-
The 13 Pay Per Click Network Challenge
Anatomy of a winning PPC to affiliate campaign
Breaking the $1,000 per hour barrier
How to import Adwords campaigns into Yahoo and MSN
Keyword Scrubbing
Google trick to reveal your Adsense competitors
Hot Tip - Non relevant PPC advertising
3 Huge Adwords Editor Timesaving Tips
Create landing pages based on keyword intent
Don't miss a single PPC or affiliate marketing tip - subcribe today!
Many people talk, including myself, about how to build good campaigns that have great quality scores and a solid ROI. But what exactly does this mean in the real world? I have said before, we are all working off essentially the same keywords. So given the same list of say 10,000 keywords, how does one person’s campaign completely fail, while another person makes a killing? It’s all about campaign structure. The best way I can explain this is with an example.
A couple months ago I began a quick and dirty test of a new niche and affiliate offer. To do this I got 10,129 keywords together into 1 campaign with about 35 adgroups. I wrote 2 ads for each adgroup, bought a domain, slapped together a landing page, and began the test. This hastily made campaign actually showed some promise with a slight profit. The potential was there for a real money maker, so I decided to push forward full force on the campaign. This was a heavily contested niche, probably one of the most competitive out there, so I knew I had to start from scratch and build a proper campaign. Here are the steps I took to build the winning campaign.
First of all after taking a hard look at the keywords, I knew I had to logically break up the campaign into 6 separate campaigns. This was necessary for the adgroup structure I had planned to work. To me, adgroup structure is the key to PPC marketing. Keep in mind some of the hard limits of certain services like Yahoo (max 1000 adgroups per campaign).
Next I was able to pare down the list of 10k keywords down to 8,257 using some of the keyword scrubbing techniques described here. The more non- converting keywords you can remove from your lists the better.
Then the hardest and most important part - adgroups. I took the original 35 adgroups, and broke them out to 1,523 adgroups spread out over the 6 campaigns. This was absolutely necessary to get the highest possible relevancy of the keywords to ads. How relevant? Well, about 300 of the adgroups had just 1, short tail keywords in them. Overall, my keyword to adgroup ratio was a tight 5.42 kws/adgroup.
After building out the adgroups, ads had to be written. Recently I have found some evidence that writing non-dynamic ads lead to better quality score than using dynamic insertion, so all ads were written manually. I did use a template to speed up the process, but no keyword insertion tricks were used. I had at least 2 ads per adgroup, to begin the process of A/B testing.
Finally the landing pages. To continue to reflect the relevancy of the keyword, from the ad to the landing page, I needed to build 1,142 landing pages. Much like the ad writing, a template was used, but each page differs enough to be totally relevant to each keyword and ad.
In review:
| Test campaign: Domains: 1 Campaign: 1 Keywords: 10,129 Adgroups: 35 Ads: 35 Landing Pages: 1 |
Winning campaign: Domains: 3 Campaigns: 6 Keywords: 8,257 Adgroups: 1,523 Ads: 3,046 Landing Pages: 1,142 |
So you can see, it takes a ton of work to compete in PPC to affiliate marketing. Gone are the days you can slap up a campaign in an hour and have it make money over the long term. The work I describe probably took around 35 hours to complete, and that was just the initial build out. That may sound like a lot of time, but if you consider this will keep making money for months, maybe even years, it’s not anything. Optimizing and improving the campaign is a never ending battle. This campaign is really starting to make money now though, and the time investment has already paid off. The great thing about PPC is that it’s a level playing field. Anyone can compete in any niche, it’s just a matter of how hard do you want to work at it. Work harder than your competitors by building a better campaign, and you will succeed.
CDF Networks Sponsors
Recommended
     |
 |
Sponsors
Categories
Latest Twitters
- worked an hour, now heading out for a long ride. its all about priorities. 3 hrs ago
- New blog post: Milestone - 2 year old campaign http://tinyurl.com/44jr3x 18 hrs ago
- glad i'm out of the stock market ;) maybe i'll buy google when its under $100 23 hrs ago
- More updates...
Top Commentators
- Mike (12)
- Juice (12)
- Gee (11)
- Ken Savage (10)
- WayneDog (9)
- Jason Tibbons (8)
- Kattie (7)
- Dave (6)
- Jeff (6)
- Dr_Ngo (5)
Blogroll
- Amit: Hey Chad, Congrats! Can you share with us a little more details about this campaign like - What PPC Engine are...
- Link Millionaire: How difficult would it be to do this with a campaign that is direct-linked?
- Chad: I hear you, Google has been a real bastard to me too. Thats why I have had to switch domains…
- Chad: Clicks, impressions, CTR, conversions, and conv rate
- Ken Savage: WHat kind of things do you keep for daily reports? The usual Impressions, clicks, CTR, ad content, CPC?
- Think Like An SOB: I think long term too Chad, except, every time I do that, Google slaps that campaign.
