How long should I try this?

AW/AS/CB strategy testing

[pompousjohn]

OK I'm kinda new to all of this, new meaning I have spent good money for hosting and invested alot of time in study and research but have yet to make a dime from webmastering. (well I have a few cents in my AS account but at this rate it'll be a few years before they cut me a check)

Right now I am doing the following:

I am running an AdWords campaign to drive traffic to a landing page designed to sell a CB product.

I am paying around 1 dollar per click and the CB product pays out 25 per sale so I figure I can break even on my investment if I get a 4-5% conversion rate.

Aside from this I have AS running to try to get a few cents back from people leaving my site, but I am wondering whether this could dilute my conversion rate for the CB product, I have looked closely at the AS ads showing on my site and filtered the ones that seem low paying and the ones that seem to compete directly, and by filtering this way I have managed to raise my cpc on adsense from .1 to .5 - still obviously not covering my Adwords bill, but I'm hoping the CB conversions will do that.

(CTR is an amazing 25%, even counting the impressions I made myself filtering ads)

I have about 50 dollars a day budgeted for this, how many days should I run this campaign until I get an idea if it's working?

[humblebeginnings]

It's worth a try, but I consider a 4 to 5% conversion rate with CB as extremely succesful. Much depends on what kind of CB product you're selling.

[pompousjohn]

Hmmm, well these are pretty competetive keywords and are not going to go cheaply, what other ways of driving paid traffic are less expensive?

I think I have tweaked adsense enough (and lowered my adwords bids a good 20%) that my break even rate is now closer to 2.5% conversion rate.

I am getting the picture that all affiliate programs claim to "convert like crazy" its an easy claim to back up because only a crazy person would buy this crap.

[ronmcd]

$1 per click for a CB product paying out 25 is high, unless its absolutely the single most targetted keyword. Most CB products (most products?) convert much lower, assume 1% initially.

I would start by getting as many keywords you can think of that are targetted to the product and run them at a much lower cpc, $0.30 or below. Let it run for long enough to know what the REAL conversion ratio is for each keyword (0 for most of them probably).

Only then increase the cpc for each keyword to a level where you KNOW you are still profitable.

It would also be worth tracking how many people click through from your landing page to the merchants site: you might think the merchant isnt converting only to find your landing page isnt sending enough people through. And CB gives you no click stats, only sales. So you need to do it yourself.

Hope that helps.

[pompousjohn]

Yeah I guess I better redesign my landing page, right now it's a direct copy of the merchant's landing page with all the links changed to my CB affiliate link.

That's probably bad, I just didn't want to confuse the customer too much by hitting them with two long seperate sales letters. Right now when they hit a link on my page it more or less just looks like the page re-loaded. (well sort of)

And I'm still paying .85/click, I guess I should lower that too.

[ronmcd]

Thats not so bad, if it looks like the merchants site then at least you know your clickthrough from your site to theirs isnt the bottleneck, or at least no worse than their own site.

But to find out what keywords convert you need to run traffic through it for a while, and at $0.8 to $1 you will lose lots of money. Thats ok if you want to collect your stats quickly, but Im pretty sure it wont make a profit.

If you have lots of keywords you also need to know which ones if any convert: most wont. To do that you need to ask the merchant to add your adwords conversion code to their thank-you page.

[pompousjohn]

OK. Great advice, thanks. I just wonder though, since at .85 some of my ads are already positioned in the 20's, if I lower it to .3 I may be in position 50-100 and I wonder if I would get any traffic at all. I suppose there's always the content network, at present about 10% of my clicks are coming from that.

[ronmcd]

Well, if someone is paying to be in the top3 for a really competitive term they could a) be losing money b) have already tested that the keyword converts, and having built up huge keyword history and clickthrough they are paying much much less than you would have to for the same position. But you dont know which it is, so I wouldnt pay that much to be there. I'd try and get onto page 1 at the bottom or page 2 and see what happens without spending too much.

[ronmcd]

Are the ads on page1 affiliates like you or merchants? It may not be viable to get onto page 1 or even 2 for that product.

[pompousjohn]

Well the page 1 ads are leading directly to the merchants page, this does not mean that they are the merchants, I know, but it does suggest that they may be.

I lowered my bid to .30 like you suggested and now all my clicks and most of my impressions have ceased completely.

I am going to raise it incrementally by .05 at a time and see if I can find the point where things start moving again.