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...).

Labels: adwords, affiliate marketing, ppc

I've spent a whole tonne of money on Adwords before.

For my first few businesss ventures, I tried a few loony projects involving a combination of premium rate phone lines, singing competitions and selling topical mousemats (of which I still have 750 in the attic) which I promoted heavily using Adwords and lost a packet.

Since then I've tried PPC campaigns for affiliate marketing and usually broke even or made a loss. I've tried direct to merchant (with Amazon) and going through landing pages and not really made much headway.

So I'm pleased to be able to able to report that a recent project has worked quite nicely over the course of the last 4 weeks.

I picked a merchant with large catalogue of items within its sector, and then built a site around a niche area within that sector and extracted the relevant items from their product feed. Without wanting to be too cryptic, the items I'm pushing are actually not the items that the merchant would probably most like to promote as they sell other competing items that are worth more to them. But there's a demand for the items I'm promoting and I'm making it easier for people to find them rather than being pushed towards the competing items that the merchant would probably sooner they buy. In doing so, I think I'm kind of solving a problem, in that I'm making i easier for consumers to find a specific range without being sidetracked.

Anyways, to the numbers: Spent a little under £200 in Adwords and have made about £450 in sales (and there's a lengthy cookie so the ROI could be greater yet). I'll be looking to see if I can gradually decrease the cost of my average click in Adwords too.

New Vaio

I'm moderately excited that this is the first blog post I've written from my shiney new Sony Vaio which I took delivery off about an hour ago. I had a couple of laptops stolen from my car car last year, so it's nice to be able to get back to a bit of portable computing though my plan to get a 3g datacard has taken a knock since i just realised the laptop doesn't have a PCMCIA slot!

Labels: adwords, google, ppc

I stopped using Adwords quite a while ago, but recently have been starting to dabble again, partly to make some money and partly because it is actually quite fun.

I picked a merchant where linking direct to the site was allowed and setup some campaigns. I created a tracking URL of my own to receive the click, insert the details into a database and mail me them to me too, before directing the user to intended destination. I like to have stats in real time as far as possible so this seems a nice way to do it, and also it exposes me to the full referral url data which is great for learning about search terms.

One of the thing that's most annoying is of course repeat clickers. I guess the odd repeat click has to be accepted as part of the user behaviour for some indecisive users, but anything over 4 clicks and I get very suspicious.

So what do you when you're getting repeat clicked?

First thing I do is make sure a warning is displayed. This probably doesn't sit will with Google but it's my money going down the drain, so my tracking link counts the clicks from a single IP source in a time span and will display an warning message alerting them to the fact that the repeat clicks have been detected.

Next thing I do is go into Sherlock Holmes mode, and crack open a command box and enter tracert [IP Address]. At the least this will tell you their ISP, but it can also possibly tell you a lot more sometimes revealing the organisation they're from, if they're on a company network.

When enough details have been logged, I pass them onto Adwords Support for them to investigate.

There are some caveats with these methods: Some ISPs, such as AOL, use proxy servers which means that some or all their users may appear to be from the same few IP addresses, so this is a less than perfect method. But when it's your money, doing nothing doesn't seem like an option. So what do you do to deal with competitor click fraud?

Labels: adwords, click fraud, google