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3 Jul 2009 @ 19:54
So, I'm trying to understand PPC marketing. I've gotten far enough to make some mistakes, but that's part of learning.
PPC is Pay Per Click. Most commonly that's Google Adwords. You'll pay an amount whenever somebody clicks on your ads, the exact amount depending on a variety of factors, most importantly how many other advertisers want the same keywords. So, you make ads, you pick good keywords that aren't too expensive, and you point your ads to something that will make you money. Most simple choice would be to point ads to a site you're an affiliate of. But not a very good choice, as there very likely would be significant competition and you can't easily improve the conversion rate (the percentage of people who buy). Rather, you should be thinking about creating your own landing pages. The landing page is where people arrive when they click on an ad. If it isn't your own product, it would be a page that somehow pre-sells and then has an affiliate link to the site that actually will sell the product, whatever it is.
A few weeks ago I felt compelled to buy PPC Bully 2, which is a tool for "spying" on the competition by easily seeing which ads are profitable in different niches, for different keywords. There are other programs one could run oneself that would do similar things, but it would take several weeks to see the results after having chosen the keywords. In PPC Bully you can see it right away. You can guess which ads are profitable simply by seeing how long they've been there. If somebody has kept a particular ad for the same keywords for the past 3 or 4 weeks, it would be a very good guess that they're making money on it. Or they for some reason don't mind losing a lot of money. Most likely they know what they're doing, and the ad is working for them. So, the theory is that I could simply copy what they're doing. I can see what the ad is and what the keywords are, and I can see where it is going. So, I could find an ad that links directly to a certain Clickbank vendor who seems to be selling a lot, and I could put up the same ad, pointing to the same place, but with my affiliate link instead of theirs. If you didn't know, Clickbank is the most popular affiliate network among Internet Marketers.
Sounded attractive, albeit not entirely ethical. I had to try it to see if it really was that easy. It wasn't.
OK, I made other stupid mistakes. But I also learned that it isn't likely to work most of the time.
I had picked a Clickbank vendor for some exercise program. I had no real interest in that, but it fit the kind of criteria they showed on the videos. Lots of sales, many affiliates. And I found some ads and some keywords that ought to be profitable. And I copied them and set up my campaign in AdWords.
My first mistake was that I entered socalled "broad matching" keywords. I.e. I just typed in the keywords without quotes around. That would mean that Google would match them, even if they're not in that order, even if only similar words would be used. As opposed to "phrase matching", which is when you put quotes around you search terms, e.g. "lower belly fat", just like when you search in Google. The final option would be exact matching, like [lower belly fat] which would only match if the user enters exactly and only that, with no other words around. Normally, the safest thing to start with in AdWords would be the phrase matching. So, I blew that one, and would have gotten searches for "Lower Slobovia Belly Dancing Fat Cats".
I had also left most of the keywords at the default $1 that Google suggested. Wisely I had set a total daily limit of $10.
I was a bit shocked after the first day as I apparently had spent $100, not $10. I wrote to Google support for that, at I got a credit for the $90, as they basically just had overshot the target. But I didn't sell anything.
I lowered my max bid for keywords to 0.30$ and tried another day. Didn't sell anything there either, but got a lot more clicks out of it. Btw, the ads and the keywords apparently were great and got 2-3% CTR (ClickThrough Rate), which is absolutely excellent. But none of them bought anything.
Then I thought I put the campaign on pause, as I wanted to learn a little more before trying again. I must have been a bit sleepy, because I accidentally left the campaign running for another 3 weeks while I went on vacation. OK, it was with that $10/day spending limit, but that still added up to more than $200. I was a bit dismayed to discover that.
There were two sales, though. The product would pay me $25 per sale. But that was with around 1000 clicks. I had tried two different ads. Each one had had around 500 visitors and one sale. But obviously it cost me $200 to earn $50.
With a 1:500 conversion, I could pay up to 0.05 for the clicks and still have a chance of making money. Of course I paid a lot more than that. It is theoretically possible that if I picked the keywords a little better, and my bid was closer to the 0.05, it could work. But it certainly isn't any automatic goldmine.
1:500 is not a very good conversion rate. I was pretty gullible to expect that it would be something like 1:20. Looking at the Clickbank vendor's site, it would actually have told me that, as he lists some of the numbers for his top affiliates. They only make a sale for every 3-400 visitors. Which makes it kind of unlikely that they do that with PPC.
I'm going to ask for a refund for PPC Bully. There's nothing really wrong with it, other than the hype that preceeded it. To really make money one still needs to know how to research niches, pick keywords, write good ads, write landing pages, and split-test multiple versions of all of it, to find out what works and what doesn't. In doing that, it would of course be useful to see what works for other people, but it takes a lot more than that.
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