Learning PPC campaigns - week 1
I'm fully aware that loads of people are making thousands of dollars a month purely by being good at PPC. You see, if you're able to couple a good PPC campaign with a good affiliate scheme, you can actually make quite a lot of money.
The basic premise in my head
The basic logic is that if you have a good affiliate scheme with a decent CPA (cost per action), push users at it using a PPC (pay per click) campaign. What you aim for is for the payload of users who follow through with the action is more than the cost of getting them there.
So, if you're paying $0.05 a click and the CPA is $50, you need 0.1% of users to perform the action to break even.
So basically you need to find the right mix of items. You need an affiliate scheme that is good enough that users will want to opt-in to, yet within an obscure enough niche that you can target long-tail keywords and still get visitors. If I've just lost you, don't worry I'll explain.
Explanation of the above paragraph
Okay, so the real key to making money on PPC campaigns using affiliate marketing is minimising your outlay and maximising your profit (as always). So you need an affiliate scheme that allows you to target "long-tail" keywords that people use. "Long-tail" means obscure. You pay less for obscure (or even specific) keywords, but the trick is running your PPC campaign on phrases that people actually search for - so you get to maximise your advert impressions (thus maximising your click-throughs) but keeping the CPC down to a minimum.
But it's not easy
It's not easy and even the best information I could find encouraged trying it yourself as a means of learning quite what the world of PPC is all about - so that's what I've been doing. I've taken two entirely contrasting affiliate schemes and targetted them with two entirely different PPC campaigns. Here's how I got on:
Here is how I got on with my two PPC campaigns this week
I chose to run two different campaigns targetting entirely different products, contained within bespoke pages on this site that don't contain references to the articles I write. This allows me to send PPC users direct to custom pages with what I consider the best layout for the task. All I want is users to perform the action, so I was aiming for minimal content and maximum promotion.
Scheme #1: Promoting Ubuntu Laptops
I decided to take an affiliate scheme that I'm already promoting around the site (visit the Linux related pages to see it) and target content directly towards it. The CPA is around 3% of the transaction so on a $700 purchase I'd be receiving $21. With that logic I set a maximum CPC of $0.14 to ensure that I was a good result for the niche keywords I decide to target.
My logic was that because I'm targetting the selling of laptops with Ubuntu loaded on them, it would be pointless to target something as generic as "Linux laptops" or "Ubuntu laptops" because you're likely to just get users click through but not do anything. No, I decided to target very specific search terms such as "buy Ubuntu laptop". This would drastically lower impressions but also reduce my CPC; theoretically increasing my percentage of users who follow through.
Scheme #2: Promoting the Text-Link-Ads scheme
This is a scheme I've been failing to promote for quite some time. Text-Link-Ads pay you $25 for each user who enroles onto their system and does things, so I decided to point users in the direction of their excellent $100 of free links campaign.
The logic behind this campaign was to target the search terms relating directly to the buying and selling of text links. I find it hard to believe why this campaign doesn't convert better because it's actually astonishingly low risk. I targetted "buy text links", "sell text links" and some the other variations of long-tail keywords that surround it. For this campaign I set the CPC to be around $0.10.
So how did I get on? I hate to admit that I did very, very poorly. But I only lost $0.12
In my first week of learning about PPC campaigns I lost $0.12. I'd love to say that the reason for that was after spending $100 and only earning $99.88 but that's not the case. Unfortunately my keyword selection was SO bad that by midweek I had only pulled in a handful of impressions and no clicks. I'll explain more specifically:
Scheme #1: Ubuntu
Unfortunately my CPC was too low and my keywords too obscure so I wasn't getting many impressions - if people did search then I wasn't being displayed very high at all - so that wasn't good enough. So towards the end of the week I upped the CPC slightly and added a few more generic search terms into the equation and things picked up (well, impressions did). I had two clicks totalling $0.12 but no conversions. Not good enough.
Scheme #2: Text-Link-Ads
This went so badly. I only managed around 12 impressions throughout the entire week and no clicks at all. This is appalling, it's not a case of my CPC being too low, it's just that my keywords were far too obscure. So I didn't actually get any love on this at all.
So here we go, about to enter week two. I've upped my CPC and I'm about to open the keywords a little bit more in an aim to push more users at the landing pages I've created. It might be worth putting a few more PPC campaigns together with similar bonuses, spread my wings and lose some of the fear. The problem I've encountered in week 1 is that I've started far too defensively; afraid of losing money. This meant no impressions, 2 clicks and a small financial loss.
Useful PPC resources (that I used for research)
The following posts were useful from Zac Johnson (the super affiliate):
NeverBlueAds PPC Marketing & Earnings
Secrets of PPC Marketing
The Super Affiliate’s Guide to PPC Marketing
Those posts really helped me, so they're worth reading. He's bunged lots of affiliate links in but to be fair, he is the super affiliate...
Stay tuned for next weeks update on how things are progressing, although I'm optimistic I'm also slightly concerned. Nothing worth having is ever easy it seems.
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