Second Attempt at PPC Affiliate Marketing
Author: glend
Introduction
A few weeks ago I had started my first PPC to CPA marketing campaign. Although I lost money (about 15% of my $500 investment) I gained valuable data and experience. Since then I have been doing research on my second attempt at affiliate marketing. Zac Johnson was promoting this Ultra Green Tea diet campaign through Advaliant and it looked very teresting.
I knew there was already a good amount of competition because Advaliant is
running a contest that gives big cash bonus’ to the affiliates with the most
conversions. I decided to go with the Ultra Lean Green Tea diet campaign
anyways. This campaign was different than my first campaign because instead of
a simple zip code submit as a conversion, a conversion would only count after
a 2 page form including a credit card submit. Obviously this will have a much
lower conversion rate than the zip submit but it pays $26 CPS (cost per sale).
Research
The first thing I did in the process was research who else was running the
same campaign as me. I learned this strategy later in the process during my
first go at CPA marketing. This is exactly what I meant by gaining valuable
experience even though I took a loss. There were 4 or 5 other competitors in
Google’s sponsored results running the same Green Tea campaign. They all had
very similar landing pages that matched the advertiser’s page. I did some
quick keyword research with Google’skeyword external and found that I would be paying between $1.25-$2 for the top 3 spots in sponsored results. I grabbed a bunch of keywords for my campaign and began the setup process.
Calculations
Next I had to set goals for my campaign. This is an important step in the
creation process because without a goal, you will just be spending money and
will not know how to tweak the campaign properly. Using the same formula as
the first time (CPA/ROI * CR = CPC), I plugged some numbers in and got a
general idea of my goals for this campaign. ($26/2 * CR = $1) Calculating this
formula gives me a conversion rate goal of about 7.7%. I wanted to give myself
enough room to hit my targets, which is why I went with a CPC of $1. This also
means I will get less clicks because I will be in lower ad positions.
Creating the Landing Page
The next thing I did was get a landing page. It used similar graphics to the
advertiser’s sales page. One thing I did not want to do with this campaign
was iframe the form onto my landing page like I did with the last campaign.
The landing page is important for “pre-selling” your visitors, which
increases the conversion rate. I also included all of the normal components of
a quality landing page: contact info, terms of service, privacy policy, about
etc.
Setting Up Adwords
The next thing to do was setup Google Adwords. I used my previous method of
creating an ad group for each keyword variation, which allows me to directly
test the quality score of each keyword. I setup a broad match version and
exact match version ad group for each keyword. After setting the campaign live
I closely watched the real time traffic of the site and for each keyword that
came through, I would create another exact match and broad match ad group for
it. I would continue this process until I extracted all of the different
keyword variations from my broad match terms. My goal was to have traffic only
coming from my exact match keywords.
The Results
I will cut the suspense here and now, I made money on this campaign:). After
talking to a few of my affiliate marketing buddies, they all agree that making
money on only my second try at PPC to CPA marketing is rare. That being said,
let’s get into the results:
The above image shows the data for the entire life of the campaign,
including the time it took optimize the keywords. Overall, I had 60
conversions (according to Adwords, which I will discuss soon) at a cost per
conversion of $17.84. Since my CPS (cost per sale) was $26, you can easily
calculate my profits with the following formula: ($26-$17.84) * 60 = $489.60
profit. Keep in mind this is only according to Adwords.
Many of you will ask: why didn’t you just leave the campaign running if
you were making money? When I started the campaign about a week and a half
ago, I was making around $100/day profit. My campaign was converting at ~10%
and all was going well. I hadn’t even optimized my keywords or CPC’s and I
was already making great money. Obviously this was very exciting for me and I
thought I finally could move up in the affiliate marketing world. Then,
basically overnight, my conversion rate dropped from 10% to 1%. I am still not
sure what happened. I kept optimizing my keywords and ad groups, and they were
optimized well. My QS was good, my CTR was good, everything seemed to be the
same or better but no one was purchasing the product any more. Maybe everyone
had purchased the product and there was no longer a market for it, but that
seems unlikely. I kept spending money for another 5 days or so, losing money
every day. Finally, I turned off the campaign and was happy with the profit I
made.
EDIT: Decided to remove my data for a little while, I will update
why later…:)
The Curve Ball
One thing that really screwed with my profit margin was the fact that Advaliant
was reporting 10 less conversions than adwords was. This wouldn’t be a big
deal if the CPA was $1.20 like my first campaign, but since it was $26 per
conversion, I really felt the discrepancy in my profit margins. I am still
working with my account manager at Advaliant to try to figure out a way to
level off the discrepancy, and hopefully they will do good by me. Since 10
conversions equals $260, that means my profits dropped from about $500 to
about $240. Advaliant said that the discrepancy was caused by Adwords double
counting conversions because of visitors reloading the page, but I do not
agree with that. I proved that individual keywords that were converting were
not being counted, so that meant double counting was impossible.
Conclusion
Overall, this was a positive experience. I made money and gained even more
experience with PPC to CPA marketing. I spent about $1000 and came out with
anywhere between $1300 to $1500 depending on whether I get the missing
conversions. I am still confused as to what happened when my conversion rate
dropped to basically 0%, so maybe someone reading this will have an answer. My
experience with Advaliant was decent and I am still waiting to see if they
make up the missing conversions to me. I will update everyone with whether
they do or don’t. Keeping affiliates happy is very important, so hopefully
they do the right thing. I would like to note that they were willing to wire
me my money early so I can pay off the credit card bill I had accumulated,
which was a big plus for them in my mind. I am already doing research into my
third campaign, so check back soon for updates!
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