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I'd imagine that these campaigns require some watching-over, ensuring the ROI is comign through on the campaigns etc., how much/many campaigns can one person moderate?
If one gets up to a 10K budget, with a modest 10-15% ROI, that's still 'only' $1-1.5K / month.
To make $5K/month would require a adwords portfolio of about $30-50K/month!
am I looking at this the wrong way?
1) Build up a bigger budget over time
2) Get a loan.
3) Use credit cards
My favorite method is the use of credit cards. This way, you can use your max credit limit and then pay off your bill in full when your affiliate checks come.
This is what I do every month. Even though I have built up enough capital over time, credit cards have the benefit of rewards programs (think of getting 20,000 rewards points per month on a travel card).
I'm assuming your monthly budget has gotten fairly large. Is it very time consuming to monitor setup/tweak your PPC campaigns?
I guess you have to balance between the # of campaigns and ROI and not get into affiliates that aren't worth your while. But the issue is if I build up some campaigns learning as I go, I might just have a 10's of programs that are giving only a small daily return, how can one manage all of this?
I just create them and if they are profitable, I let them go. I calculate what my conversion rate needs to be and as long as it is above that, I know I am making a profit. I dont worry too much about how much profit until the end of the month.
When I notice campaigns that could use some optimizing, or campaigns that are particularily profitable, then I spend some time on them. I manage 50-100+ campaigns at a time. A lot of them dont make a lot of money, but it all adds up.
It is also helpful to affiliate networks (like CJ and others) so that all of your revenue stats are in one place.
If one gets up to a 10K budget, with a modest 10-15% ROI, that's still 'only' $1-1.5K / month
That would be a very low ROI indeed. I would aim for an ROI of at least 200% to be on the safe side with PPC :)
200%, your kidding right? Sure some may, but accross the board i'm sure most are not getting such crazy numbers!
I agree with eyeinthesky. I would shoot to at least double your money. Go for $2 everytime you spend a dollar. I have been there optimizing a campaign and making like 30% ROI... It sucks.
C.K.
Me think the same , my minimum ROI creteria is 50% ...IMHO 10% is very low and not worth investing time/money
those are crazy numbers!
As long as a campaign is making a profit, I keep it going, even if it is only making a 10% return, that is better than my money sitting in the bank. If I ever need to cut back on expenses, then that is when I cut down on the lowest performing campaigns.
You would be suprised how fast a few low ROI campaigns can add up to total profit.
[webmasterworld.com...]
One of my most successful campaigns ran about a 1000% return ($500 spend, $5000 profit). Unfortunately, the merchant ran out of inventory and I haven't found a suitable replacement.
I haven't found any situations where you can just double your budget to double your earnings. I usually go in to each campaign with the maximum recommended budget and a maximum CPC that I project will give a 100% ROI. After I have sufficient history, I adjust the CPC, optimize the keywords and ad text, and let it run.
You have to create a landing page to pre-sell the visitor?
I'm guessing many people will try and copy the merchant's page (if they don't know how to presell themselves at least).
ROI should go up if you do the landing page properly. Just think about it. All the affiliates that were just sending straight to the affiliate are gone! IMO an Affiliate using Adwords properly just got a way bigger paycheck.
All the Best,
C.K.
There are other dangers with a 10% ROI. What if a merchant goes out of business? You might be stuck with 2-3 months of CPC charges before you know that you aren't going to get paid. If you're only running 10% ROI, that could wipe out YEARS worth of profits.
If you wade into the affiliate pool, though, you're swimming with sharks. Competition is intense and most people can't hack it. Don't go into it thinking it won't be work. Something like 97% of people who try it crash and burn, and 90% of those who succeed only make like $30/day (of course, that's an extra grand a month, and I remember how excited I was when I first reached that level). But if you're a really creative thinker, you can find converting traffic at low cost. You've got to be willing to do the heavy lifting as far as overseeing your campaigns, guarding against click fraud, and tracking right down to the keyword.
What are the limits? I used to think doing $400 profit a day was a lot... nowadays I do more than triple that, and I know of someone who does 3k/day in net profit (I understand he spends 1k/day to do it... but I don't know this fellow personally, just a friend of a friend so I can't confirm. I have no trouble believing it though). I don't know that there are any limits, but it would be foolish to try to find out. Affiliate marketing is a cheap and easy way to find a good market and get a feel for how to sell to that market, but once you find a niche that converts it's probably best to abandon the affiliate approach and design your own website/product/service to fill it. That way you can cash in on the lifetime value of the customers you solicit instead of just getting the quick one-time commission. I need to practice what a preach a little more on this. :)
If you're worried about funding it, well you could take on a partner. If you're getting decent roi (and decent in ppc is usually at least over 50% daily) there aren't too many investors who would look at your business plan and say 'hmmm, 50%+ roi daily' who wouldn't want to invest.
