Learning PPC campaigns - week 2
Last week was a week of mild failures but lots of learning, I lost $0.12 and earned £0.00. This wasn't really an issue for me because I learned that I was using a set of keywords that were too obscure (set to only specific matches). This week I opened things up a lot more.
I opened up the keyword usage somewhat
I put a lot more generic matches in, yet remaining in the ballpark of specific to the scheme. I included a few broad matches on the specific keywords that I'd been using before with the aim of pushing more users at the scheme. I increased the CPC too to ensure higher visibility.
I stopped the Text-Link-Ads scheme
It just wasn't financially viable to run these scheme, the CPC required to get a sensible visibility would completely throw the campaign. The payout is only $25, yet I'd be spending $1 per click, so I'd need an awfully high conversion rate to make it work.
How things went
With all my focus on the promotion of the Ubuntu laptops, I was able to dedicate all the money to promoting that one scheme. The CPA works out as around $17 and I was using a CPC of $0.34. The logic was that I'll spend $17 in clicks, if I get no conversions then I stop the scheme and write it off as a failure.
5 days later, the scheme had 3,078 impressions and 65 clicks; giving a CTR of 2.11% (which isn't bad). The average CPC was $0.28 and ended with a total cost of $18. Unfortunately there were 0 conversions. None.
$18 spent, $0 earned, result: -$18.00
Not a succesful week - so what have I learned? The trick is going to be finding a niche scheme with a CPA of around $50 that I can push users at with a CPC of $0.10 - that would be ideal. The mistakes I made this week seem to be paying too much per click. I'm also willing to concede that my landing page was probably a key factor in failing to convert users, but considering I was using the same scheme elsewhere on the site I'm unable to measure the PPC campaign clicks against the affilate scheme clicks - which was a mistake I feel.
Check back in 5-7 days to see how week 3 of learning PPC campaigns is going. I'm going to keep trying until I find the right combination.
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