I wonder how much of you are you using adwords for advertising third party sites (afiiliate programs)?
What is your niche?
How is it going for you?
Thank you
Yossi
[edited by: Shak at 1:44 pm (utc) on July 7, 2003]
[edit reason] corrected typos [/edit]
What is your niche?
Just FYI, you're not going to get an answer to this question. If somebody is using Adwords for affiliate programs, they depend on low bid prices and letting others know they're making a profit would be counterproductive.
1) i am doing that for a long time and talking about that with a lot othe pepole that doing the same thing .... We are learning from each other ( like in any other form on ths board ) .
2) when i am asking for niche i am not talking about the specific program or keywords, i am talking about adult niche , Casino, ect...
Yossi.
No, I don't know if it actually does me any good. Could be I'd be selling the same amount of stuff without the Adwords. I may disable them for this month just to see if it really makes any difference.
Why you are not using any Tracking program? .
Porgram like that will tell you for sure if the customer came from adwords...
Yossi.
Shak
You can establish a basic correlation by opening a second account with your sponsor and creating pages just for adwords traffic.
Some measurement of effectiveness can be determined, such as how profitable that single account is (monthly expense on adwords against sales produced > take into account potential rebilling).
Problem is to determine the exact referring page that made the sale. Many aff. programs do not know this either since it implies having access to credit card processors' database.
The closest we get is to match a group of URLs against a group of sales per period (for example an hour). On heavy traffic partners, it's virtually impossible to determine how sales occur.
If anyone knows of a software that can establish exact correlationship between referral and sales, please drop a line here (sorry for hijacking your thread Yossi).
In terms of the need for confidentiality, well, maybe, but I think it is fair to say that GAW offers a fertile field for what might be called tangental or even contrarian advertising at the cheapest rate for folk like myself who are exclusively doing affiliate or partner or distributor businesses.
Taking widgets and related terms and running a headline like Widget Disasters with a text that segues almost word for word with the page you are sending folk to has made sense.
Best luck is with particular terms do not include widget but relate tangentally to the widget.
Using the "widget" convention to create a spread over many little-searched terms also makes sense I think.
>Taking widgets and related terms and running a headline
>like Widget Disasters with a text that segues almost word
>for word with the page you are sending folk to has made
>sense.
interesting technique - but i'd be afraid of getting too many unqualified clickthrus. if i'm selling widgets, i want the prospect to understand that BEFORE they click my link - otherwise i'm paying good money to attract people who want to read about the Great Widget Disaster of 1905.
prof.hojo.
- Bid HIGH on specific or action-oriented terms, aka "buy widget" and "buy widgets" or "best widget san francisco"
- Bid VERY LOW on very general or broad terms: "widget" and "american widgets"
Of course, you face the same risks as always with Google AdWords: still spending for some unqualified traffic, or having some words disabled for very low click-thrus. But on the whole, I've found it to be a decent compromise.
Suppose Widget opportunity has 100 things it sells and each has one specific name which is actually the thing itself not the opp name or a brand.
Then you make ONE page on your own site just for that word [word.htm] that is a gateway to the opp. The gateway enables you to link easily to the specific product plus to the opp, customer or business opportunity and even a resume so folk know who they are dealing with.
Who knows? I will, in a week or two, a page a day.
Cheers, S
There are still plenty of under-utilized areas on google-adwords. Take a large category, and find your own overlooked niche
Boy I have a hard time doing this. Any suggested large categories? I looked into doing this in travel. I figured I would be the king of adwords for "smallville, USA". But there is a ton of unreasonable bids by the big three.
What I do is look for an unexploited niche, where something comes available at a really good price. The key is finding those niches and writing the ad copy to grab the attention, not just of the general public, but for people who are likely to spend money on that item or similar ones. Some of these ads do really well, some ok, and some I've tanked on. It's a learning process. It's also common that once I've found a cash cow, it's usually only a few weeks before everybody else finds it. Then the CPC gets too high to justify the ROI anymore and it's time to find the next niche.
Like anything else, it takes work.
i tend to bid on overlooked keywords and most of my keywords are at 5 cents. i made a very big mistake at first - the mistake many make with adwords - and bid 30 or 40 cents or more for some "magic keywords" that didn't convert at all. (of course, that was in the days when there were artificially high minimum bids for a lot of keywords.) i now bid 5 cents on those same keywords and hover in position 7 or 8... and the ROI on 5 cents is a lot better than at 40 cents!
the site has three fairly high-paying topic-related affiliate programs and one fairly low-paying one ( i buy no ads whatsoever for the low-paying one, but it still picks up sales from the associated traffic.) all the programs - the different sales tracks - are cross referenced on virtually every page of the site.
about 15% of site visitors click through to an affiliate program and about 5% of those buy. my adwords advertisng costs run about 12% of my monthly sales commissions on the site, which i think are pretty substantial (not stratospheric, but quite substantial).
i've allowed a few campaigns to be syndicated to google's content partners, but they don't perform nearly as well. but a couple of them do... with content syndication, it's a real trial and error thing.
As long as my bids seem reasonable and the products on the other side are something people might want to buy on the internet as opposed to K-Mart, I haven't been able to loose money at it yet.