- Kattie: Ads approval makes you wait too long, isn’t it
Wow Chad,
First of all hats of to you for providing the stats and breaking them down so that we can follow whats going on.
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.
Answer if you may.
Vijay
Awesome post. It’s nice to see big time affiliates giving up there secrets! So how are you defining “winning campaign”.?
[…] Original post by CDF Networks […]
@1 - This is just my method, but I have found the easiest way to make a ton of landing pages is to simply make a php function. Inside the php function you will have the complete template. This way if you make a change to you landing page all you have to do is change the function and all landing pages get updated.
My landing page would look something like this (but a little more complex obviously):
So you see it is is pretty bare. With essentially two lines of code you are generating a full landing page. Title, Keyword, and paragrah are just sample variables.. you would use whatever you need for you landing page.
ANYWAYS, Chad, great post bud. At least I don’t feel crazy anymore when I launch a campaign that has 100+ landing pages.
You going to be around ASW?
damn, the comment stripped out the example.
here it is again minus the php tags
PHP
include “global.php”;
createPage($title, $keyword, $paragraph);
ENDPHP
[…] I would like to share you a great post from Chad. He shows us the anatomy of a winning PPC to affiliate campaign. I have no doubt with his campaign. […]
Teach Me- I have a system that creates a template then inserts the keywords into placeholders throughout the file. Similar to what Jared posted, but not PHP and produces clean HTML only code with seems to work great for QS.
Scott-I define winning as any profitable campaign. This particular one is pulling about 1k a day.
Jared- Great comment. Yes, I’ll be at ASW.
Chad,
That “system that creates a template” — can explain how that works. The closest that I’ve come to this is caching php as html and then using the html
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?
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?
Thanks,
Andreas
Great post! Very useful and interesting data. Thanks for sharing.
That’s impressive, I can’t even imagine building a campaign like that! I just don’t have the patience (among other things..)
You mean affiliate marketing actually takes work?
What kind of free tools are necessary for a beginner or do you have to purchase everything first?
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.
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.
Why exactly did you break this up in 6 different campaigns? Wouldn’t different adgroups be enough (and 1 campaign)?
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.
Great way to break it down the narrower the better these days. get that QS up
Thanks guys for all the great questions. I will do a follow up post to answer them all in a day so keep em coming!
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
>> This particular one is pulling about 1k a day.
Well, that certainly changes the economics of creating thousands of ad groups. It doesn’t seem like such a bore now
If your landing pages just offer a paragraph of text with the affiliate link, hasn’t Google spanked you yet with $12/keyword bids? Google dislikes landing pages with one affiliate link as they don’t offer value to the user (according to Google of course).
I have landing pages with title and h1 tags that are the exact ad text and unique content on the page that includes the keywords from the ad. After months with ‘Good’ QS and low bids, they jump to $12/keyword and become ‘Poor’.
So how have your landing pages stayed in good standing with Google when they seem destined to get rid of affiliate landing pages because they see them as diminishing their brand with quality search results?
Also, with that many ad groups and keywords, how on earth do you manage it all? For example, how do you pick up when you’re paying WAY too much and losing money on a keyword or when you’re not paying nearly enough? Or how about a keyword that you’re paying a lot for but isn’t bringing the right traffic (people are interpreting it as something else)?
This is a great post man. quit informative. Its make things much easier.
[…] going to do more niche research and keyword research. Some of the most successful players in PPC affiliate marketing use something like 10,000 keywords in their campaigns. I’m going to pick an offer that […]
[…] for my main offer by 143.4%. How’d I do that? No big secret, just by using the techniques described before on this blog with super targeted campaigns, tight adgroups, and hyper relevant landing […]
Thanks cos this makes things easier truly.
This is harder than i thought..but i guess that hard work is what separates the best from the rest.
Now I know why I’m not making any money from PPC. I SUCK!!
Great post - question…
How in the world did you build 1142 landing pages (along with all the other work) in only 35 hours. Is there a tool that you used to auto-generate the landing pages?
[…] Popular Articles The 13 Pay Per Click Network Challenge Anatomy of a winning PPC to affiliate campaign Breaking the $1,000 per hour barrier How to import Adwords campaigns into Yahoo and MSN Keyword […]
[…] Once I saw the campaign had promise, I tore it down and rebuilt it from the ground up with awesome structure. Then I kept checking reports all the time and honed everything down intto a conversion machine. […]
1000k a day net or gross? That number is meaningless to your readers if you are spending more than that on clicks.
“Work harder than your competitors by building a better campaign, and you will succeed.”
Solid advice.
Hi Chad,
Thanks for posting such great stuff on here! I’m just getting into ppc for affiliate marketing and am looking at conversion tracking software options. xtremeconversions and affiliateradar are the primary ones I’m looking at.
I’m creating a shopping comparison site and will be using datafeeds provided by several affiliate networks…cj, avantlink and amazon etc.
Any advice on a platform to monitor the ppc campaign at the keyword level?
Thanks!