Amazon’s recent commission changes have somewhat crushed Greg’s affiliate plans!
I started off in AM with a website running through the Amazon Associates programme, I was able to build an income from this one site upto a peak of £2,200 profit in May & £2,300 in June of this year, solely using PPC for traffic. All was going really well and I was improving my PPC knowledge and optimising the site well. Then Amazon decided to cut it’s % referral rates and drop their direct link bonus (2.5%). This effectively wiped out my profit margin on my PPC campaigns, and has left me struggling to gain an income from the site. I was very aware that ‘all my eggs were in one basket’ and was working hard to branch out to other sites in the Summer.
So far my new sites have failed to bring in any profits, they are based around PPC traffic again, as I felt utilizing my skills in this area would be the best bet. The sites convert traffic well, but it’s the high CPC that’s preventing me from creating any kind of profits. The markets I have entered are very competitive, and I’m struggling to find any profitable long tail search terms, so my question is, how do you find profitable long tail keywords in an already competitive market?
Or would I be better off forgetting these sites and focusing on a smaller niche?
Did I just hit beginners luck with my first site?!
Well, I think the first thing I need to tell you is that making that kind of money isn’t really to do with beginners luck. You clearly found a group of products that really worked for you and fell victim to the eggs in one basket syndrome that’s bitten most affiliates on the bahookie at one stage or another.
You’ve obviously been working hard on that site, and one answer to the issue you’ve had with Amazon cutting their commissions and effectively wiping out your profit margins is to introduce some nice free SEO traffic into your promotional mix. Your site looks really great, so you clearly know how to put a decent offering together. I think it’s worth giving the site due diligence, adding some nice content, and seeing what can be done with it. It’s certainly a great domain.
Again with your other sites, if they are converting well but you can’t get the traffic cheaply enough I do believe the answer to making them work is to add in some organic traffic to help that PPC budget go a little further. Read this recent article by Nadeem Azam to see just how effective SEO traffic can be in revolutionising your affiliate campaigns: -
http://www.azam.info/combine-seo-ppc-marketing-dominate-search-engine-rankings/
That all said, SEO is not the entire solution to your revenue stream woes. I have loads of landing page sites that do great from PPC traffic alone. One thing you might do is have a think about what might be selling well this Christmas and give some of those things a push using some landing pages. Keep an eye out in the press for “buzz products” you see being spoken about and keep an eye on GMTV and This Morning. If they mention a product as being ace, it can pay you nice dividends to get a PPC landing page up as quickly as possible. I recently saw a massive sales spike on a site of mine because a product had been featured on a Channel 4 show about embarrassing illnesses. I’ve also capitalised on TV shows such as Gok Wan’s How to Look Good Naked in the past.
I can’t really give you more specific niche advice than that (sorry!), finding and making money from new areas can seem like a near impossible Zen art at times… but spending time keeping on chipping away and trying new things is so worthwhile.
October 5th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
I recently saw a massive sales spike on a site of mine because a product had been featured on a Channel 4 show about embarrassing illnesses. I’ve also capitalised on TV shows such as Gok Wan’s How to Look Good Naked in the past.
October 5th, 2009 at 9:09 pm
SEO and PPC is a good balanced approach. In the agency I work at (day job) we use PPC to test keyword phrases. We run a test campaign for a couple/few months. We test long-tail search phrases all the way down to the high volume short-tail phrases. We monitor the return against each converting KW – in my opinion, there is no point in PPC unless you have granular PPC data for ROI.
Once you know which phrases convert. Look into the chances of getting a result in SEO. You need only chase one or two non-competitive SEO phrases and you will be quids in.
All that money made/saved by switching to SEO for long-tail phrases leaves extra money in the pot for chasing the core PPC phrases more aggressively with slightly less pressure on the ROI of PPC.
In turn you could go on to be a high volume affiliate – and with the right program (increased commission tiers) the ROI will creep up again. (note to self – don’t get so carried away with optimism!)
Hope that helps and makes sense. Leave a comment if you need any clarification.
October 6th, 2009 at 8:41 am
@Kirsty – thanks for another really useful and interesting article. The profitability of PPC campaigns is something that I have been working on for a while and have come to a sort of dead-end, so I am feeling a bit more inspired to get back at it and keep trying/learning!
@PAYG broadband – thanks for this info, I have one question regarding ‘granular PPC data’ – is this referring to having the conversion rate of particular keywords, or simply to running the initial 2-3 month PPC campaign to give you the keyword data?
Out of interest – if it is conversions you refer to, may I ask what method you recommend for tracking which keywords convert?
October 6th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
Hi Ali. I’ll try and answer as best I can. Quick question, long answer!
“Granular data” is where we take a KW by KW level approach – lots of exact matching in PPC. We (again with web agency hat on) use a mixture of custom filters in Google Analytics to ensure we get the exact KW search not just an approximation of the match. (Adwords sometimes fibs about the actual distribution of a KW phrase and it can show up for all sorts of randomness. Any randomness triggers a quick addition to the negative KW list.) We back up the tracking with some custom queries on our own internal log-files.
Now this is where I see a dis-connect between standard performance tracking for an e-commerce website and affiliate tracking. It is relatively straight-forward to ascertain the ROI on a ‘normal’ website. For a ‘normal’ website you can quickly get to a KW-to-sale level of detail – you have all the data to hand. On an affiliate website this can get a bit more tricky… its not something I have done on my own affiliate websites but we do it for an affiliate client who we help on the web development front…. so thinking aloud ….
For affiliate ROI you can use Google Adwords/Analytics to pass in the KW variable, the cost per click. You can also use it to track an event (we use an outclick). We assign an estimated value to the outclick, calculated from the average EPC (earnings per click) of our individual campaign for the affiliate merchant. This takes you to a point where you can track the number of in-clicks and cost per KW phrase from Google, you can track the out-clicks per KW phrase from Google and you can apply an approximation for the earnings per click.
If any of the above makes sense (I was loosing myself at points
) then you can see we can get close to a an estimated return per PPC KW. Hopefully enough information to know if a KW is profitable.
You can take this to the next level and pass custom variables from your website to your preferred affiliate network. It is possible to pass the information coming in via your PPC campaign, hold it in the cookie / server and pass the same information out via the affiliate link into the affiliate network. You could then manually tie up the sale event data back to the PPC data. I see this as a manual process to get to the real detail but there must be ways and means to automate the matching up of data.
In my opinion, if you can reach an estimated earnings per click for your PPC KW campaign then you can quickly determine profitability of PPC against each merchant. However, the KW by KW detail requires a lots of head scratching and more brain-power than I currently possess.
October 6th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
@PAYG broadband – Wow! Thanks so much for the detailed reply! Definitely all makes sense, even if I think my technical ability would probably not be up to the latter suggestions – but the Adwords/Analytics combo for tracking outclicks and basing the ROI on EPC from this data is exactly what I was looking for! A suitable solution to affiliate PPC tracking has certainly eluded me so far – so I can’t wait to give this a go.
Thanks again for your help!
October 6th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
There’s actually a way to track keywords that convert with an Amazon Associates site, even though Amazon dont offer that functionality. Search for “Amazon Affiliate Store Keyword Tracking”, there’s an ebook that explains it.