If at first you don’t succeed….
I started a PPC campaign for a new merchant a couple of weeks ago. The method I used in this instance to drive traffic was Pay Per Click from Google Adwords to a custom built landing page I designed exclusively to promote this one merchant.
After a few hours of keyword research I managed to build a decent list of around 15,000 keywords. So I plugged them into Google and set the bids at around 40 cents. Now 40 cents is quite high for this merchant as they only offer a low percentage of their sales, which are typically a low basket value. However I wanted to get my CTR up in Google and going in with high bids is one of the ways to achieve this.
So I set the campaign up and after about a day I was around $800 down.
Over the next few days I continued losing money, probably around $3000 in total. However, I slowly adjusted bids, and tweaked the campaign here and there. And then after about a week or so I started to lose less and less money and eventually started to break even.
Its now about 3 weeks after I launched the PPC campaign and I’m happy to report that I’m now generating around 200 sales a day and even better am getting a 130% to 200% ROI (Return On Investment).
So the moral of the story? If using Google then certainly be prepared to lose money on the outset of a PPC campaign. This is because you need to give it some time to settle in with Google and to achieve a high CTR. Once you have a good CTR (by paying a high CPA) then you can gradually lower your bids while still maintaining a high position is the results. The key is to have the courage to keep your campaign running even when losing money. Of course I don’t recommend this is in every case as some campaigns just won’t work, full stop. Unfortunately its one of things that comes with experience, I guess as long as your losses decrease every day then thats a good sign that things are looking up. If you lose more and more every day and even tweaking keywords doesn’t help, then give up and move on to the next project.
What I’m listening to right now: P Diddy - “Press Play”
Tuesday, November 7th, 2006 at 10:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Welcome to my blog. My name is Kieron Donoghue and I run UK Offer Media Ltd. I thought it would be fun to post a daily (well hopefully daily) blog, writing about my experiences in Internet Marketing and more specifically Affiliate Marketing. I'll include some personal stuff too, probably about my other passions, music and cars. Please feel free to post your comments and thoughts too.
November 8th, 2006 at 1:06 am
just a query you say you bid 40 cents? do you do your google bidding in cents or GBP?
Do you find it cheaper to bid in US Dollars rather than UK Pounds?
November 8th, 2006 at 11:28 am
for early accounts the only option was US$ its a legacy thing
November 8th, 2006 at 3:03 pm
How can Google PPC allow you to advertise a landing page? I thought they’re new affiliate marketing PPC rules disallowed this?
Joe
November 8th, 2006 at 5:05 pm
It makes sense that you were able to make your adverts more visible to traffic that make purchases by tweaking the campaign. Changing bids suggests position was important but PPC in general is proving, to me, to be a very difficult game to play with a lot of uncertainty and a high degree of trial and error.
Feedback is minimal or non existant making it difficult to determine why an advert is successful or unsuccessful. We are told the number of clicks generated from campaigns and the number of sales made with the merchant. But you cannot determine which adverts or keywords attract traffic that make the most merchant sales, or find out why there were 25 sales from 100 clicks today yet only 2 sales from 200 clicks yesterday (with the campaign not having changed).
November 8th, 2006 at 7:05 pm
I am glad you posted this. I have almost given up on a particular campaign I was managing and I was down over $1000. I stuck with it and tweaked a few things like content search and watched my clicks closely. In the end I turned it around to a ROI of over 75%
It was worth the wait!
November 10th, 2006 at 9:25 am
Way back in 2004 I started my first Adwords campaign. I spent $10, and gave up. I suspect this is the number one barrier to entry for new affiliates.
The key is you are exchanging data for money. That data is valuable. Even if you are not turning a profit you are still recieving something of value. However, if you are doing a “blind” PPC campaign, your in trouble.
November 10th, 2006 at 9:25 am
40,000 keywords wow, do you use some 3rd party software to keep track of your campaigns. If yes can you reccomend it.
November 10th, 2006 at 3:42 pm
Kieron,
do you have a email address i can contact you on i have tried in in several forums
Andrew
November 10th, 2006 at 5:44 pm
Just to answer your questions…
My Google account was set up years ago, and the only option was $US.
And yes it is cheaper as I have some bids at 3 cents.
Landing pages for brand bidding is tough at the moment on Google. But not so for generic terms.
No, I don’t use any third party software.
My email address is on the contact us page at http://www.ukoffer.com
November 11th, 2006 at 12:29 am
Kieron,
You talk about tweaking your key words. How do you do this? As we don’t know which clicks convert to sales, how do you know which words to tweak.
Good post btw, I am new to this but I am working in an area that I don’t think people other people are and its going very well. I certainly understand perseverance.
November 11th, 2006 at 11:55 am
I disagree.
That’s kind of dumb.
Wouldn’t a better/cheaper test be to use the same keywords and bids, but set a campaign daily budget limit of around 100 bucks work better? Then, start adjusting bid amounts.
Just sayin…
Editor, E-Commerce Now
November 11th, 2006 at 11:55 am
sorry about the earlier double posts…comment pop-up wasn’t working too well on your blog.
Apologies for the spam-like comments…meant no harm.
Editor, E-Commerce Now
November 12th, 2006 at 8:12 pm
How can you manually build a list of 15,000 keywords?
November 13th, 2006 at 10:35 am
I have been having an odd problem where Google asks me to bid (sometimes up to £5 per click) on keywords that I am paying just £0.05 for on exactly the same term, to the same site, but in a different campaign.
Is this why you have to go in high and bring it down? Is there any other option as there’s no way I can start my bidding at £5 per click, even for 1 or two clicks!
Matt
November 14th, 2006 at 1:22 pm
Just to reply…
Anonymous: I tweak my keywords manually by looking to see which have a high CTR so that I can lower the bids and hopefully maintain the high CTR.
Editor E-Commerce now: No its not dumb as you put it. If I set my budget at $100 a day it would just take longer to see how the campaign is coming along. With Adwords you need to let a good volume of clicks go through before things start to settle.
Anonymous: Easy, there are lots and lots of keyword tools out there. Just do a Google search to find them.
Matt: Sounds like you have been hit by the Quality Score algorithm. Maybe start a new campaign using a different domain. This may lower your bids.
November 19th, 2006 at 7:07 pm
What was you daily PPC budget for 15k keywords?
Also how long did it take to build 15k keywords and where did you build them from? overture? word tracker? G suggest?
February 6th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Thanks, Kieron, that’s pretty useful info! It helps to know that even an experienced operator like yourself goes through a loss phase on a new campaign. Although as you say the trick is to know the difference between something that will turn around, and something that will always eat your money!
I suppose it’s best to have a day job and a good line of credit when starting out on this path.