed through trial and error.

Ok I've got myself distracted and forgot the rest of the tips off my head so I'm leaving you with one final note and I'm going to let the others fill in the rest.

The info I just gave you the Guru's will charge you an easy $2-3K for so tell them to go to hell if your looking to them for training they will fuck you, take your money and leave you in the ditch.

There was something else but I forgot I'll come back later when I remember again, my brain freeze is most likely caused by lack of nicotine in the blood stream so I'm going to go and top that up.
 
awesome post Aequitas ... motivated me to revise a few of my campaigns and try to increase the quality scores.
 
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