I like to track trends. The more info you can know about your campaigns and conversion rates, the better. Certain days have always seemed to have better conversion rates than others so I decided to run the numbers. I took a campaign that has been running for over 10 months and crunched the data to see which days of the week really converted best.

You can see that for this affiliate campaign, Fridays definitely converted best on average. The worst day of the week was Sunday. Keep in mind these numbers are conversion rates, which takes traffic volume out of the equation. What conclusions can be drawn from this? Maybe people are in the best moods on Fridays and want to buy stuff:)

(Note: this is NOT a paid review)

Every affiliate marketer needs good tools. So when I saw a promotional video for SpeedPPC, I was eager to test it out. After visiting their website I was a little nervous. It was one of those 1 long page, sales letter looking sites. Those are my pet peeve, and normally I would click right off, but I stuck with it and downloaded the program. Once I started going through all the materials, I was glad I did because this program is the real deal.

Documentation:

First off, there is excellent documentation of the program. Its clear going through it that Jay really understands the PPC marketing game. To the new affiliate marketer, the examples and theories in the documentation may be worth as much as the program itself. He also provides landing page templates and extra keyword expansion lists for the program. Add to that all the video tutorials, and you have a very nice documentation set.

The program:

The program is a tool that combines a seed keyword list, with an expansion keyword list then inserts these into your text ads to spit out upload ready lists of ads and keywords. It does this using what they call tokens, which are kind of like a variable in PHP. These tokens can be placed in the URL and the text ads to dynamically insert the keyword strings into the token placeholders. It works very well, if you have set it up correctly. You then can take the lists that the programs outputs, and drop them into the Google Adwords editor, or upload into MSN. In testing I did, getting the lists into your PPC program was the biggest challenge. Adwords or MSN always had minor problems with a few of the keywords or ads that needed to be addressed, but that is to be expected when dealing with large lists. I would also like to see a Yahoo output stream for the program. According to the FAQ this is in the works, but is proving difficult with Yahoo’s interface.

Bottom Line:

The bottom line is, this is a serious tool with a lot of potential uses. You can even work with datafeeds, which is extremely useful. It’s not a magic solution where you push one button and your campaigns are built and done. You do have to know what you are doing and create your own seed lists and ads. But for automating much of the leg work in building out large campaigns with multiple adgroups, this program delivers as promised. Is it worth the $497 asking price? Well, considering if you create one successful campaign you can make that back many times over, I would say yes. Anything that can automate tasks and save valuable time is worth it to me.

I think every affiliate marketer has come to Adbrite and been really excited at the possibilities. “You mean I can get a flat rate 1 week text ad for $1,750 that will bring me 28,000 clicks?!?! With the 5% conversion rate on my landing page that will be 1,400 conversions and at $15 a conversion that’s $19,250 pure profit!! Woohoo, I’m gonna be rich!” Unfortunately it doesn’t work out that way. You have many strikes working against you with these ads.

• First of all, from our testing experience you usually get a fraction of their estimated clicks. I’m not sure where they are getting their figures, but the estimates are way off.
• The traffic is largely international, even when it says US. If you have any kind of geo tracking on your landing page you will see this. So if your offer is geo-restricted, much of your traffic will be lost or redirected.
• This advertising is contextual, which most affiliate marketers tend to avoid. You can’t apply your known conversions ratios from a search campaign, to a contextual campaign. Search traffic by definition converts more because people are actually searching for your keywords. They have put effort into the search, and are ready to convert. But, people simply browsing a site who happen to see you text ad probably aren’t too motivated to convert your desired action.

Of course, as with everything in affiliate marketing, you should always test it yourself to see what works and what doesn’t. Adrite’s flat rate ads may work for some purposes, like to increase brand awareness. But for the cut-throat world of driving traffic to CPA type offers we have found Adbrite ineffective.

With a PPC text ad, 4 lines are all you get to make your impression. Yet most people give little thought to the display URL, which is 25% of your ad’s real estate. The display URL should be a major concern when writing your ad. I would venture to say that it’s more important that your description even.

Buy a new domain:
This is one place not to cheap out and try to save a few bucks by using a bad domain name. Go ahead and register a new one, or even multiple new ones to test a new offer. Using an old domain that you had lying around, that kind of fits the offer is a recipe for failure. Besides, 1 conversion could recoup the domain cost for a year.

Buy a good domain:
For some reason I don’t have any trouble finding good domains. I never buy .NETs or .ORGs, only .COMS. I hardly ever use hyphens or weird punctuation either. Remember, you are buying the domain to instill confidence in the searcher, not for SEO purposes. Obviously, the shorter the better, but multiple related words are better than punctuation I find.

Test display URLs

I like to run multiple ad copies in Google with the only difference being the display URLs. I have seen big changes in CTR from various URLs tested. Once you find the best converting URL you can switch everything over to that URL.

It’s been said a million times before, you need to keep testing in affiliate marketing. You just never know what may or may not work until you actually commit some money to testing. We’ve all heard it before, but here’s an interesting case in point.

I was testing a campaign that has been running on Google for about 8 months now, just chugging along. I had 5 ads that I was testing for a particular Adgroup, and in one ad I noticed that I had accidentally left out a word in the description that made it read like total nonsense. It had ran that way for about 2 weeks and the funny thing is, that ad performed about 23% better than the other ads. I have no explanation for why that is, but you can bet I left that messed up ad in place

You really do need to think outside the box to be successful in affiliate marketing. Sometimes copying what others are doing does work, but that will only get you so far. To truly break out from the pack, you need to think differently about what you are doing.

Part of thinking outside the box, is constant testing. For me that means testing totally crazy stuff, because you never know what might hit. Sure, most of it will fail miserably, but occasionally you will get a winner.

Here’s a funny example of something I tested that was off the wall. I don’t like to give specifics of what is converting well from me, and what niches I am in (can you blame me?), but ringtones are always safe to talk about. Everyone does them. So I got to thinking about the standard boring, “pick your carrier” landing page that everyone uses. I asked myself what would be the opposite of this landing page? This is what I came up with.

 

Yes, that’s the whole landing page, no need to reload your browser. Just a white background with 2 small words. The amazing thing is, the bounce rate was about the same as the page I was running at the time! Conversions were a little lower probably due to a few lost carriers not supported by the offer it was going to, but surprisingly it worked pretty well. Since then I have hit on something that works way better, but at the time it worked great. I found my current landing page by “crazy” testing, just like this.

So get creative and stop following the pack!

When you are running a long term PPC campaign, ongoing testing is key. The hard part is to continue testing, even when you have an established and well running campaign. It’s easy to sit back and be satisfied with your ROI, but how do you know you aren’t leaving money on the table unless you continue to test? That’s what takes discipline, and if you have it you can separate yourself from the rest of you competitors.

This brings me to a task that I have started calling “pruning the trees”. I have this mental image of adgroups as branches on a tree, with the top performing ad texts as healthy branches shooting up. The bad performing ads are kind of scraggly branches growing off to the side. So just like if you want to keep a tree growing up, you have to prune off these side branches to let the good one keep growing up.

So for example, say you have an adgroup with 2 very strong ads pulling around 5% CTRs. Start throwing ads in there daily and let them run for a few days. Once you have this cycle going for a while, you can go in and prune out the bad ones, keeping the top ads in place. This will create a constant upward growth pressure on your adgroups. You are looking for that new ad that just may end up beating your top performers.

It’s important to note that by testing, you are going to use up some impressions on low performing ads, which would have otherwise gone to your top performers. That’s the cost of testing, but the rewards can exceed that cost if you hit on a great new ad copy.