Or you could go to a bank and ask for a line of credit. Again, with documentation of a successful business plan in action, most would be only too happy to meet your needs, I'm guessing.
But I'd be surprised if your affiliate ppc operation grows much faster than your ability to keep up with it.
As for how Google's change has impacted... sadly I haven't noticed any real changes. Maybe Google is all talk or maybe they're implementing it slowly. I was excited when they announced it, because I thought it might knock out some of the smartest competition (affiliate marketers using ppc are always smarter than straight merchants in their approach; they have to be because their profit margin is so much lower).
One question - for affiliate marketing, how do you track PPC performance down to every keyword? Is this possible?
For Overture you could just enter a different url for each keyword since they allow you to do this when you create a new campaign.
For Google, you could try using their {keyword} variable in your tracking url, but some keywords may not register. The other option would be to create a new ad group for each keyword.
The best method for tracking is to group related keywords and then track them separately, so that you have maybe only 5-10 different tracking urls.
Some merchants don't provide detailed referral stats so that's an issue too.
Anyway, thanks for the ideas :)
It is time consuming to track, especially with adwords, because remember that it delivers the keyword, but doesn't tell you whether it was broad, phrase, or exact match. So you have to add the total clicks for all three types together to truly learn the roi for any particular keyword. Also it takes time to get meaningful statistical data on any particular keyword, but you can identify strong winners and losers immediately, and in a broader sense you can see which adgroups are performers and which are not. You can also measure which ads in an adgroup are converting and which are not. I was crunching the numbers only a few days ago and in one adgroup I had 4 ads that all were getting 2.2% ctr (not great, but not in any danger). Google liked them all. But looking at the conversion rate over 40k+ clicks, I saw that one ad had an epc of 2 cents (heavy loser), one had an epc of 7 cents (break even), one had an epc of 10 cents (mild winner), and one had an epc of 19 cents. Well obviously I got rid of two of the ads immediately, and profitability has shot right up.
I respectfully disagree with Beau on one point: I do believe it is worth it. It is time consuming, but when you treat your business with the attention to detail it deserves, you can sometimes turn a break-even or mildly-losing campaign into a winner, so it's worth it to me.
For 2nd tier engines (and when promoting anything by Clickbank - a network I try to stay away from) I generally take the more general approach, separating by groups of related keywords, and then identifying the keywords that get large numbers of clicks and further subdividing them to track them separately.
Ruthless tracking is your only ally in this game, but it is a formidable one. If I hadn't been so hot on tracking, I wouldn't have discovered that one of the largest affiliate programs on the net was skimming 30%+ of sales/commissions from me... that's actually a topic for another thread though...
By the way, thanks for the welcome. :)
to track whether a click comes from the content network or the search network, I usually create two campaigns. One that only shows to the search network, and one that only [should] show to the content network. Since the content network gets low ctr, this also allows you to see your actual CTR for ads and work on improving them. Google doesnt factor the content CTR into your keywords, but it does get factored into your ads, which can make it impossible to compare multiple ads at once.
The downside of doing this (and why i added "should") is because google says you cannot turn of the search network. So you have to settle for most of your search clicks going to the isolated campaign and some of them going to your "content network" campaign.
For Overture you could just enter a different url for each keyword since they allow you to do this when you create a new campaign.
Actually Overture has this feature called "Overture Tracking URLs" which adds a parameter called OVKEY, which lets you know which keyword triggered your ad.
inasisi: Thanks, I never knew that before. Cool, something new to try out with overture. :)
ralent: I will start a new thread on that, giving good details of how I caught the fraud and seeing what everyone else's experiences have been with this. In my case I caught both the merchant and the affiliate clearinghouse both committing the fraud. We're still working on nailing down who took what, but it looks like the larger portion of stolen sales/commissions was perpetrated by the affiliate network. This is one of the biggest affiliate networks on the web, not some fly-by-night, and from my dealings with them I get the feeling this is business as usual. I've been really upset by this discovery, especially because ostensibly affiliate networks should be protecting our interests. We drive their sales, technically they work for us, not the other way around. They don't have some divine right of kings to steal our money and should have some accountability. The most alarming thing about this discovery though is the reaction of most other affiliates when I tell them about it. Very few are even perturbed, most just shrug and say 'well, that's sort of the cost of doing business'. If this is our attitude, than no wonder the affiliate networks feel they can rip us off. We deserve it if we don't do something... Anyway, you can see I'm passionate about it, but it shouldn't be in this thread, so I'll start another. :)
I guess it's really hard to find out.
