Unsuccessful PPC … it doesn’t always work
I’ve had many a successful ppc campaign over the 2 years i’ve been in affiliate marketing, but it’s not always the case. Often i’ve ran ppc campaigns and they haven’t been profitable. It’s not as easy as adding some keywords, making an advert and seeing the cpc turning a profit !
Recently i’ve been doing some direct PPC to some merchants to find that the CPC and conversion rate isn’t worthy of me carrying on. Direct PPC can be great but it doesn’t always work like you want it too. One of the reasons my PPC campaign didnt become profitable was as I was competiting directly with other merchants and not other affiliates thus they would make a bigger mark up on a sale than I would. So they could afford to push the price of each click up more.
When is the stop off period ? how long should I let it go before I pull the ad ? People have various ideas on this, but I generally wait till either 200 clicks have been done, 2 days of the ad, or if a limit of around £100 has been reached before I look into an ad and see if I should pull it.
The point is, if a campaign you run isn’t successful at first then maybe it won’t be overall.
May 12th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Nice post, interesting stuff about the cut off point. What made you try direct to merchant? Are there really any benefits other than not having to build your own landing page?
I read time and time again that you’re throwing your money away with direct to merchant stuff because of your reliance on their (frequently) shoddy website to convert well.
Hat’s off to you for trying this though.
July 21st, 2008 at 6:37 pm
Dunc, there is of course benefits and also there are clauses when it comes to PPC. I found using Adwords a challenge when coming to quality score. The one good thing about direct PPC is that you are guaranteed mostly that the cookie gets dropped, so you wont lose any commissions if they go on to make a sale. And of course as Max has stated, not all products convert the same as if you are going against a big player in the industry that can offer a better price that the merchant you are promoting, I would say it is time to move on.
PPC to a landing page, especially with the Google quality score issue is itself a challenge, but direct PPC cannot guarantee you that quality score as you dont have control of the landing pages content, hence then your bids ‘may’ go up if the quality score is poor. With PPC to your own landing page you can alter the page to boost the quality score and try to lower the price of your clicks. At least, thats one of the issues concerning Adwords. Also, with your landing page the main challenge is to get the visitor to click that link and land that cookie, so pay-per-click to sales conversion will be lower as not everybody clicks your links.
So as you see, there are benefits of doing both.