When to stop PPC?
- Thread starter DaVJ1
- Start date
HarveyJ
He is - THE CACTUS!
One ad doesn't give you much data to work with.
Is it that you've got too few keywords? Or just an insanely small target demographic for this offer?
Honestly, I'd recommend making an ad that targets the same demographics and keywords, but with different pictures and headline text.
Give you a better idea of what's going to work for your market, then you can work on expanding the base.
Is it that you've got too few keywords? Or just an insanely small target demographic for this offer?
Honestly, I'd recommend making an ad that targets the same demographics and keywords, but with different pictures and headline text.
Give you a better idea of what's going to work for your market, then you can work on expanding the base.
You have two main problems here:
#1: No split testing
As Harvey said, one ad and one landing page isn't enough to work with.
Look at it this way:
You have one ad and one landing page. That means that ad HAS to be good, and the landing page HAS to be good. You need to have everything 100% correct in order to make money from it. Since (I'm assuming) this is your first campaign, the chances of that happening are really, really low.
Therefore, you WILL NOT be profitable with that campaign, EVER, because you're not testing variables. You'll just eventually give up.
Now lets assume you made two ads, and two landing pages.
You've doubled your chances of finding something that works. Lets assume that the two ads are still pretty bad, but that one of those two landing pages you've made is OK. You'll start seeing conversions coming from that landing page. After a while, you'll realize that one of your landing pages is working, and you'll ditch the crappy one for the one that's bringing you conversions.
In the short term, it will cost you more money to test, as you'll need to spend enough money to get relevant data from both ads and landing pages. The difference is though, you're more likely to find something that converts when you're split testing, rather than spending money on something that's going to net you zero conversions.
#2: You're spreading yourself too thin for such a small budget
Stop focusing on more than one offer on more than one platform.
You're running on Yahoo and Facebook (plus on Yahoo you're running two different types of offers), so you're automatically spending three times the amount of money you would be if you focused on one of the two platforms and only ONE offer type.
Choose either Yahoo or Facebook, and then choose ONE niche. $100 is obviously a lot of money to you in AM, which is normally is for newbies. $33 per campaign is not enough to get relevant data in nearly every niche. Unless you're doing email/zip submits, you're essentially pissing away money.
Lets look at the numbers: You spent $100 on 200 clicks, so $0.50/click.
On Facebook, you got 117 clicks. You said you're using a landing page, so lets assume 20% clicked through to the offer (I really doubt you got that high a CTR). You've gotten about 23 clicks to the offer. This isn't even CLOSE to enough data for you to determine if the offer works or not. You generally need at least 100 clicks to the offer page, and even then, you're on the very very low side of statistical significance.
On Yahoo, you got 80 clicks. With a 20% CTR that makes 16 clicks through to the offer page. Since you had two different types of offers going, that makes 8 clicks to the offer page for each offer.
Now look what happens if you put all of your money into one campaign, and one platform:
Lets assume you stick with Facebook, one offer. With 100 clicks at $0.50/click, you would have gotten 200 clicks. It's still not enough for statistical significance, but it's almost double what you already have. With a 20% CTR you would have gotten 40 clicks to the offer page. You probably should have had a conversion by that point. If you were split testing, you would have some data to go by. Instead of seeing a whole lot of zeros, you might have gotten something out of it if you focused on one type of offer on one platform.
This advice might change very slightly depending on the niche you're promoting. I don't know if it's a $1 zip submit, or a $40 rebill, or something in between. Regardless, you should be split testing your ads and some landing pages (you can also split test between direct linking and a landing page - some offers do work better without a landing page).
You're giving it a go, which is important and a big step. Now you've just got to use your small budget as wisely as possible and gather as much data as possible to get profitable.
#1: No split testing
As Harvey said, one ad and one landing page isn't enough to work with.
Look at it this way:
You have one ad and one landing page. That means that ad HAS to be good, and the landing page HAS to be good. You need to have everything 100% correct in order to make money from it. Since (I'm assuming) this is your first campaign, the chances of that happening are really, really low.
Therefore, you WILL NOT be profitable with that campaign, EVER, because you're not testing variables. You'll just eventually give up.
Now lets assume you made two ads, and two landing pages.
You've doubled your chances of finding something that works. Lets assume that the two ads are still pretty bad, but that one of those two landing pages you've made is OK. You'll start seeing conversions coming from that landing page. After a while, you'll realize that one of your landing pages is working, and you'll ditch the crappy one for the one that's bringing you conversions.
In the short term, it will cost you more money to test, as you'll need to spend enough money to get relevant data from both ads and landing pages. The difference is though, you're more likely to find something that converts when you're split testing, rather than spending money on something that's going to net you zero conversions.
#2: You're spreading yourself too thin for such a small budget
Stop focusing on more than one offer on more than one platform.
You're running on Yahoo and Facebook (plus on Yahoo you're running two different types of offers), so you're automatically spending three times the amount of money you would be if you focused on one of the two platforms and only ONE offer type.
Choose either Yahoo or Facebook, and then choose ONE niche. $100 is obviously a lot of money to you in AM, which is normally is for newbies. $33 per campaign is not enough to get relevant data in nearly every niche. Unless you're doing email/zip submits, you're essentially pissing away money.
Lets look at the numbers: You spent $100 on 200 clicks, so $0.50/click.
