I was looking at the stats yesterday for the last year of a successful campaign I have been running. I ran an average yearly eCPC and compared it to the affiliate network average. I was surprised to see my average was 83.9% higher. So how am I doing so much better than others running the same offer? Here are some reasons its going so well, and some tips that can help you outperform the crowd as well.
1. I have optimized the campaign to the highest degree. 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. This is nothing but hard work and time investment.
2. I know the niche inside and out. I researched everything there is to know about the industry to a level that a wall street analyst would. I checked out consumer demographics, the major players in the industry, what moves the market for the products and services, etc. Then I applied all that knowledge back into step #1.
3. I researched the trends. I know what days of the week convert, what months are hot, and when things are slow. This information is can be utilized to forecast spending trends and optimize the campaign even more.
4. Success breeds success. Good campaigns take on a momentum of their own. The more money you make, the higher your payouts, the better terms you get, which lead to more money. It’s like a feedback loop that keeps building and building.
I think it all boils down to knowing your niche better than your competitor and just outworking everyone else. If you are willing to do that, you can easily outperform the averages by a large margin too.
is a nice feeling compete with big companies.
Damn, that’s blowing them out of the water. i suspect the higher payouts than average really helps this statistic.
Just curious, when you talk about the days of the week – are you often using the AdWords timing function? Meaning you set a campaign to run just from 2PM to 8PM? (e.g.)
In my case I see a lot of clicks happening in the morning, probably people from work click my ads and maybe buy directly at the merchant from their home pc – because the morning traffic converts really bad.
You think it harms the QS if you don’t show your ads all day, just on specific timeframes?
Regards,
Andreas
I am using dayparting more and more. I don’t generally turn off ads ever, I just bump up bids on better converting times.
Does this statistic really say much though? For example if you are running a direct link campaign EPC will be much lower then if you have pages of content pre qualifying the user. I have had campaigns in the same niche at .30 epc that are more profitable then campaigns at 1.5epc.
Right, I was just assuming all things being equal – comparing my stats against the network average. I do know that almost no one is direct linking this niche.
Classic example of a pro-marketer…
The real reason you blew past the average eCPC is that you are sending targeted traffic. The average eCPC is calculated across all the affiliates.
Affiliates that send crap traffic, have organic links that are being clicked by search engine robots, and PPC direct linkers always bring down the eCPC.
Neil hit the head when he mentioned that you are probably pre-qualifying the offer with a landing page. Are you calculating your eCPC based on your PPC and conversion traffic, or simply using the eCPC provided from the affiliate network?
I’d be surprised if anyone can make any money via PPC if they earn the average eCPC.
I had my AM pull the average over the same time frame for just the search segment for comparison. It may be off due to factors that you mention, but its still a good rough average.
Hi Chad,
Relating to optimisation to the highest degree: a campaign probably has many ad groups, and each ad group probably has at least 2 ads. And what if you have so many campaigns running? You’d have so many ads to check. Then split-testing them becomes extremely tedious and may be close to impossible. Do you do it manually with all your ads, or do you have some sort of automation? If yes, could you give us more details about the tool(s) you use please?
Thanks!
When are you going to be posting that hot tip? I’m checking your blog every 30 minutes to see if you have posted it yet, I am dying over here!
That’s coming tomorrow morning!
Awesome! I have learned tons from your blog. I don’t even want to say how much I’m making from the tips you give, haha. I like to remain anonymous, but seriously thank you for your blog, it’s a HUGE “think out of the box” eye opener for me. I already think outside of the box, but you have challenged me to think and focus on getting traffic from many alternate ways.
Not sure if all your readers can read “between the lines”, but I can. Every piece of info you blog about I basically try to think as to how can I make my campaigns more profitable from that blog post etc.
Anyways I’m rambling now, but you’re the MAN.
Thanks alot for that. It’s nice to know someone is getting the more subtle hints.
I’m going to call you Chad “Mr. eCPC” Frederiksen from now on, good work dude!