Anatomy of a winning PPC to affiliate campaign – part II

There was a lot of questions about the previous post, so I thought I would tackle some of them.

Q: I have one question, how did you build that many landing pages you mentioned a template, My guess is that you made static landing pages with adgroups/Ads/keywords related.

A: Yes, all pages were static, not PHP variable populated. I am doing some testing and have some data that suggests static leads to better quality score than dynamic pages. I’ll post more about this in the future because it’s a pretty controversial theory.

Q: So how are you defining “winning campaign”.?

A: Simple, anything that is a profit. Even a break even campaign makes money on the PPC credit card rebates. This campaign is doing a lot better than break even though

Q: You going to be around ASW?

A: Yes, I’ll be there 2 days.

Q: Can you share with us how exactly you broke up the keywords? Did you do it manually (I guess not) or do you have a good macro/script/tool that will do it for you?

A: I have a tool I had build where I enter a term of phrase and it pulls all similar. Determining the groups and phrases I do 100% manually. There is no tool that can come close to manually break apart the adgroups. If you use auto tools, you will get the same results as everyone else.

Q: Chad, are you interlinking your pages? For example if I’d go for “loan”, I build a landingpage for “car loan” and a landingpage for “student loan”. Would you recommend to have a top navigation bar which points to all the different loans and links to the various landing pages? Or do you keep internal links away from landing pages and just link the offer?

A: On this campaign, no, nothing was interlinked and no navigation. I do that on some campaigns but for this one it doesn’t make sense.

Q: You mean affiliate marketing actually takes work?

A: No, you can just read an ebook

Q: What kind of free tools are necessary for a beginner or do you have to purchase everything first?

A: You can do everything with free tools to get started. The Google Adwords editor and Excel are enough to start.

Q: I’ve seen another tool that organized keywords, but adwords editor works great on the free side for breaking down keywords by relevant terms – not their auto tool, but typing in manually. Of course you can do it from the start, too by how you group them – like a speed PPC (though it is a breeze to script something like that.)

A: Great point. Grouping from the start will save huge amounts of time. I always do this.
Q: Wow. You must be extremely talented or with extreme patience to break down into so many adgroups.
Also, your idea of successful may not be the same for others…for many $100/day is wow and for some $1000/day is oh well.

A: Like I said before, I will keep running any positive cash flow campaign. They certainly aren’t all $1k/day winners! It’s all about the cumulative effect.

Q: Why exactly did you break this up in 6 different campaigns? Wouldn’t different adgroups be enough (and 1 campaign)?

A: It’s hard to say without giving you the niche, but there were logical reasons. Also Yahoo only allows 1,000 adgroups per campaign so with over 1,500 adgroups that wouldn’t fit in 1…

Q: Great job, Chad! However this post could easily sway the noob away from PPC. It’s certainly not necessary to do all of that work to make a lot of money with PPC. You don’t need thousands of keyword, and certainly don’t need thousands of LP’s, dynamic or otherwise, to create a winning campaign. I just think it is a bit misleading.

A: You are right, you don’t have to do this for every niche. But if you want to jump into a super competitive niche, you need to be aware that your competitors are doing at least this amount of work. Rather than discouraging a noob, I think they should find it inspiring that they can compete too if they just put in the effort.

Q: Could you explain more about how you broke down your campaigns? For example what do you do with broad phrase and exact matches? Do you put them into different campaigns or do you keep them in the same ad groups? Looking forward to hearing more on your campaign structuring philosophy.

A: I break the KWs and phrases by similar semantic meaning for best quality scores and similar relevancy of the adgroup. I do a mix of all match types. I don’t repeat any KWs in any adgroups or campaigns.