Recap of first month trying PPC, need guidance.

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bb_wolfe

bb_wolfe

Medicinal KFC
Jan 1, 2008
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Set a budget for $1000 on March 24th, 2008.

Focused only on Google Adwords and Neverblue campaigns. Ran 3 simultaneous CPM campaigns on Myspace for 1: Stamps.com @ $14.25/lead, 2: Children's place $100 gift card @ $1.25/lead, and 3: eHarmony @ $4.25/lead.

Created 3 campaigns on Adwords, all $.50 CPM, $50 daily limit on each campaign in Google. Created simple landing pages on a domain I already owned. Placed ads on most of the myspace pages, and various youtube spots. All text, no banners.

Spent $150 in the first 8 hours: $1.25 revenue from #2 Children's Place converstion ($1.25/lead). Thought WTF?

Halted campaigns. Read stats. 0.00% CTR. 1.25 million impressions, 44 clicks, one conversion.

Left to buy bottle of scotch and pick up sandwich. Went to bed drunk.

Next day, retargeted my Myspace ads and completely replaced the ad copy. Spent $150 again in first 8-12 hours: made aroudn $30 in revenue, at least one for each campaign. Thought WTF? Again, bought some booze and went to bed.

So after 2 days I spent $300 and 10 hours of my life and earned a considerable amount of nothing.

Paused all campaigns and took a week off.

Came back in week later and put 3 x $25 max/day ($75/day total) daily campaigns at $.25 CPC for each of the banners that Google would take. Got banners from campaign on Neverblue.

Let it sit for 6 days. Thought if I can't get this right, then I need to either hire a mentor or just give the fuck up.

Campaign for Stamps.com had average CPC of $.19 and had 12,000 impressions, 42 clicks. No revenue

Campaign for eHarmony had an average CPC of $.24 and had 9,400 impressions, 13 clicks. No revenue

Campaign for Children's Place had average CPC of $.24 and had 10,200 impressions. 23 clicks. One conversion for $1.25.



Here's the thing: I have the money to use while learning, but there are so many variables I seem to be missing.

What would you guys do, keep pushing campaigns or hire someone who knows what to do and help you get started? I'm kicking myself for not hiring someone for a $1,000 2-3 day training session and get me started right.

I'm just not used to losing. In the past, if I've had a problem with a project, bring in a consultant and make things progress. Fuck, maybe PPC isn't the thing for me.

From 2004 to 2007, I had a website that earned $35/day from adsense. Had I known about affiliate netowrks, I never would havesold the damn thing. Only got $3000 for it too.

Anywho, what would you guys do, just STFU and keep trying or hire a consultant?
 


Myspace is close to the last place I would run any of those 3 offers. You need a general audience offer targeted to the youngish demographic of myspace. None of those sound like a good fit to me, to say the least.
 
on that kind of social networks I would use banners that look like still frames of videos linked to offers like friend finder
 
what you're doing is basically "hoping" that they would like the stuffs that you throw to them and sign up.

that's wrong and not the way to make money. what you ought to do is grab all those peeps that are actually LOOKING FOR those stuffs.

As you can see, people on youtube are there to watch videos and various stuffs, NOT joining some dating site. Although, you could get some good leads if your ads are alongside some videos that show the viewers how to get girls and stuffs.


Forget about "traffic". Traffic doesn't make you money. Leads and sales do. And leads and sales come from "targeted traffic", people who are in need/looking for the stuffs you're promoting.

And actually, your concept of "brute force" is wrong. If you're going "brute force" then you ought to advertise on a wide range of websites. See which traffic from which site converts, which sites don't, cut the losers, keep the winners, and you've got yourself a winning campaign.

But, you are only bidding on the losers, therefore you lose.
 
There is money to be made advertising on social networks but it sure as shit isn't where i'd recommend starting. If you're married to the idea of the content network, fine. But CPM campaigns are not a good idea for newbies, especially on a site that does the kind of volume MySpace does.

Either do a keyword-targeted content network campaign, or do a site targeted one but be a hell of a lot more selective about where you target. I'm sure it occurred to EHarmony and Stamps.com do run their own campaigns on myspace. You could dump flyers out of a helicopter too, but that's not marketing either.
 
Did a new campaign today, $.25 CPM to only women's sites via adwords. Baby sites, pregnancy sites, and mother/preschool sites only. Baby photo contest.

$25 daily limit. 8000 impressions so far at $2.xx, one click.

Will keep trying copy over the next week.

Thank you all for your criticisms. Guess I was too cocky about it the first time around. Will post back the results of this current one.
 
