So for the last few weeks I’ve been running my first campaign on Bing. It started off just as a test to get my feet wet and learn the ropes. Well as time went, on it became profitable but at the same time it’s in a very competitive niche and I find myself bidding way out of league. As of right now I’m paying almost $4.00 a click (The offer pays 15 bucks). This wouldn’t be so bad if I had the budget for it and didn’t have crappy days where I’m at a loss. I was wondering if I should kill this campaign and perhaps try something else or what? I’ve thought of trying to find longer tail keywords but Bing seems to lack the traffic for this particular niche to do so.
Make sure you're maximizing the ad with all the bells and whistles they offer in terms of sitelink extensions, call extensions, and callout extensions. Your ad needs to closely align with the content of what the clicker can expect to see on your landing page. Do those things and you'll see your CPCs drop. There are other things I do to improve the CTR. PM me if you have specific questions.
It is going to be very difficult, if not impossible, for you to make money on that offer given the CPCs and the low payout. Your conversion rate would have to be astronomical. If you're on Adwords and Bing, you're generally going to need to run higher paying offers given the high cost of the traffic.
If you're just getting started and don't have much of a budget, you should probably stray away from search and find some lower paying offers that can be promoted with lower cost traffic. This will allow you to collect a lot more data with a lot less money.
Good luck!
Early on in my direct marketing career I learned (from Dan Kennedy) the importance of thinking in terms of “making money with bad economics.”
As often happens in Affiliate Marketing (AM is subset of DM, Direct Marketing), guys would come into the direct mail industry with a product (offer) and a salesletter, proclaiming that if they could get "only" a 3% response, they would be rich. And it was true…if they got a 3% response, they WOULD be rich. They worshipped at the altar of “copy only” (ignoring economics), devoutly believing their pitch was so good that a 3% response was all but guaranteed.
When you asked them what happened if they instead got a .3% response (much more likely, especially across broad spectrum, scalable lists), they would get aggravated, chastise you for not believing in their copy and offer, mail away…and get a .3% response. For them to make money EVERYTHING had to go right, and they had to get an astronomical response just to break even. They had no chance from the beginning because they engineered their campaign to make money only from “good economics.”
However, if they thought in terms of “making money with bad economics,” (i.e. a miserably low response rate) then they could have done one of two things: 1) abandon the campaign entirely, going in search of greener pastures (which is often the right option) or 2) start asking how they could “bridge the gap” to overcome bad economics.
What would some of these things be? For example, creating a basic/deluxe version of the product to increase overall transaction value, raising the price, adding a continuity program (rebills), including a “bounceback offer” in the product (a pitch that rides along with the product itself, often offering an expensive upgrade), renting the buyer names, having a tele-shark call the buyers to sell them something more expensive on the phone, and so on. The point is, of course, to do as many of these things as possible to bridge the gap from money losing to profit. Each one adds only a slight amount of transaction value, but added together they “bridge the gap” from loss to profit and allow you to make money with bad economics, something mere copy tweaks to the offer won’t do.
Obviously most affiliates who are promoting other peoples offers can’t do these specific things (an argument, by the way, for eventually creating your own offers), but if you look at it as a way of thinking it can prevent you from wasting time on campaigns with bad economics (like the one described by OP), and focusing on ways to “bridge the gap” on campaigns with less bad economics. Things like asking AM’s for pay bumps, collecting email addresses to build a list, negotiating favorable traffic rates, splitting media costs with someone who has an offer for traffic you can’t use (for example, on PPV, I have an offer for men only—someone who had an offer for women would be an ideal media partner, and we’d concoct a landing page with separate paths for men and women leading to our respective offers).
Think in terms of “can I make money with bad economics on this campaign?” and you’ll spend a lot more time working on potential (but not guaranteed) winners, while immediately dismissing campaigns that cannot work due to bad economics you cannot overcome.
I don't think it is possible to go wrong listening to John.