Starting Off in PPC

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Have you looked at what advertisers landing pages look like (that are bidding on your came keywords). 4% conversion is not good, but how are you looking at it?

The networks base it on their clicks, so that 12-14% networks talk about is only after they click through the landing page. So 300 ad clicks, 50% click through to the offer, it'd be 12-14% on that 150 clicks.

If you're direct linking, 4% is probably expected.

Way to get profitable! I remember how excited was after my first profitable campaign (and it was a small profit). I would suggest to concentrate on increasing your volume first before maximizing profits (many of the steps are the same). Get on weeklies on one or two networks.

The more volume you can do, the more keyword optimization you can do.
 


As you become more profitable, if you hate the creative part or if you think your landing page sucks then take the profits and outsource it.

You might consider at some point, once you have culled down your keywords, taking your most profitable keyword/LP/ad copy combo and testing it on Yahoo to pick up some more traffic.
 
Thanks for sharing, this is basically where I am at at the minute finally seeing a little profit. but cant get the large amount of traffric due to cash flow.
I need a credit card with $100,000 limit. but don't think the bank will give that to a 22 year old without a job haha
 
jackfitz said:
Thanks for sharing, this is basically where I am at at the minute finally seeing a little profit. but cant get the large amount of traffric due to cash flow.
I need a credit card with $100,000 limit. but don't think the bank will give that to a 22 year old without a job haha
Click to expand...

Try applying for the Bank of America Student Platinum Plus. I got that card as a student with no credit and got a decent credit limit.

Keep it up zorba, you'll be rolling in the green sooner than you know it.
 
5.) Apparently my landing-page-fu is not strong. My landing pages actually seem to lower sales -- I've made more from direct linking. I don't think that's how this is supposed to work. :) This is kind of a problem I expected -- my technical ability is great, and I can automate everything, but graphic design and making appealing sales sites is not a skill I presently have. That'll take practice.




If you make sucky landing pages, then pay someone to make you good ones. You said you have the money so get a few made up and split test them to find which converts better. That oughta up your returns fairly quickly.
 
^^^^
Worthwhile point for somebody starting out, but this makes split-testing very difficult - unless you want to keep paying your designer for every little change. Getting a handle on XHTML and CSS is worth your time and effort if you want to make this a serious income source (advice meant for myself, as well as the OP).
 
I did a lot of work on my landing pages, and increased my bids on commercial-intent keywords where my $1-1.50 bids were getting zero impressions up to $2-3. The results were mixed.

The stats look good on the surface. CTR went up to 2.17% (up from 1.5%), and better still, the clickthrough rate from my landing pages went up to 20% (from a horrible 4%.)

But... there's a problem -- revenue went down. While I drove more to my merchants' pages, almost nobody actually followed through and bought anything! Unlike the previous few profitable days, today was a pretty big loss -- revenue was only 30% of spending! Now, part of this may be luck due to my low volume -- with only 12 clicks getting to the offer pages, it's hard to know what's representative. Investigating my keywords, I quickly found one big problem -- my higher bids got me top position on an expensive keyword with tons of traffic (like, 1/3 of my whole campaign's impressions tons) that appears to be commercially worthless. I don't think I'm giving away any big secrets when I say that a large bid on "what is resveratrol?" is probably not a good idea. These searchers want information, but they're not in the mood to buy -- they're in the mood to read.

On the bright side, for the first time I got to drop a keyword based on my criteria of "if I've spent 2x the CPA price on a keyword with 0 conversions, I should get rid of it." While I'm not delighted to have wasted $70, at least I won't be doing it again tomorrow. Even without that blunder I still wouldn't have been profitable today, but ditching this and one other keyword would have cut my losses from 70% of today's spend down to 15%. And I'm not too discouraged, because I think the luck factor with such a small sample size enters into this -- if I hadn't made that keyword mistake, one more conversion would have been the difference between loss and profit. I once again find myself thinking I should have started with a cheaper offer (some $3 lead-gen thing instead of $33-40 CPA resveratrol), but I'm in this far and pretty close to profitability, so I'm going to stick with this one.

I'm also interested in trying out the content network, since I see resveratrol flogs on the MSN content network constantly. However, I don't know that I should jump around that much right now.

