Friday, May 11, 2007
PPC Success Turns To Dust: What now?
Last month I wrote about the success I was having with a PPC campaign. The return on investment was healthy and everything seemed great - I was at last tasting PPC success.
And then something changed.
All of a sudden, I was just was not seeing the conversions anymore. I noticed that the merchant had made substantial changes to their site. I contacted the affiliate manager and the account manager at the network to see if other affiliates were experiencing any drop in conversions. The account manager at the network didn't reply (don't you love that?). The affiliate manager at the merchant was more responsive and said he was about to engage in some split testing to see which pages worked best.
His results are in and it turns out the new pages perform "well" and in fact, marginally better than the old style.
Which leaves me at a loss to work out why things have taken a nosedive for me. Consider this:
May 1 - May 10
216 click throughs (to the merchant site from mine), 1 sale
April 21 - April 30
177 click throughs, 4 sales
April 11 - April 20
198 click throughs, 4 sales
Now maybe these samples aren't big enough to draw any firm conclusions from. Maybe I need to hold my nerve and hope things come good. But I've gone from a healthy profit last month to only recouping 50% of my ad spend so far this month. Ordinarily I'd say, ok wait and see, a few more sales would change it all back round, but looking at the past 10 days in the context of the previous 20 to that, makes me nervous about how this is going.
So... what do you think, dear reader? Hang tight and see what happens? Call it a day? Switch to another merchant and see how they fare (although this one has a great CPA at the moment which I'd hate missing out on...).
And then something changed.
All of a sudden, I was just was not seeing the conversions anymore. I noticed that the merchant had made substantial changes to their site. I contacted the affiliate manager and the account manager at the network to see if other affiliates were experiencing any drop in conversions. The account manager at the network didn't reply (don't you love that?). The affiliate manager at the merchant was more responsive and said he was about to engage in some split testing to see which pages worked best.
His results are in and it turns out the new pages perform "well" and in fact, marginally better than the old style.
Which leaves me at a loss to work out why things have taken a nosedive for me. Consider this:
May 1 - May 10
216 click throughs (to the merchant site from mine), 1 sale
April 21 - April 30
177 click throughs, 4 sales
April 11 - April 20
198 click throughs, 4 sales
Now maybe these samples aren't big enough to draw any firm conclusions from. Maybe I need to hold my nerve and hope things come good. But I've gone from a healthy profit last month to only recouping 50% of my ad spend so far this month. Ordinarily I'd say, ok wait and see, a few more sales would change it all back round, but looking at the past 10 days in the context of the previous 20 to that, makes me nervous about how this is going.
So... what do you think, dear reader? Hang tight and see what happens? Call it a day? Switch to another merchant and see how they fare (although this one has a great CPA at the moment which I'd hate missing out on...).
Labels: adwords, affiliate marketing, ppc
Permalink // posted by Rob @ 12:31 PM 
Comments:
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Hold your nerve! The data isn't in anyway big enough to draw conclusions, it may well be that your earlier successes were the misnomers or the other way round, either way if the investment thus far is more or less equal to return - keep plugging for another two weeks of data. Then refine what you've got.
I'd say hold on... if its been working before it will work again.
To make sure nothing's amiss elsewhere you might want to ask the merchant to run a few small test sales through your affiliate links to make sure the new site design hasn't caused any tracking issues. I've had experiences where changes to a merchants site has resulted in intermittent tracking issues. Always worth the ask if the managers being responsive!
To make sure nothing's amiss elsewhere you might want to ask the merchant to run a few small test sales through your affiliate links to make sure the new site design hasn't caused any tracking issues. I've had experiences where changes to a merchants site has resulted in intermittent tracking issues. Always worth the ask if the managers being responsive!
Thanks for the comments guys.
I must admit I paused my ppc campaign yesterday morning but I saw Duncan's comment and knew he was right. So restarted it and have since had another sale which puts a better reflection on things.
Thanks Kirsty for the encouragement and suggestion.
David - hopefully that day won't be too far away, eh!
I must admit I paused my ppc campaign yesterday morning but I saw Duncan's comment and knew he was right. So restarted it and have since had another sale which puts a better reflection on things.
Thanks Kirsty for the encouragement and suggestion.
David - hopefully that day won't be too far away, eh!
Hi Rob,
Normally on a new PPC campaign I'll give the merchant about 100 clicks and see how much I make/lose before I make the decision to kill the PPC or not. Not an exact science I know !
As you've had sales (and just bagged another I see) it looks like you should give it a little while longer.
Others: (1) Make sure the merchant hasn't switched to google checkout.(2) Is a competing merchant offering the product on better terms?
Are your ads showing on googles'content network? If so, either perhaps use lower bids or switch content off all together - content network traffic tends not to convert as well for me at least (says a lot for us publishers earning adsense revenue!!)
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Normally on a new PPC campaign I'll give the merchant about 100 clicks and see how much I make/lose before I make the decision to kill the PPC or not. Not an exact science I know !
As you've had sales (and just bagged another I see) it looks like you should give it a little while longer.
Others: (1) Make sure the merchant hasn't switched to google checkout.(2) Is a competing merchant offering the product on better terms?
Are your ads showing on googles'content network? If so, either perhaps use lower bids or switch content off all together - content network traffic tends not to convert as well for me at least (says a lot for us publishers earning adsense revenue!!)
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