This is an awesome thread BTW. I'm going to echo dogfighter here and suggest you try keyword CPC-based instead of CPM. You may have to bid fairly high to get the initial rush of traffic (someone correct me if I'm wrong) but at least the traffic will be targeted to your offer.
 
You're not really going to find a "consultant" who will tell you what you really want to know. Reason is, they are your competitor. They could run the same campaign and make $1000 in a day long term. Why would they give out their personal method for $1000 when they could make $30K a month if they kept it to their self?

You should research more on PPC and I wouldn't start with CPM. I would start with Adwords and YSM and promote on their search network.

You can find everything you need to know on this site and on blogs by "super affiliates". All the same information is repeated over and over, you can do everything by the book but, eventually you need to learn how to be creative and think outside the box.

You can't just expect to simply start 3 campaigns and throw money at them and expect results. If it was that simple, everybody would be rich from affiliate marketing. It's not that simple, it requires hard work and creativity. Learn all the basics first.
 
goddfadda said:
This is an awesome thread BTW. I'm going to echo dogfighter here and suggest you try keyword CPC-based instead of CPM. You may have to bid fairly high to get the initial rush of traffic (someone correct me if I'm wrong) but at least the traffic will be targeted to your offer.
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Interesting. I saw in another thread that someone bid mid dollar (.30 to .70 or so), then bumped it to $1.85, and finally lowered it to $.07.

Is that normal? If I went a week paying $1.85, does it really keep up the traffic, or were his keywords just that good?

I'll start a CPC campaign using the same ads, where do you think I should start price wise for a baby photo contest, I was thinking $.20.
 
Why are you doing CPM and not CPC? and you're using the content network right? that converts a lot worse ... because people aren't searching for those things you're interrupting them to try and sell them something.....

just saying.
 
bb_wolfe said:
Interesting. I saw in another thread that someone bid mid dollar (.30 to .70 or so), then bumped it to $1.85, and finally lowered it to $.07.

Is that normal? If I went a week paying $1.85, does it really keep up the traffic, or were his keywords just that good?

I'll start a CPC campaign using the same ads, where do you think I should start price wise for a baby photo contest, I was thinking $.20.
Click to expand...


You're still not listening. It's not as simple as throwing money at your offers and expecting a return. Do you have a landing page? Do you know what a landing page is? Are you linking directly to the offer?

This isn't gambling, you can't just throw money and expect a return. This is marketing you have to understand how marketing works. Understand your target audience, there's much more involved than what your bids should be.
 
Your first mistake was puting CPM ads on myspace and youtube, people there aren't looking to signup for offers or buy stuff they are there to either score tonight or beat their junk to cam whores. Not exactly the best demographics.
 
MentalyDisturbd said:
You're still not listening. It's not as simple as throwing money at your offers and expecting a return. Do you have a landing page? Do you know what a landing page is? Are you linking directly to the offer?

This isn't gambling, you can't just throw money and expect a return. This is marketing you have to understand how marketing works. Understand your target audience, there's much more involved than what your bids should be.
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I understand what you're saying. (We posted our posts at the exact same time above.)

I also understand your view on consultants, I partially agree but also see some differentiation in the situation. Not really relevant to me though, but the world I come from is consultants at $X,xxx a week produce results of $XX,xxx a week.


This is affiliate world new to me and I'm reading through posts, yours included, and learning a shitload. For what it's worth, I've spent the last 4 years whoring myself out to SOX implementations and penetration testing/PCI scanning at $XX,xxx a week. Now that my boys are in preschool, I need something that keeps me close to home and not in the air. Seriously, if you run into me at an affiliate summit, remind me of this thread and insist that I buy the next 4 rounds at the bar. I do appreciate your input.

I do have some landing pages, 3 to be exact. Two are OK (very similar to the email HTML NB uses) and one admittedly sucks. I'm considering buying a few from teh folks on this board. I've seen them run from only $50 for a single landing page to Seocracy's DataPresser product to build a conglomerate of pages.

Currently, the PPC goes to landing page, landing page goes to offer. Do I dare post the page here?
 
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ayzo said:
Your first mistake was puting CPM ads on myspace and youtube, people there aren't looking to signup for offers or buy stuff they are there to either score tonight or beat their junk to cam whores. Not exactly the best demographics.
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Duly noted and I agree. Dumb fucking move on my part.
Here are my current CPM stats for a targeted baby photo contest ad on only women's/baby sites:

Ad Group Name Status Max CPM Clicks Impr. CTR Avg. CPM Cost
Test .25 CPM Active $0.25 1 17,023 0.00% $0.25 $4.26
 
I'm glad you posted this, took guts, because 3 months from now if your still in the ppc game you'll think "what a fucking newbie idiot i was".
 
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