Affiliate Marketing
Dipping Our Toes In PPC – Part 2
Our first PPC campaign was officially underway. I checked our YSM account the next morning and it was missing our daily limit amount. We did not believe it at first but five people actually clicked on our ad. The daily limit was reached so soon because the bid amounts for the keywords were way, WAY too high (lowering the bid was one of the suggestion YSM support gave) making the average position of the ads around three. The amazing thing is that someone clicked on the banner in our crappy landing page! They did not buy anything (the banner just took them to the homepage instead of the product category page) but we were still really excited.
The second day I lowered the bid amount to something that could actually make us a profit but we only got one click. The ad still showed up in the search results (that is called an impression) but on page two instead of page one. Only getting one click did not matter. We were still jazzed.
I made two more versions of the ad by varying the destination URL and the display URL. Because of the lame landing page, I created a new page that just redirected people to the affiliate site. I also made a custom affiliate link at LinkShare to take visitors directly to the product category page the ad described. The two new ads both sent web surfers to the redirect page. I then raised the keyword bid amount just a bit to try to get us on the first page. The ads got more impressions and clicks but still no sales.
I created six more ads by duplicating the previous three and changing the titles. I also added a few more related keywords and changed the campaign setting so it rotated the ads one by one instead of showing the best performing ad. We let that run for a total of four days and collected a pretty good set of data.
One of the big things I learned from listening to more experienced people like ShoeMoney is just to take action. Try a few things. See how they work and make changes if necessary. Otherwise, you will be a person who does tons of research but never creates that first landing page or that great site.
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