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Figuring out PPC with 7Search (14)

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This is my first follow along here, and my main goal in it is learning.

Since I still have about 200$ to spend on 7Search, I will use that and if I find something profitable I'll move these campaigns to Bing.

In my first attempts at 7Search, my biggest difficulty has been slow, shared hosting. I had Prosper202 installed there, and I was also using a landing page in my first campaigns, but something strange was happening.
7Search reported much, much more clicks than my tracking and I figured that people were bouncing off even before they could be tracked as visitors by Prosper.
Now I got a self managed VPS from burst.net, and I'll work with that.

My plan of action for this and the next week looks like this:

• Start a test campaign on 7Search. My aim here is to get comfortable with setting up tracking.
• Continue to study Ca$hvertising techniques. I'm already halfway through the book. I'll finish that, make notes, and make a quick reread.
• Once I'm comfortable with setting up campaigns, I'll start two of them per day.
• I'll also make a daily analysis of gathered data, optimize bids, and remove bad refferers.

Wish me luck! I'll be more than happy If everything works out as planned and I become adept at making landers, text ads, tracking and time management (yup, procrastination and laziness were my biggest sins). However, if I get a few dollars of profit per day, I won't complain .

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All looks good!

Whilst any traffic source is good to do your initial testing on, in time you may want to consider moving to Bing entirely. 7Search doesn't have the best reputation as a traffic source: you may find it's easier to reach profit on other platforms.

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Keep testing those angles.. Different creatives and different LPs yield different results.

Get creative with your messaging and try to understand the perception of your visitors.

So far so good though

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Understood. 7Search has some bad traffic sources, and traffic can be really low for many keywords. However, I think it will be great for learning tracking, since I already have funds there.

Good advice. I'll start with one LP and add more of them after I learn how to set up tracking.

Updates:
Server:
FINALLY I have a VPS with nginx web server set up. Prosper202 runs on a subdomain, and I have memcache installed. Everything seems fine now, and there is still about 450 MB of free RAM.

Offer:
I selected an offer that looks promising on MaxBounty. This offer is called Dunhill Travel Deals and it is an email submit. It pays 1.5$ per submit, with 0.2$ of network EPC.

I went with the email submit type of offer, because I read on multiple sources that it is the easiest to get conversions from 7Search.

Next steps:
The next steps that I plan to take are:

• Research travelling niche to get an overview of the field.
• Look for keywords.
• Have a look at competitors ads and pages.

All your thoughts and tips are much appreciated.

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Update:
The offer I decided to promote requires approval, so I requested it today in the morning. I also went through caurmen's Getting Started Guide and decided to first set up tracking for direct linking and then include landing page(s).

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7search traffic is tricky. Try survey style PPV landing page with audio and 3-5 offers to pick at finish.

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Thank you, sounds like a good idea.

Update:
Offer:
I had to choose a different offer, because I did not get the approval for Dunhill Travel Deals. I chose an iPhone5 offer, where visitors can leave their emails for a chance to get an iPhone.

Ad:
Offer description said that I "cannot use the words – free, win, won, winner, claim, etc.". I did not include any of these words in the text of my ad.
Does that mean that I must not bid on these keywords, or what?

Tracking:
I set up tracking for this campaign. I followed related caurmens guides in the process.

Here's how my links look like:
Campaign link in prosper (copied from MaxBountys offer page):
Destination URL of my advert on 7Search (copied from prospers "Get Links" section):
I concatenated affid and rid to keyword because these values are good to know when looking for bad traffic providers.

Postback URL for my traffic source in prosper (copied from 7Search):
Postback url on MaxBounty (copied from prospers "Get Postback/Pixel"):
Does this links good look to you? I have already started a campaign, but didn't get any clicks, so I cannot say for sure if it works or not.

Thank you for replies, you guys are amazing

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Looks good! You could alternatively save affid and rid into C variables in Prosper - might be more convenient as you could then check how each of them perform independently. Let me know if you need a guide to doing that.

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Just contact your 7search AM and ask for their high volume data, keywords/niche/Country
and find offers for this keywords.

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I think I got it right, I changed ad destination link in my previous post. Thanks.

Please forgive my ignorance. If I understood you correctly, you advise me to ask my affiliate manager at 7Search to unlock a special feature called high volume data for me. What will this feature do? Is this related to your previous tip on PPV style landing page?

Update:
Everything seems to be working like a charm, which was quite a nice surprise . I got 70 clicks tracked by 7Search, 78 by prosper and 71 by MaxBounty. One or two of these clicks are probably mine, from test clicking. Did Prosper give me the highest number, because it is most frequently refreshed?

You might be interested in other stats besides clicks. Here they are:

• In 15 hours I got 36,444 impressions of my ad.
• 70 of people who saw my ad clicked on it (that's less than 0.2%, my ad must really suck )
• None of these people submitted their email address on a landing page.

Even though these results seems humiliating, I am satisfied with my work so far. My goal in this follow through is to learn tracking and landing page construction and move on to a more promising traffic source when I get skilled at this.

Next steps:
With properly working tracking for direct linking, I think I'm good to move on to my first landing page.

Godspeed's advice seemed great, so maybe I'll go with a short, simple survey landing page with a selection of different Apple product offers as a reward

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@primozb I'm working with 7search too is check the users sending traffic (like you have setup) then blocks ones that sent over 50 visitors with no conversions. I am doing direct to offer right now but will be switching it up to a landing page with a few offers (same as yours email submits). Looks like we are running close on this one, send me a PM if you want to chat about this more .... we can have a beginners mastermind group (eek oxymoron)

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Thank you murkmurk, the same applies to you. You can contact me anytime you want

I ran into a problem today. I got my first conversion. It was reported by MaxBounty. What bothers me here is that this conversion hasn't been tracked by Prosper. I check my post-back URL on MaxBounty and is exactly the same as Prosper gave it (+ s2 subid).
After close examination I changed post-back URL from this:

into this:
What I think is happening here is that in my first link, a constant string with value "s2" is passed to prosper. In the second case, where I used a variable #s2#, instead of constant s2, a keyword is passed. Is this hypothesis valid?

I think that I solved A problem here, but not THE problem. I manually connected to post-back URL, but prosper didn't report any clicks.

Suggestions?

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@primozb I had the same issue with two networks as well. They told me this is something that the cake does automatically. I corrected by doing this; http://whatever.com/?a=471378&c=12254&s2=

and then on the post back;
http://mydomain.com/adclick.php?#s2#

Hope that helps

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@primozb - you're correct, that should fix the problem.

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