I thought I would start a new series of posts to tackle common PPC to affiliate marketing problems. The first one is: not enough traffic to the offer. Many times you set up a great site or landing page, spend hours building a PPC campaign, implement a full tracking system, then launch everything only to find traffic trickling in. What went wrong, and what can you do to build up the traffic?
1. Bid prices. Assuming you have a decent keyword set, if you aren’t getting any traffic your bid prices may be too low. This is by far one of the most common problems I see with campaigns. Its very tempting to try to ease into a niche going after cheap clicks, but its also an biggest way to shoot yourself in the foot. You have to bid enough to get the clicks, no matter what that price may be. If the top ads are bidding $1.75 and you start with $ .85, your campaign might be doomed to never get any impressions. Set your bid aggressively - you have to pay to play.
2. Add Keywords. If you have maxed out the traffic on your current keywords, common sense says its time to add more keywords. There are million keyword tools out there, so finding new keywords is never a problem. Just be sure they are relevant keywords to your adgroups. Adding non-relevant keywords could end up hurting your quality score and actually reducing traffic levels.
3. Increase CTR. Split testing ads is still one of the best ways to increase traffic on current adgroups. You should always be testing new ads no matter how much of a winner you already have. Even small increases in CTR can yield a lot more traffic. If you have an adgroup getting 10,000 impressions a day and were able to increase CTR from 3.5% to just 5.5%, that would be a 57.1% increase in total clicks.
4. Increase Quality. The quality score on your account will affect the amount of traffic you get. Unfortunately this topic alone is so big that full books are written about it. The main things to look at are ad CTRs, keyword relevance, and landing page factors. Different networks weigh the factors differently. A good resource is always Adwords help.
5. Other traffic sources. Once you have everything optimized and running nicely it might be time to add new networks. Adwords, Yahoo, and MSN are all great. Try adding the content networks with all 3 networks (in separate campaigns). There is always second tier PPC networks, some of which do actually work. Social networks like Facebook and Myspace are another option. Media buys at large ad agencies can add lots of traffic volume as well.
Next up: no profit.
I think another one that could easily have its own post is determining as early as possible whether PPC is financially feasible for the offer.
For example…I spent god knows how many hours making a gorgeous (IMHO) site (it doesn’t get any traffic so I’ll share… http://www.lovecoaches.net) on the Ingenio affiliate program which has a payout of $100/new signup in the categories I was promoting.
They then promised me keyword lists of their top converting keywords (yes I know to take that with a grain of salt). While they didn’t end up providing them, I did end up wasting a ton of money on words I thought would work such as “find a therapist” “how to choose a therapist”, variations of the word Therapist, etc. I also have landing pages with content unique to those.
Decent quality score and ad prices weren’t astronomical, however NOTHING CONVERTED. I then later learned from the merchant that they have an average cost per conversion of around $200-$300, which is fine for them since they make money over time with the customer whereas I get a one-time payout that would have me losing a ton of money at those rates.
I’ve hence stopped promoting the site and focusing on my other profitable one that is now starting to get some BANS competition.
Now, there may have been better ways to promote it, and if any of you have any suggestions I’m all ears…but some things you just need to learn to cut the cord on early.
I agree with you Mike. I would like to know if there is some process to use to determine whether or not an offer is even worth pursuing before putting together a test.
You’ll obviously never get it perfect but even something that was fast and could at least give you a ballpark figure.
One thing I’ll start doing in the future is more research on forums around the particular program. Also, if it is a specific product like Mona Vie or something, and googling it pulls up a ton of PPC affiliate ads, I’ll check those out, see their style and see how consistently I see the same sites popping up. If they show up for a while, they are assumedly somewhat profitable (although not necessarily for those keywords).
Chad, any thoughts on that approach? I think its tough for struggling new affiliates to find programs to sink their time and energy into…how would you go about finding a new program to promote?
Excellent post. There are so many factors that go into making or breaking a campaign you have to keep trying everything.
Mike…. decent site but the MAIN content should have been tagged center div. I got lost in site and could not find the home page. Did you use xsitepro, dreamweaver, or wordpress?
Built from scratch in Dreamweaver. I’m still learning best practices for CSS so I’m sure there’s lots of room for improvement there. Not sure it was the best niche though.
Not sure what you mean by tagging the center div either…can you clarify?
Oh wait, I see what you mean now…
I actually made the decision to put the directory in the center after careful review of their own sites (they own several under different URLs) which I’m sure they’ve tested to death.
To be honest, I probably could have tried switching it up but after I heard what their conversion costs are I gave up to focus on more profitable things.
I’d be happy to sell the site if anybody is interested
Hey guys,
I think the whole problem somehow lies in making a deep research before jumping in the pool.
I, personally, never get into a niche that doesn’t pay off …and doesn’t have potential.
How do you determine when a niche will pay off and has potential?
Good post.It´s dangerous to use PPC if you don´t know exactly what you are doing, you will lose your money.Keyword research and writing blog posts around those keywords works quite well.I use Google´s keyword tool to find the best ones.
Social networks like Facebook and Myspace may bring you some traffic but it’s not what I call “tunneled”, unless you have a specific niche.
[...] 1. Bid prices. Assuming you have a decent keyword set, if you aren?t getting any traffic your bid prices may be too low. This is by far one of the most common problems I see with campaigns. Its very tempting to try to ease into a niche going after cheap clicks, but its also an biggest way to shoot yourself in the foot. You have to bid enough to get the clicks, no matter what that price may be. If the top ads are bidding $1.75 and you start with $ .85, your campaign might be doomed to never get any impressions. Set your bid aggressively - you have to pay to play. Common affiliate marketing problems - low traffic | CDF Networks - Affiliate Marketing Blog [...]
[...] found this article by Chad of CDF Networks who gives some suggestions on how to draw traffic to an affiliate site. I [...]