My latest PPC adventure started with almost instant success. Then I blogged last week about my concerns over how things were going when the month started off with a very prolonged dry spell. My worries coincided with a makeover on the merchant site which did spook me into considering calling it a day and I did actually pause my Adwords campaign for a few hours. I looked to the comment section for advice on how best to go forward.

Duncan Popham wrote:

Hold your nerve! The data isn't in anyway big enough to draw conclusions

KirstyM said:

I'd say hold on... if its been working before it will work again.

JC replied:

it looks like you should give it a little while longer

The advice of the respondants was sound, and after I reactived my campaign a few more sales came through at the end of last week and more over the weekend which put me back in profit.

Not the level of profit I was seeing last month, but certainly enough to reassure me that the program is at least tracking OK and it's taught me not to pick out arbitary time periods like 10 days here and there to prove or disprove success, but to let this carry on for the rest of the month at least and take a more considered view of how things have done. I would normally have been more patient but I think it was the fact the merchant had a new site which made me nervous as to well it was working.

So I'd like to thank those who replied with their advice and I'll post up the figures at the end of the month to show how it did.

Labels: ppc

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

DGM are running an interesting promotion on behalf of their client, Easyspace. The four affiliates who drive the most validated sales to the client in March will win the right to be in a closed group of PPC brand name bidders from April 1st onwards. Winners will also be allowed to use the Easyspace domain names in their PPC ads.

Personally it's of no direct interest to me, but sounds like an intriguing promotion for those interested in taking part.

I know that closed groups aren't popular in some quarters and Fraser did that interesting post questioning the opacity of these things and whether corruption might exist in determining who gets exclusivity, so throwing the rights open to all in a competition sounds kind of cool.

I suppose this does assume that the affiliates who get the most sales will be PPCers anyway, because if you topped the table of validated sales through your web content/seo channels, I guess you might not be interested in PPC brand bidding exclusivity.

Labels: affiliate marketing, dgm, ppc