And in reply to the above comments,
cucaloco: Yes, both my landing pages were based of looking at a lot of other landing pages and seeing what they do.

jackfitz: Alas, I have the opposite problem. I have the money and credit to support a $10k/day spend if I had something that were profitable and got a decent amount of traffic. But starting with only MSN, traffic is low, and I can't yet convert well enough to support the expensive keywords that would produce high traffic. I'll get there, though!

BlueYonder: I'm quite capable of coding XHTML and CSS (and PHP, ASP.NET, perl, C, C++...). My problem is visual design. The problem isn't "I want to make it look like this and I have to figure out how to code that" -- it's "I'm not sure what it should look like in the first place." Right now I've been patterning my LPs off the look of other LPs I've seen, figuring if it sells stuff for somebody, perhaps it'll sell stuff for me, too. The problem with this technique is that for all I know I'm copying off people who aren't making any money. :)
 
Awesome detail in this post; has certainly answered some of my questions of "Where would I go from here on a starting campaign if I were him?"
 
Anything "resveratrol" is probably not a good idea for search, though I'm sure some are making it work. The problem is, the word itself. It's hard to spell. I bet there are a hundreds spelling variations that have to be accounted for. I can't see this word getting a ton of searches except through your competitors and weight loss gurus.
 
zorba;
I would definitely give content a go if I were you.

And you say you're unsure of what styles of landing pages you should go for since you're not sure if the competitors are profitable or have been running long.

I use PPC Bully for this, but the quickest (and free) way of doing some similar research is to use Alexa.com and Quantcast.com.

Type in the domains of what seems to be your top competitors (ones you keep seeing over and over again in the results for many of the keywords) and see how much history Alexa or Quantcast has on them. At the same time, they will give you a rough idea of how the competitors stack up against each other, and what sorts of demographics visit those sites.
 
zorba, great thread. In your first post, if I'm understanding it right, you decided to jump into resveratrol, and it seems within days after you had a full 30 page site with 12 original articles? How did you put that together so fast? Did you outsource it? Or did you use some kind of scraper tools? Or are you just plain fast at writing lots of content? :)
 
+rep

Thanks for keeping us posted on what you're doing. I've been playing small time, doing blogs and things like that. I'm going to do PPC when I've got a bit more money saved up--this thread has already saved me some time and money. thanks for keeping us informed.
 
ImagesAndWords, I'm interested in trying out PPC Bully and will probably give it a go, but they don't appear to be taking new customers right now. I'll probably look at them again when they re-open for signups. Thanks for the tip about looking up domains on Alexa, though -- that'll work for the more-established competitors (though a lot look to be little throwaway flog domains that get only PPC traffic and no organic search.)

pizzafari, I didn't outsource or use scrapers, I did it manually. I used WordPress as a CMS for that sort of content, then interlinked my landing pages with it. The "original" articles are better described as "semi-original" -- they're basically rewrites of other people's content, but text analysis tools show them as <30% similar. I can churn out mediocre articles pretty quickly, especially on a semi-scientific subject like resveratrol.
 
+rep wish I did this kind of analysis when I first dove into competitive offers on search. keep us posted zorba.

tip: don't bid $3-$4 a click unless your budget can handle it. CPC will come down, but it'll take a while.
 
So, time for another update!

Things have, all told, not been going well in the last week. Since I've been using P202 tracking on everything, I decided to look through all my search campaign data and dig out negative keywords, as well as go through all my content data (only one day, but that one day had >800k impressions) and fish out bad websites (looking for low CTRs, since I only had 1 sale from content and thus had no sale data to go on.) Doing this cut down my daily spend quite a bit... actually it's down a bit too much.

Just using MSN, I at this point have a daily spend set at $150, but AdCenter only manages to spend about $20 of it. I think that while unlike Google, AdCenter doesn't tell you a quality score, it still has one behind the scenes, and mine sucks. My CPC isn't visibly going up, but my number of impressions keeps going down, which implies to me that my bids are no longer sufficient for those keywords (i.e. my CPC is going up and it's just not telling me.)

