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Mastering MSN with Merezza (and getting crazy with Clickbank) (13)

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Yeah I know it's called Bing Ads, but that doesn't sound nearly as good in the headline.

Anyway, here's the plan:

Traffic Source: Bing

Offer Source: Clickbank (I'm approved on Neverblue and getting a couple more accounts at other places, but want to focus on CB for now)

Toolkit:

Goal:
I don't expect consistency, those are single day goals but I want to be in that ballpark as well (i.e. not having a $500 day with a bunch of $20 days)

So here's where I am so far, as today (Seahawks Sunday) was my first real day of working on this. I've chosen an ad source on CB, one without huge gravity but decent enough and checked it for leaks to the ad. The niche is diet/lifestyle and there should be a strong following, which I've determined by using my head (bad) and checking keyword searches (exact) on Google Keyword.

I've set up P202 on my VPS (Linode) and put together two ads to start off with for a split test. I'm using redrummer's guide (thanks dude!) and another one that I can't remember right now to start. The initial keywords and two ads are in an ad group on Bing and everything is tested and working so they're starting off. I don't expect much this first day (and didn't get it because lots of my bids were too low), but will be testing and optimizing quickly.

Once I have a second I'll be adding in daily, monthly, and lifetime totals to make this even more fun.

Any questions or comments would be incredibly helpful. Thanks in advance.

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Looks good! Bear in mind that with most Clickbank payouts, you're going to need to spend pretty generously to get statistically significant data - each ad needs multiple conversions before you can be sure of its ROI (unless it's just terrible).

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@carumen Thanks for the advice! I'm not too worried about the spend TBH, but I'll definitely keep it in mind. In terms of clicks per day I'm probably going to be seeing 150-250 where my budget is set right now, which I'm hoping will give me decent numbers to test against a few days down the line. For reasons that I'm about to get into this number isn't even close to being hit today, but I've made some modifications to get decent amounts of data in the coming days.

Day 2 Recap:
I had this crazy dream that I woke up and checked my phone to find about 10 conversions on my first day. Unfortunately that's not was happened in real life (although I did check my phone immediately when I woke up).

So for a bit of background, I'm running a single offer (Health Info Product w/o being too specific) on a single traffic source (Bing). I'm targeting nothing right now in terms of demos, looking to first get some data in before I get too aggressive on cutting people out (explanation why further down).

The Clickbank offer looks good and after a discussion with the guy running the offer (and my checking things out for myself), it seems that they're doing some testing on their end to maximize conversions, so I'm direct linking for now. I'm definitely open to landing pages in the future, but for the time being I want some actionable information that isn't confounded by other variables. I'm pretending like I'm in Karate Kid and this is the part where I paint the fence (and later repaint it with dollar bills...).

Given what I've heard about Bing and them not liking you split testing tons of ads, I'm running a straight A/B test that looks like this:

Since I'm direct-linking, my process so far looks like this:
AD => Prosper202 (gettin mah keywords) => Clickbank Advert => Conversion?

Practicing the KISS principle here, because I really want to check them against each other. I'll spare you the details of my spend today ($0), and go into why I have nothing to show after my first day...

Over-optimization:
I completely forgot about gathering data and threw on about six things to test, because all my experience tells me that my offer is PERFECT for 43 year old women from the Midwest who have just had triplets within the past week (I know, I know, dumb). This meant that my ad was totally optimized for about 0.01% of people.

Fear of losing money:
Not only did I over-optimize, but I also took all of these CPC bids that would've had me hitting the front page on some decent keywords and dropped the price because it seemed "too high" (again, dumb). What I didn't think about was that I was effectively setting bids at about half of what my breakeven point was (if my breakeven given standard % conversions was $5.50 per click, I was setting bids at like $2.00 and hitting pretty consistently in the #10 slot a.k.a the bench). All of this amounted to me hitting nothing for the day (50 impressions, 0 hits).

No Keywords:
I was also running about 40 keywords, which basically meant that I was getting very few impressions since many of them were showing up in slot 10 to top it off. I'm shooting for 2.13 as an average point to hit for keyword bids. I've tossed on some additional ones (now I'm at 150) so that I can gather more data. I plan on splitting them into different ad groups and doing serious testing once I get some information, but for now I want the firehose to be running full(ish) steam.

