My New Venture into PPC Marketing - 1st Tests

I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts lately about how much money is being made with affiliate marketing and PPC. Obviously people having been making a killing from this approach for a long time. I’ve been using PPC for a long time, but only on a rather small scale except for one campaign. I’ve been spending around $6000 to $10,000 a month on pay-per-click for the past several months. The vast majority of that money goes to one Adwords campaign which yields me anywhere between $1,500 to $4,000 profit each month. Due to increased competition for this set of keywords, profit has been heading down.

I’ve decided to try and learn the ropes on PPC campaigns a bit better and start experimenting with lots of new campaigns.

At the moment, I’m just experimenting with Direct to the merchant PPC (this does not include my active old campaigns) using Google Adwords.

I plan to look through all the offers in the CPA networks list from my Top Affiliate Networks post.

As a very basic summary I’m:

1. Looking for an offer with a decent per lead or sale payout.
2. I then use various keyword research tools to see what kind of traffic the keywords might get starting with the merchant’s name or main product/service they may be offering.
3. Jump over to Google search to see what kind of competition I might be competing with.
4. Setup direct linking Google Adwords campaigns.

In my first round of tests, I chose the OfferWeb.com CPA network. I started with them rather than Azoogle etc. because I figured there might be a little less competition.

Here is how things have gone so far after running this campaign for 2 1/2 days:

That adds up to $453 in revenue in a little over two days.

Here are the Adwords expenses to date:

On Campaign One, I’ve spent $81.50 and had $270 in revenue, for a total profit of 188.50. This was in less than 24 hours! That’s a huge return on investment. Later however, I overlooked the part in their program description that said “no search allowed.” Ouch. So I paused the campaign and hope they won’t notice. That’s to bad because that would have been about a $6,000+ a month in profit offer based on the half a day stats. However, even if I can’t use this offer in PPC, it’s obvious the offer converts very well. If I can build a high ranking website/page in the natural search engines for the keyword, it could make me a lot of money.

On Campaign Four, I’ve spent $18.51 and had $72 in revenue, for a total profit of 53.49. That’s not to bad given a couple days of tests.

On Campaign Five, I’ve spent $73.74 and had $84 in revenue, for a total profit of 10.26. It’s to early to tell if this one is going to be a long term winner or not one at all.

On Campaign Six, I’ve spent $55.80 and had $27 in revenue, for a total loss of 28.80. It does not look like this one is going to do well. I’ve lowered bids on this one to see what happens.

I’ve lost money so far on the other campaigns.

Overall, I’ve spent $256.67 via Adwords for these OfferWeb campaigns and made $453 in revenue for a total profit of $196.33 in a couple of days. However, if you take out the stats for the best performing offer that I should not have been using in PPC, it comes out to $175.17 in PPC expenses and revenue of $183 for a total of profit of $7.83.

That’s not to good, but this is all about testing. I didn’t believe all of the offer would be profitable. The point of this is to find which offer will be and then drop the others. If I just keep campaign four and if things stay on track, that could end up being about $1000 in profit each month! Everything above was setup in just a few hours.

As metioned, I’m starting with Direct Linking PPC but later will be moving on into landing pages etc.

I’m no expert at PPC and I’m just learning the ropes. As I learn, I hope you do to.

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