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3 Critical Keys For A Profitable PPC to CPA Campaign
January 28th, 2007
I’ve done my fair share of CPA in the past, but I’ve never done it with paid (PPC) traffic. I have a friend who’s making a killing of PPC to simple CPA offers, so I decided to test the waters:
I asked me AM at CPAE (Brandon, who’s awesome), to get me a list of the top 15 email/zip CPA offers by EPC. I figure, if something is converting for everyone else, then it will for me as well. After doing a little research, I picked the one I was going to try first. It was in the top 3 offers, and had a killer EPC, so I figured it was a guaranteed hit. I determined 3 steps in the process of making the conversion.
1. Getting the visitor to my site.
I chose about 5 very specific, and highly targeted keywords for the offer. This part was golden, I was using AdWords, and I had a 6% CTR to my site. This was very good. I ran 3 ads to test the various CTR’s, and the highest one looked a lot like this:
Widget Niche Products
Reviews and info on Blue Widget
Free Blue Widget Coupon
www.[B]widgetsource.com[/B]
The Widget is the brand name, and niche is, well, the niche it’s in, i.e. gardening, sewing, etc. Blue Widget is one specific product of the brand. So, this ad format works very well. I bolded the terms that would show up bolded when a visitor is searching for that term.
2. Getting the visitor to the CPA offer
I’m not going to show my site/template, but it was basically just an edited free CSS template. It got the job done. I had about 3 pages, each with a 200+ word article/content on them, some pictures of the product, and about 3 different links on each page, H1, linking to the offer. I got between 40-50% of my visitors to click this and get to the actual page. Here’s what the links looked like:
Free Blue Widget! Enter Email To Get Your Coupon
And other very close variations of that. So #2 also was golden, which leads me to the third, final, and most important part of an effective and profitable CPA Campaign.
3. Getting the visitor to sign up and convert into a lead.
Of the 40-50% of my total visitors getting to the actual offer, only about 10% converted. That’s just straight up pathetic. I knew my first two “gateways” if you will, were doing great, but for some reason, the visitors just weren’t converting.
This is the last step in the chain of converting a visitor into a lead, however it is the first step that should be researched. After setting this all up, and losing money (not much, but it’s definitely worth the learning I gained from it), I went back and found out why the visitors weren’t converting.
- The CPA offer was over 2 months old, and according to my AM, had been pushed very heavily since it’s institution.
- On Google, about 40%-60% of the AdWords links on the SERP’s were to other sites like mine, pushing the same CPA offer.
So the offer was old, and already saturated on AdWords.
If I had researched this final step, looked into the age and saturation of this campaign, I would have known right off the bat that it wouldn’t work.
This doesn’t always hold true, but in general, I’d highly recommend making sure you can convert on all 3 of these key steps. If you do, you’ll have a money maker.
Josh