On Facebook, you got 117 clicks. You said you're using a landing page, so lets assume 20% clicked through to the offer (I really doubt you got that high a CTR). You've gotten about 23 clicks to the offer. This isn't even CLOSE to enough data for you to determine if the offer works or not. You generally need at least 100 clicks to the offer page, and even then, you're on the very very low side of statistical significance.
On Yahoo, you got 80 clicks. With a 20% CTR that makes 16 clicks through to the offer page. Since you had two different types of offers going, that makes 8 clicks to the offer page for each offer.
Now look what happens if you put all of your money into one campaign, and one platform:
Lets assume you stick with Facebook, one offer. With 100 clicks at $0.50/click, you would have gotten 200 clicks. It's still not enough for statistical significance, but it's almost double what you already have. With a 20% CTR you would have gotten 40 clicks to the offer page. You probably should have had a conversion by that point. If you were split testing, you would have some data to go by. Instead of seeing a whole lot of zeros, you might have gotten something out of it if you focused on one type of offer on one platform.
This advice might change very slightly depending on the niche you're promoting. I don't know if it's a $1 zip submit, or a $40 rebill, or something in between. Regardless, you should be split testing your ads and some landing pages (you can also split test between direct linking and a landing page - some offers do work better without a landing page).
You're giving it a go, which is important and a big step. Now you've just got to use your small budget as wisely as possible and gather as much data as possible to get profitable.
wow, you guys are all being very nice. my input would be start with FB or Face Book. It is easy to make lots of ads fast, and everything is pretty easy to use. just remeber its not really the # of clicks...but the quality of the clicks as well. So with a small budget go really really targeted ( as in use keywords for sure in FB) then if its profitable, expand it...good luck!
In case you dont know DAVJ1, PPC is quite expensive now and difficult, its all good that people here are saying split test, run multiple ads etc etc, but if click costs are just too high and you have another 13 ads to compete with you are essentially screwed unless you want to play real hardball with the other advertisers.
Go find another way to make money, or try MSN where clicks are cheaper and conversions are easier, leave expensive and shitty Google Adwords for another month.
Go find another way to make money, or try MSN where clicks are cheaper and conversions are easier, leave expensive and shitty Google Adwords for another month.
Yahoo is not as competitive as Google and it's possible to get a decent ROI but you really should A & B test with any of the big 3 search engines to get a better estimate if your efforts are working or not.
Ok, you need to start with yahoo or MSN. yahoo is getting more competitive since google has been slapping affiliate campaigns left and right so now there's more competition in yahoo. MSN isn't quite as competitive but it has less traffic and CPC costs aren't that different.
It's not impossible to compete with the big boys but it'll cost you some money, your going to need probably about $1,000 to compete with any hot niche right now. Your best bet is to pick a niche and start with yahoo or MSN and just go for long-tail keywords. The clicks will be cheaper than the short-tails and they should convert better but it'll take some time and you might not get many clicks but you won't blow through cash to quickly.
It's actually funny to watch some guys roll into the hot niches and try to blow everyone away with a high CPC bid to only die within a few hours cause they got chewed up by the high CPCs and didn't take it slow.
My first campaign I didn't split test for about 2 weeks until I realized I wasn't really getting anywhere, you've got to split test or you'll never improve. I don't care how good you are, the first Landing page or ad you throw up isn't going to be the best one in the end.
And when someone says split test, they mean SPLIT TEST EVERYTHING! headers, copy, pictures, colors, font size, font style, etc.
It's not impossible to compete with the big boys but it'll cost you some money, your going to need probably about $1,000 to compete with any hot niche right now. Your best bet is to pick a niche and start with yahoo or MSN and just go for long-tail keywords. The clicks will be cheaper than the short-tails and they should convert better but it'll take some time and you might not get many clicks but you won't blow through cash to quickly.
It's actually funny to watch some guys roll into the hot niches and try to blow everyone away with a high CPC bid to only die within a few hours cause they got chewed up by the high CPCs and didn't take it slow.
My first campaign I didn't split test for about 2 weeks until I realized I wasn't really getting anywhere, you've got to split test or you'll never improve. I don't care how good you are, the first Landing page or ad you throw up isn't going to be the best one in the end.
And when someone says split test, they mean SPLIT TEST EVERYTHING! headers, copy, pictures, colors, font size, font style, etc.
Also Google can sometimes be picky if you try to use different destination URL's within the same adgroup. You can copy and paste and create a replica of your exact same campaign, adgroups and keywords etc and change the destination URL so you can A&B test. Also if you are using the content network and placement ads features you should also create entirely separate search and content campaigns to once again split test.
Sounds like I need to split test^^
Some problems I got is that have have got around 180 clicks on my ads but not a single conversion : /
That offer that I'm promoting need CC, should I leave it? And foucs perhaps on zip/submit?
Edit:
How many % should be clicking on my ads? If I got 100 clicks from Yahoo, should 40% click on my ad or? How should I determine when my LP is good?
Regards
/DaVJ1
Some problems I got is that have have got around 180 clicks on my ads but not a single conversion : /
That offer that I'm promoting need CC, should I leave it? And foucs perhaps on zip/submit?
Edit:
How many % should be clicking on my ads? If I got 100 clicks from Yahoo, should 40% click on my ad or? How should I determine when my LP is good?
Regards
/DaVJ1