I also tried split testing several other ads, and overall, I think my ad is reasonably good. I get an average CTR of 2.5% campaign-wide, and 5-10% in some adgroups -- for the groups that get clicks at all (most of them are now at 0 impressions.) Every other ad I've tested against it got lower CTRs. (I realize that what's important is not CTR but rather conversions, but given that AdCenter doesn't seem inclined to let me spend much, I don't have the data to be statistically significant for sales.)

While my landing page changes did get me a landing-page-to-offer CTR of >20%, I was still stuck in the situation where using a landing page actually lowered profit relative to direct linking, so I tried direct linking for a couple of days. I think this may have shot my invisible MSN "quality score."

I think that my landing page has too much information on it. I've realized that I'm subconsciously trying to sell things to people like myself. I am a geek; if I were going to take a nutritional supplement, I would want to know things about it. I shop online mainly for information-rich goods (e.g. books, software, electronics) where more information is better in a store experience. Thus, my landing page, while colorful, professional-looking, and with a clickthrough to the offer above the fold, has quite a lot of research, stats, etc., and links to more of the same.

In retrospect, I don't think this is right for promoting ResV offers, or any other health/supplement offer. My customers, fundamentally, are people who want to pop a magic pill to lose weight and have wrinkle-free skin while they eat like pigs and go to the tanning salon. That is, they are the willfully ignorant -- some part of them has to know that magic pills will not solve all their problems (nobody's that stupid), but since the alternative is taking responsibility and doing something about their health, they're looking for someone to offer them the quick, easy fix. It's useless to try to sell resveratrol supplements to someone like me -- no sales pitch will convince me, and even if it did, I'd comparison shop and not buy a rebill from shady.com. I need to make a landing page to sell resveratrol pills to dumb people.

Which isn't to say my landing page doesn't have its share of bombastic hype -- it does. But I think the presence of statistics and research that doesn't come from fucking 60 Minutes and Dr. Oz may actually turn people off from buying, or at the very least make them dawdle on the page instead of clicking through to the offer.

Overall, my profit margin is up, but my absolute profit is still around zero (at least, too low to be worthwhile) and # of impressions is declining every day.

My plans now:
1.) Create another new landing page. It's funny how my web-browsing experience has changed since I started IM - I actually read and click on ads now, especially ads I see a lot (i.e. the ones I would have been most likely to ignore before.) I recently saw a landing page style that I'd never seen before and thought was brilliant, and I'm going to try imitating that -- it was for make money online stuff, not health offers, so I'll have to change all the text and graphics, but the basic style and approach should still work and should be decent for QS, too. Besides, it can hardly be worse than my current one seems to be.

2.) Prop everything up as a new campaign with a new domain name. I think my current campaign & domain may be "contaminated" due to low CTRs on my original ads, plus my experiments with content network & direct linking. I'm sure I could get its quality back up with enough time and money, but frankly the domain name I chose is better suited for information-rich sites like I have now, and I don't think that's the way to go anyway. Domains are cheap.

3.) Set up international redirects; even though my ads are US/Canada only, a good 10% of my clicks to offer from the LP are getting redirected by my affiliate network to international ubershit offers (e.g. Webfetti), and maybe I could capture a few of them by sending them to international ResV offers.

4.) Once I've done 1-3, try bidding higher on one adgroup at a time, going for high (1st-3rd) placement. I can't afford to do that campaign-wide, but it would be nice to get data about some adgroups to know if any are worth cutting altogether.

5.) Try out PPC Bully 2 when it releases, assuming the price isn't exorbitant. There's the possibility that my keyword research just isn't very good, and some competitive-analysis-based verification of this could be nice. I'm not much of a tool buyer -- I've developed everything I use myself without buying anything so far -- but it looks like this could be worth a try.

I'm also going to try doing a campaign for a cheap lead-generation offer (something with a $2-4 payout) like I think I should have done to begin with. However, I've put enough work into this one, and it's not losing much money (my total losses for the last two weeks are only around $100), so I'm going to try to keep at it, too. I may not be making money, but I'm learning things.
 
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If you were using Yahoo/Google before (which I think you were) and you are only getting $20/day in clicks you might want to just forget using Microsoft (which usually provides very little traffic) and concentrate more on either Yahoo or Google which provide a lot more volume.

Either way you're taking the right approach by testing, testing, testing. You'll learn more about what works for that campaign, and you'll learn more about how to do Affiliate Marketing in general.
 
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