AM via PPC

What are good strategies & how does one get started?

[Max_K]

I'd like to know how people get started in serving affiliate ads directly through Adwords or other PPC engines. Do you get special permission from advertisers to run PPC ads for them, or do you just copy & paste their text-links into adwords directly? Or do you set up your own landing-page and filter traffic through that?

I keep hearing about people doing this, but I'd think that the "aff" text would reduce CTRs. Any suggestions on effective strategies or how to get started doing this type of thing?

[PeteM]

I've been thinking about doing this for a while and reckon it might work out like this.

Firstly we take 3 assumptions:-

1) 5% commission (eg from a major online book seller)
2) 5% conversion rate (that online book seller publishes the average conversion rates)
3) Cost per click. I'm gonna go for the minimum with adwords, i.e. 4 pence in UK.

So if I take a book costing £20 I will earn £1 in commission. To make that conversion will cost me 20 click throughs at 4p each, which is 80 pence. So therefore I make 20 pence profit.

Now I want good quality click throughs. If I'm selling books I don't want DVD click throughs. So my keyword is "Widget Books". My ad is "The A to Z guide to widgets" and the destination URL is for the book in the advert.

As I have no seed capital I set my daily limit to 50 pence and see what happens. The merchant's reporting system will tell me what people have bought so I can drop the poor performing ads and think up more of the good performers.

Am I on the right tracks?

Pete

[Procyon]

PeteM - budget for a lower % conversion rate. 5% is very high. Budget for lower than that and if you achieve 5% it's a bonus. :)

At least that's what I'd do.

[andla]

One important thing I would like to add to this thread is the choise of affiliate program. I've been thinking of this and have come up with a conclusion based on what affiliate programs are generating sales from time to time.

The recipe has two ingredients and here it is:

1 portion of good content
1 portion of good design

Mix the two ingredients and remove everything that is similar to spam. That is the landing page should have a good mix of formatting to make it well organized and easy to read and it should look like it has been spent much work and effort. Not to much of screaming red & yellow text. The page should have a mix of commercial feeling and a big chunk of content but not to much content.

It should have testimonials, picture of the author and so on and so forth.

I would be happy though if you have some more ingredients to make the recipe even more
delicious :-) .

Sincerely
Andla

[edited by: andla at 3:39 pm (utc) on Sep. 26, 2004]

[fclark]

...do you use the merchant's tracking codes? If so, then the merchant will know which are the best converting keywords.

To protect and track your kw's, you can send the PPC clicks through your own domain first to strip the referrer info from them using script (coldfusion or php) before server-side redirecting them to the qksrv link and on to the merchant. You can even insert your own tracking code (SID) at this point for conversion tracking that only you can benefit from in the CJ reports.

To the visitor (and adwords reviewer), the experience is no different from PPC-direct to merchant.