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Once you have a successful campaign running, you always want to increase the traffic. After you have done all normal methods such as optimization of everything and buying all the traffic you can on every network, then what? It might be time for a little self-competition. This is a fairly advanced technique that works great for expanding the reach of an offer.
Competing with yourself is a way of capturing a larger percentage of the paid traffic for a given search result by having more than one ad for a given search query.
You may have seen someone owning all the spots on Google for a given keyword. They have the exact same ad copy and even destination URL. But that is way too obvious, not very effective, and not self sustaining. The PPC network will catch on and shut you down. You can take a more subtle approach for better and long lasting results.
The approach
The approach is to have the competing ads and landing pages be completely different in every way to the main campaigns. Different ad copy, different domains, different landing pages etc. The only thing that stays the same is the keyword and offer. Someone looking at the search results and even clicking through to the landing pages should have no idea they are owned by the same person. The plus side to this, besides the extra market share you are grabbing, is that the competing campaign is essentially a split test of your main campaign. You can use it as a testbed for new ideas without upsetting the main stable campaign.
Different accounts
It’s debatable whether or not using multiple accounts is allowed with different PPC networks. It might work, and it might not. So if you want to be really sure you won’t be hassled you can follow these steps. You don’t want to sign up for another account with the exact same info as your main account. If you have a secondary credit card and alternate address, use that info.
Different Domains
You want completely different domains to send competing ads to. Ideally, they are totally different sounding than your main domain. Also I would use a different landing page and coding structure from the main campaign.
Different Webhosts
Google has ways of seeing all the domains you own under a given webhosting account. Don’t ask me how, but they do. So if you really want to keep everything separate and not draw attention to yourself, get a new hosting account for your new domain.
Different Campaigns
This is really where self competition comes through. You want to write ads completely different than your main account on your competing account. Play off the other ad. Go opposite of the ad text. Remember you are trying to catch a different customer than would click on your main ad, so get creative. If your main ad is playing to an emotional buying response, try a more analytical stat based selling technique on the competing ad. Capture the right brain and left brain people in the same search result.
If used correctly this technique can add a lot of revenue along with providing you more and more data about your niche. Have fun with it!
Disclaimer: Many PPC networks (like big G) don’t like this technique, so use at your own risk.
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You’re hittin on all cylinders dude…
Chad, that interesting!
Thou i don’t want to risk getting banned from the network and worse Google doing this. Plus, you’re not playing fair to other advertisers. Everyone’s got the right to compete fairly. I’ll rather stick to my $100/day profit then to risk losing that too.
Another hugely eye opening post to me. Are you giving away all your secrets now?
No, I still have a few in my pocket.
surprised to see you post about this even though people do it… it is walking a fine line atleast in G’s eyes….
Agreed, it’s definitely a fine line.
Bastard… haha, you’re starting to give away too much!!!
yes, i think that you could keep this technique to yourself
I agree that you don’t see this type of info posted publicly too often… but it is actually fairly common among PPC super affiliates… you definitely see it in the competitive niches..
- D
Wow, I didn’t realize this was such a big secret in PPC affiliate marketing. I do it all the time to send traffic to multiple related sites when I happen to find cheap keywords. (I guess I’m exploiting cheap keywords rather than expanding the reach on a given offer though.)
It’s just like in the organic listings when you get the 1 and 2 spots for your site, then 3 is a Squidoo lens about your site, 4 is a HubPage, 5 is a Blogger blog about your company, 6 is aboutus.org/yoururl, etc etc. Although that can be a bit too obvious
Oh yeah, I actually saw something like this in action the other day, where a bunch of landing pages were very similar. But that may have been different people copying what they thought was a good landing page from someone else!
Usually it is different people all copying each other. There aren’t too many people doing original thinking in affiliate marketing, at least in the crowded niches.
What I am talking about in this post is having completely different domain and landing sites, so if you saw all the results you would never dream they are related.
…which is an awesome idea! Of course this requires more work, but hey if you want to differentiate yourself you need to put in the time. I know of one affiliate who grosses $200k+ month consistently (all PPC) who is pretty well dominating the sponsored results for his niche… he’s got 3 different domain names out there that I see.. But all his LP’s look almost identical… and I just did an nslookup on the names and they all resolve to the same IP…
He’s asking for trouble!
I could see this being a great way to split test your copy in a way to get better at writing copy, if that makes sense.
Awesome post, Chad!
It takes a good amount of discipline and planning to pull this off safely. You could get a bunch of those pre-paid visas, and register them online to different names/addresses, and get multiple vps accounts at various hosts and setup a private proxy server on them. Register the cards to the general location of the proxy ip that you will use it on, and always use that proxy to log into that specific ppc account. Only issues there is that your cc’s you buy will most likely run in a pretty close range, and the ip you’re surfing on will be owned by a web host. Could be an issue, but considering the other options… seems like the safest way.
Reminds me of the one time I saw a particular fellow dominate the entire page for the ringtone niche - and he was running it all off the same domain, but with typo-graphic error that Google was apparantly too busy to notice. That guy was banned daily, but always back the very next day.
And he was ranked for multiple artistes names - wonder how much bank he must have made then
I’m probably gonna try this myself, but on different accounts, cards, and hosting.
This is walking a very fine line. Maybe just a little too risky for me…