Summary/Questions:
So that's where I am today, which is a far cry from where I dreamed that I would be. In terms of my testing, even though I hit a roadblock I learned a ton and spend a grand total of zero dollars. That's not a bad way to start. In terms of questions going forward, the three that I have right now are:

1. What do broad match modified do exactly?
From what I've read (both from other STM posts and Bing Ads) is it lets you lock a word into a search. For example, if I were selling an info product on repairing your Honda CRV, I might set my keyword to be +Honda +CRV, and I would set it to be broad match. This would let me rank for things as diverse as 'Honda CRV bumper', 'Honda CRV hood', etc. If I were to do +Honda +CRV +repair I could rank for all of the keywords I just noted (and MORE!) with the word repair in them. It would also negate me ranking for things like Honda CRV bumper fix while still ranking for Honda CRV bumper repair.

2. How exactly do I set negative keywords?
On the Bing Ads keyword page for any of your campaigns, you can set keywords or negative keywords. I assume that I want to set phrase match negative keywords for words like 'free', or in the case of my CRV ad 'shop'. In the same vein, I would want to set exact match negative keywords for things like [repair shop] and [repair center].

3. Can I combine keywords?
Right now I have the equivalent of Honda CRV bumper repair guide, Honda CRV hood repair guide, etc as keywords. Could I replace them with a single keyword that is +Honda +CRV +repair +guide to match for all of my other keywords?

That's all for today. I plan on coming back tomorrow with a vengeance and hope that I will have some more information to share. In the meantime, any questions/comments would be great.

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If you do not have a repair center or repair shop, you could negative phrase match those phrases. It would be best not to combine your kw's like that. Instead, tighten up your keyword groups

Adgroup 1: Honda CRV hood repair guide
Keywords +Honda +CRV +hood +repair +guide "Honda CRV hood repair guide" [Honda CRV hood repair guide]
Negative Keyword: Bumper

Adgroup 2: Honda CRV bumper repair guide
Keywords: +Honda +CRV +Bumper +repair +guide "Honda CRV Bumper repair guide" [Honda CRV Bumper repair guide]
Negative keyword: Hood

Adgroup 3: Honda CRV Repair Guide
Keywords: +Honda +CRV +Repair +Guide "Honda CRV Repair Guide" [Honda CRV Repair Guide]
Negative Keyword: -bumper -hood

See those negatives? They prevent cannibalization between the two adgroups in a really tight structure like this

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That's a great point. It seems like using this would result in separate ad groups as you drilled down the exact keywords being used (taking your example):

Adgroup 1: Honda CRV (General)

Now assuming that you had NO idea what people were searching for, you might maintain this ad group to gather data. As you found that a lot of people were searching for 'hood repair guide' you might create a separate ad group and modify your original one like so:

Adgroup 1: Honda CRV repair guide

Adgroup 2: Honda CRV hood repair guide

And so on....

This is really starting to help me understand how to set things up, and now I realize that I have a lot to work on for this campaign to be successful. Can't wait for work to end so that I can begin testing!

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If you had a landing page that targeted each of those adgroups it would help with conversions and one day if you move over to Adwords it would do a lot for quality score. Im used to building out campaigns for enterprise level sites with 200,000+ keywords. That might not translate into what you are doing. Im new to this affiliate stuff.

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Day 3 Recap:

So today was a recap of what happened to me yesterday. I got zero clicks and only a few impressions. When I checked my stats at the end of the day, it showed me that many of my keywords were still off page 1 ad space, showing up at slot 5-6 and getting a grand total of 60 impressions.

This was totally unacceptable today so I paused my main Ad Group and created two new ones that are simply broad match modifiers for the search (you can really call this thing by two different names). I've also set my initial bid at something that will definitely pull in some clicks (setting both targets to mainline bid levels immediately). This will hopefully give me something to work with tomorrow, and depending on what I can think of tonight I may add an even more broadly matching Ad Group to really pull in some clicks.

