Affiliate Marketing Plunge: Day 5
April 27, 2007 Posted by Tyler CruzWhew! I need to shave. The past 48 hours have been… intense.
You’ll be glad to hear I’ve been totally wracking up a ton of work hours, which means I’ll beat my 40 Hour Challenge (4th attempt) easily.
I’ve been diving into this affiliate marketing stuff head first, and have been loving every minute of it. I guess it’s just something completely new (to me) that it’s so refreshing and really interesting.
I’ve been slowly making my way through the AdWords videos. Some of them overlap on each other, and most of the videos are extremely basic, but it’s worth going through them all since I have indeed picked up a lot of information. There’s a lot of good information in there. I’m about halfway done the videos now.
I’ve been working hard and adding more Ad Groups and keywords. I’ve been focusing on getting extremely targeted long tail keywords. It’s very difficult as you often thing you’ve exhausted all the possible keywords, then you’ll have an idea and once you have one idea, that equals another 100-200 keywords, sometimes more.
Skimming through my last post, I had mentioned that I had only received 1 impression despite my attempts of getting a lot of keywords. Well, yesterday I was getting so frustated because of no impressions, that I did a stupid thing. I enabled the content network, just “to see if I’d get any impressions”. I awoke the next morning to see a lot of clicks and impressions, but no leads or conversions.
I’ve since disabled the content network again, but am able to get a lot more impressions and clicks now. This is because I added a few more hundred keywords, but mainly because I drastically increased my Max CPC. See, I was stubborn enough to tackle one of the most saturated markets on my first try as a newbie AM. Why? I dunno, I like the challenge. Is it stupid? Probably, yeah, but it’s sure fun 😉
So I had my Max CPC at $3, but lowered it a while ago to $2 or $2.25 I believe. At least I know now why I wasn’t getting the traffic, and know what range I need to be in the top 1-3 positions.
Now, I have some bad news. So far, I’ve sent 100 clicks to AzoogleAds, but have no leads yet! I’m very confused by this since I’m sure my keywords are very targeted, but perhaps I need to have even better targetting. I’m hoping it’s a problem with AZoogleAds, but that’s just wishful thinking; it’s gotta just be me. However, it should be noted that about 40 of the clicks from AdWords were from the content network.
The good news is that I’m getting an 88% CTR from my landing page to the affiliate’s page, and my QS on most of my keywords is either “OK” or “Great”, and I haven’t even optimized yet, so that’s good.
Now for the scary part. Check out this image below:
Ouch, eh? At $2-3 CPC, it adds up quickly, heh. That’s what I get for choosing one of the most competitive markets possible, and competing for the top keywords with the big boys. But I don’t care.. I’m having a blast doing this. I only wish I would have gotten at least one lead…
But I’m progressing nonetheless. I’m now generating traffic from AdWords, pushing it to my landing page, then onto the affiliate program.
My goal is still to make at least one lead. After that it will be to lower my negative ROI, lol. At $200~ a day in ad spend, that’ll cost me $6,000 in a month. In a stupid kind of way, choosing such a hard market actually helps motivate and push me. It kind of forces me to learn this s*** fast or risk going broke.
I’d like to give a shout out to ZeMG. He had messaged me on MSN because he apparantly has been a reader of my blog for quite some time. He offered to help me if I had any questions with AM, and since he’s doing so well, I took him up on his offer. He helped me set up tracking keywords through AdWords into AZoogle, so thanks ZeMG. Watch out because I’m going to pick your brain some more.
So guys.. wish me luck. 100 clicks to AZoogle and 0 leads is pretty disappointing (and scary!) but I am making progress. Here’s hoping I can make at least 1 lead by the next update…
Update: I got my first lead!!! $250 to make $6… not the best ROI in the world, but I got my first lead so I don’t care. Now my goal is to average a -80% ROI. Hey, baby steps…
Good Luck Tyler, Expect a review from my site in the coming days.
Ringtones, amiright?
[…] Kudos Tyler for PublisherSpot, but I see you’re not the best with affiliate marketing.. […]
Good to hear you got your first lead. Hopefully you can work that red into some green. Good luck!
Tyler,
Whats the average payout for conversion for your niche?
I’ve been doing PPC for a while and I can tell you’re doing a few things wrong.
Firstly, you are bidding too high. Based on your CPA of $6. You need to convert 33% of your visitors just to break even.
A more conservative conversion rate assumption is 5-10% at the start depending on how many fields an user has to fill in.
Secondly, how many keywords do you have? You need at least a few thousand.
How many ad groups do you have? Each adgroup should have 2-4 keywords max. so that you can customise ad’s for a high CTR.
Peter is absolutely right…. you are bidding MUCH too high for only a $6 lead. Your CPC should be no more than .35c to get a 10% conversion rate with a lead offer…. even this is a low 70% ROI.
Btw,
You do have the right idea in trying to start off with a low ROI. For competitive markets, You might have to build up ad history and just try to go break even/lose a bit of money for first two-three weeks before slowly lowering bids.
I have 3 leads now, and apparantly AZoogle fucked up, and should be crediting me money… one of my ads wasn’t working and they’re contacting the advertiser now. That explains a bit, but even when I get credit back, I’ll still be deep in the red.
Spent $411 now, but at least I’ve made a bit of it back now.
Stop watching the Adwords videos. They make money when you lose money.
You also need to stop thinking in terms of position. 1-3 … what does that matter? All that matters is the conversion rate. You can easily get more visitors by adding more keywords and diversifying into other ad networks (Adwords isn’t the only one). But spending $2-3/click for a site with a $6/lead will never make you real money. Even if you profit it will be a few pennies.
But that’s just my take on it. I only did PPC AM for a couple months. I made a little but it was just way too boring.
Tyler, this is one of the best blog post series you have had in a long time, so keep it going! Also, just wanted to say congrats on the nice plug John Chow gave you for PublisherSpot 😉
Thanks but it wasn’t exactly a “plug” at $300 😉
“Spent $411 now, but at least I’ve made a bit of it back now.”
Dude, look at your ROI.
Go read this post
http://www.cpa-affiliates.com/high-pay-per-click-bids-does-always-not-mean-high-profits/
if you dont believe my words and want some proof. PPC is all
about numbers and your numbers dont add up at this point.
Yup, I know. But I’m a few days in.. give me a bit of time 😉
“i spent 300$ but i made 6$, im happy!”
give me 300$ and let me kick you in the balls and ill give you 6$ back. sounds like a good ROI by your standards. 😀
LMAO keep following zemg’s advice and your be a billionaire in no time 😉
Gone down to PR4?
I agree that you are spending too much on something that only makes a $6 return. I’m not an arbitrage guy but I know that this won’t add up.
Thanks, I thought that spending $300 to make $6 would make me rich.