PPC marketing for affiliates

How to Lose Your *** in PPC Marketing (and Get it Back)

PPC (Pay Per Click) Marketing is a very popular way to get traffic to the target site. For the most part it refers to ads run on one of the search engines (most people thing Google for this) which appear along side the main search results. 

As an affiliate we can take advantage of this, especially for sites which don’t tend to show up in the regular search results, such as sales letters or shopping site pages. However, PPC Marketing has a few traps that will suck your wallet dry.

First, I’m going to assume you know what Google’s Adwords program is, even if you don’t have an account. MSN and Yahoo and others have similar programs, some engines are entirely PPC.

1) Every single click on your ad costs you money. If you’re paying 5 cents per click that’s ok, but if you’re paying $5 a click you’d better be pretty careful.

It’s entirely possible to pay a buck or two a click, on a popular keyword, and spend hundreds of dollars a day. Can you afford that? How about at $5 a click? Anything Real Estate or Mortgage related will run you at least that much. Same for legal issue, such as divorce.

2) Not all keywords are created equal. If you’re bidding on a keyword such as “dogs” you’re gong to spend a lot of cash on pricey clicks and you’ll get very little back for it, even if you have one killer dog site.

If you bid on something like “rottweiler hepatic dysfunction” (a real phrase, really searched for) you’re going to have very little PPC competition, fairly low bid prices, much lower traffic, and a far higher traffic to conversion ration. Now if you just happened to have a ebook or email list related to that topic you might do ok.

3) Hot ads, lousy sales pages. One of the things that makes PPC marketing for Affiliates tough is when the merchant’s sales page is bad. The affiliate comes up with a hot PPC ad, maybe getting 4% clickthrough or better, and the traffic doesn’t convert.

You spend all your time tweaking the ad, raising that clickthrough rate, and then realize you’ve sent 1000 clicks and made two sales. For $4.95 each. $1 total commission.

Ouch.

So Ok, you’re in the Affiliate PPC Marketing game and you’d like to know how not to have your wallet sucked dry. The one word answer is lots of testing. Another word is research.

Don’t bid on any keyword or phrase that’s one or two words. Never. Try to bid only on longer phrases, trademarks, brand names, etc. Look for phrases that indicate someone wants info and/or to buy something. Use the phrase match and exact match options for most of your bidding.

Keep your ad groups small and tightly related. Don’t make an ad for “rottweiler hepatic dysfunction” and include keywords related to poodle training in the same ad group.

Learn how to make good landing pages. A person goes to Google, clicks your ad, then lands on your page, then clicks through to the merchant. This way you can do a nice pre-sell, so that it matters less if the merchant page sucks. You might also be able to collect names for your mailing list. The emails you send to that list might feature the merchant and related merchants.

Keep a close eye on sales and click costs. Some merchants have a system set up where you can put a separate tag on each ad (and sometimes each keyword.) Clickbank.com and cj.com are two of these. You may find that one or two keywords, which don’t get the most clicks, turn in the most profit.

If you’re building a list you can get away with click costs that are higher than your immediate sales, because, if you have a good set of emails, you’ll make a far greater profit through your list and have long term people who buy repeatedly. But not if you have lousy emails.

So what’s the key? Testing, tweaking, more testing, research, still more testing. You’ll probably want to pick up an Adwords book. Here are some search engine tips that’ll be useful for making landing pages, but you’ll want to to more research in how to build killer landing pages.

Keep it up, pay attention, and you might just find your wallet getting a lot fatter. Not a bad position to be in, hmmm?

Dwarves and Gnomes don’t much care about PPC advertising for affiliates or any other critter. Heck, they don’t even know what a computer is. But they do like to eat, and eat well. In fact, they get many of their dishes and recipes from the World of Warcraft Cookbook. Now there’s something a Dwarf can get into!