If you want to know how I'm setting up my ad groups, refer to the post by me that I made previously.

Question:

I just checked my Prosper today to set up a couple new ads on my system, and I have 400 clicks through my system for my campaign, but none show up on Bing? Are these all bots? They're definitely coming through my Bing Ads, because they have the correct URL and are sending me a Keyword.

Summary:

I can't really say that I learned too many NEW things today, but I did implement some things that have been discussed on this thread today, and am waiting for results. Frankly this seems like the slowest start to AM in the history of the world, and it makes me think that I should have a second campaign running as well (same CB/Bing though). Thoughts?

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Definitely not the slowest start ever! Things always take a while to get going in the beginning - a few days of teething trouble is very normal. However, starting a new campaign is almost always a good idea, so go for it!

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Couple of points that might help you out:

1. Turn of Yahoo syndicated search partners, the quality in my experience is generally shite.

2. The simplest way to think of BMM is like a really flexible phrase match, essentially if a word has a + in front of it, then you are saying it must be included in the keyword but it can be placed in any order.

3. For negatives the best way to gather them is just take yourself over to the Google keyword planner search for a few of your top keywords and then go through the results you should be able to find lots of negatives.

4. If the product is popular and has search volume bid on the brand, Clickbank vendors are much less strict about bidding on brand and this can result in some easy wins.

5. Also download Bing Ads Editor and learn how to use it, its going to save you a load of time in the long run.

Good luck with the campaign

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Don't forget to grab $50 dollar credit that's available if you havent done so and grab .99 domain add it to webmaster tools to grab another $50. $100 testing budget.

Look for redrummr's post for more tips to run click bank.

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Facebook Ads + Clickbank = Madness

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@creathinker Looks like I'll have to take a look at that next!

@lewis69 Great advice, I'll be implementing as many of those points as possible this weekend

@paulis1 My current account was already set up, so I wasn't able to get the credit (I tried) but I'll definitely look into that if/when I have to set up a new one.

@caurmen Good point. I guess I assumed I'd be a badass affiliate from Day One, but I may have to wait until at LEAST Day 6 (or even longer?)

Day 4 Recap: CLICKS

FINALLY after screwing around yesterday, I put together a couple of new AdGroups (2) that strictly use broad match modifiers, along with some basic negative keywords like free to discourage people who aren't looking for what I'm offering.

The net result of these few changes were my impressions going up and finally getting a few clicks.



All of this translates into my first daily income report:

Day 4 Breakdown:

Based on my knowledge of standard conversion rates for info products (2-3%), I should have received between 0.3 and 0.45 conversions today so that lack of revenue isn't too concerning. I wasn't exactly expecting to be balling out on this offer with the small number of click-throughs that I got.

What does make me pretty happy is the strength (I think?) of the CTR. 8% seems pretty reasonably high, at least from what I've seen before, so that means the ads that I have out there are great for getting people to click on them. That doesn't necessarily mean that they are the highest converting yet but it's still too early to tell. I figure that I would need at least 200 clicks (which would theoretically result in 4-6 conversions) before that was the case.

The two AdGroups break down like so:


Which gives me even more data to work with. I would throw away my bottom group in terms of changing things, although a 42% click-through does look good. On the top one, my average position isn't exactly where it should be, which means that I probably need to jump my bid a bit to get further into the top 3 consistently.

Tracking:
As I mentioned above, right now my Prosper is totally screwed, with tons of bot clicks messing with my stats. I also haven't turned on cloaking, so that's going to happen today most likely. At some point I'd like to be able to start tracking income/expenses in P202 but that's not happening until I can figure out how to filter out the bots.

Next Steps/Summary/Questions:
Today was good in terms of finally getting some clicks, but the amount that I got was a bit underwhelming. I still believe that Bing is a solid place to start, so I will be looking for another CB product to promote in order to increase my exposure to AM.

And I'm going to locate a copy of Windows 7/8 and toss it on a VM so that I can download Bing Ads Editor....

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you need more keywords!! nice CTR though, but only 179 impressions is not enough, try Spyfu.com (even free version) and check your competitors, look at their keywords, Bing is not google less than third of the traffic google has, remember that.

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