I had a question from Dave this week. I’ve helped him before getting started doing some PPC campaigns and he now has a steady flow of sales. Unfortunately he’s not so crash hot on his profit margins!
Ok, at the moment im battling with increasing my profit. I know I can make this work now, its all about increasing my profit. Now I know its not what it should be proably because of my mismanagement of keywords. I know you should wait 100 clicks/1000 imp before you delete if you dont have a sale, but when youve got hundreds of keywords going on at once each costing the 7 – 12 p each, then it adds up doesnt it. So instead of only deleting after 100 clicks has been reached or so, do you go by how long they’ve been going?
I’m averaging about £40 – £60 commsion rate now per day, which is good, im happy about that, but my £20 or so profit can dwindle to as little as £3 or £4 by midnight that same day..So what is it i need to start considering when managing my account?
You definitely need to look at making sure your profit margins are better. First of all, what is costing you the most money for the least return? Are there any keywords in your account that have never brought in any money? It might be an idea to consider weeding those out. If there’s not a lot that you can discern in your campaign as being “dead wood” or “star performers” that can be worked on, then you may need to take a formulaic approach.
If a campaign is only breaking even or even losing you a bit, work out how much you earn per every click you send to the merchant. Say you send 100 clicks and earn £15, this means you earn 15p for each click you sent them. If you’re spending 20p to get these clicks then you need to reduce that.
There are a couple of ways you could approach this. 1. you could work out a reasonably desirable profit margin and reduce your max CPC to reflect this. i.e. Just knock your bids down to 10p and take whatever traffic you can get. 2. Work out ways to get cheaper traffic to offset your more expensive traffic and bring down your average costs into a profit.
Re: not deleting keywords until you’ve reached X amount of clicks. I think you have to apply common sense to this as you suspect. If keywords that are closely related aren’t working then you should definitely have a clear out.
July 2nd, 2009 at 9:07 pm
Interesting. So do most people have multiple campaigns running at once?
I’ve only tried a few PPC campaigns but there never get many clicks so I never really know if they are working or not or learn much from it. Anyone know of any good guides for the beginner?
July 17th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
Hi Joe –
You’re best bet is to focus on niche categories; ideally with high volumes of traffic. Promoting campaigns in a niche category, will prevent you from having to compete against the big PPC affiliates paying $2/$3+ / click promoting products such as Teeth Whitening and Acai supplements!!
Before running a campaign, check the average search volume with Google’s keyword tools. Ideally aim for keywords with 10,000+ search results / month; that’s not to say keywords with low volume traffic won’t convert.
Set a budget you can afford and ALWAYS track clicks/conversions by keywords. This will allow you to drop those keywords that do not convert to sales along the line; increasing your profits.
Always test using 2 or 3 landing pages to find the one with the highest CTR. Hope that helps!
July 21st, 2009 at 6:56 pm
Tracking…there are dozens of pay for and free services and scripts out there…which is best?
Is it really possible to track affiliate direct-linking sales? I have found most affiliate programs to be less than helpful in allowing pixels.
-Scott
July 28th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Scott – most programs will NOT allow you to add pixels, but there is a way around it.
Simply append your keyword to the affiliate url. (Can work for either direct linking or using a landing page.)
In adwords
———–
“mobile phone” ** http://www.YOURAFFILIATEURL.com/?s1=mobiles_phones
“order phone” ** http://www.YOURAFFILIATEURL.com/?s1=order_phone
Then, if a visitor searches for “order phone”, clicks through and places an order, you can see in your account (by viewing the subid/optional info report) that the keyword “order phone” lead to a conversion. You can then scrub keywords that do not convert. (Works best with exact match in google.)
Hope that helps.
July 29th, 2009 at 5:08 am
Thank you; I did not realize that would work all the way through the sale.