1st Newbie Campaign on Adcenter (8)
I plan to quit my job within a year 
. That said, I'm starting out in PPC with Adcenter to get my feet wet.
I started my first campaign last week. My CTR was high, but the actual product landing page conversions were low. So I lost money on that one (voucher money..ha! 
). After realizing that I could create at least decent ad copy, I went ahead and started researching more products and keywords.
Today, I received 156% ROI on a campaign that I started this morning. Unfortunately, Prosper202 didn't track things properly, so I have no idea which ad and keyword got the conversion. I just set up a Prosper202 VPS with BeyondHosting (they kick ass so far with their support) so that I can refine this campaign as the week goes along. I plan to set up 3-4 more campaigns this week to see what works and pull out hopefully 1-2 winners.
I used a landing page redirect off of a related domain that I purchased. The ad link went to a subdomain, and the main domain has a simple blog (Wordpress default theme) with 4 posts, a review, and an About Me section on the sidebar. I'm not sure how many of the campaigns I will be doing a lander for (it will depend on what I see is working for the competition).
I'll update things as the week goes along.
This sounds like a badass follow along! Looking forward to you next post, Did you get your tracking squared away?
Yeah looking good man, definitely cool to see a different styled follow along especially on adcenter!
Can't wait for some profit posts bro!
Day 3: Testing Pains
I have my tracking working, but now that it's working I haven't made any new conversions ( 
). I played around with the 2nd campaign to optimize it (even though I didn't have detailed tracking info..BAD idea)..and WHOOPS 
. So today I set it back to where it was initially. I've added on 2 more campaigns and plan to add 1 more on before the week is done. I figure at least one of them should be a winner when I'm done refining the ad copy and keywords.
I'm focusing on products that have over 10k in search volume on Google for the exact product name (this way I know that they have a decent chance of bringing in Bing/Yahoo traffic). I also am using the MSN desktop tool to research the keyword CTRs and optimize my keyword list.
Right now, I'm only advertising on the actual Bing/Yahoo search network (not content or 3rd party search engines) and on laptops, desktops, and tablets.
My Targets have..
- 10k+ searches/mo for product name on Google
- Top and side ads for product with product name search on Bing
- $20+ commission for sales items
- Chance for monthly rebills (the gift that keeps on giving)
I also get keywords from affiliate pages and competitors. I created a bot to produce screenshots of the results from keyword searches so that I could keep track of which keywords seem to be working well for others. This bot runs every day for a few days.
I plan to continue with this thread on a weekly basis unless something epic happens and I have to share the badass or just bad news
.@Rockstar, I got it squared away with the new hosting. Their user support kicks ass.
@Maynzie, hopefully, I can help some other newbies through documenting the FAIL that happens during my first campaigns
.
Day 6:
I spoke with someone that actually makes money with PPC, and realized that my strategy was all wrong. I was attempting to follow a strategy by the letter, when I should have worked on lowering the CPC (which was in my way).
The Strategy I Was Working From:
- Put two ads against each other
- After so many clicks, throw out the loser and bring in the next opponent
- Once you have the most high CTR ad, start working on refining the keywords and landing page
This is a great strategy, except my CPC on some items was $3.89. So I was losing money waiting for the right amount of clicks so that I could test the ads "by the book".
Now, I am running one ad and bringing down the CPC max bid based on the lowering avg CPC. This switched me from a loss on one campaign to a return of 300% for yesterday's run (woot!). That said, I'm still at a loss for invested money across campaigns, so things still need work.
I plan on narrowing down the keywords, working on ad copy (for 2 of the campaigns), and figuring out the best times of day to run ads.
My niches:
- Campaign 1: Online Learning (CJ.com)
- Campaign 2: Software (Clickbank)
- Campaign 3: Green Living (Clickbank)
- Campaign 4: Health/Athleticism (Clickbank)
Daily Budget: $20 per campaign
Day...something?:
I worked on making sure all of my ad copy has a high CTR (over 2% is good for me). I've also lowered the bid down to the avg bid rate +0.02 each day (and sometimes I'll lower it twice within the same day). All of my campaigns are now on a very manageable budget, which..WHEW .
I've actually paused a few campaigns due to a low amount of conversions on the actual main product pages. I need to build and refine some landing pages for a few of them.
THE GOOD:
- Campaign 1: I have reached a very good ROI on this one. Today I made $48 from a $3.79 investment, which is major to me. I have to just keep working with it.
- All of the campaign bid rates are low
- I've been able to lower my daily budget
THE BAD:
- I'm still struggling with making conversions on the Clickbank products.
- My $500 spend is higher than my $303 return
- The bulk of my return won't be available until the end of next month
I plan to hit a few people up for help with figuring out how to improve my Clickbank campaigns. It's totally possible that Adcenter will be my CPA advertising channel and I'll use another one for other offers.
Anyone up for some advice on where to go next with things?
I would run a "search query" report. In case you don't know, this will show you the actual search terms people entered that triggered your ads. You will find two types of "nuggets" here.
1. Negative keywords - perhaps your broad and phrase match KWs are producing unrelated clicks and costing you money. Add them in as negatives and get your campaign and AdGroups more focused. Not only will this save you money from unrelated clicks, it could also reduce unrelated impressions which will improve your AdGroups CTR. Higher CTR leads to lower CPC. WIN-WIN!
2. Your broad and phrase match KWs are also leading to targeted searches. Search phrases you may not of thought of initially. Add these to your campaign (as phrase and/or exact matches) and you may start getting that same traffic cheaper.
Also...
Look through your whole campaign for any "outliers". Is there an AdGroup that has 1 or 2 KWs that are dominating most of the budget? Pull them out of that group and put them in their own AdGroup or even Campaign. It will be much easier to monitor, optimize and make the right changes.
Keep it up. Sounds like you are doing great!
Thanks! Sorting out the high costs keywords into their own group should help a lot *slaps forehead because I should have thought of that*. I've had to pause my campaigns as I'm closing on a house and plan to move in next month =]. This house is a bit far off from my job and will be some big motivation for me to be successful at this. I'll update more as soon as I get back to it in June =].
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