Using PPC for Affiliate Offers

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computerblue

computerblue

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Feb 13, 2007
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Ok, I've been trying out affiliate offers for a little while now, and to be honest I have no idea how you guys do it. Either because I am a douche or you are full of shit.

I have had a retail site for 2 years, and was / am making 20k a month, the business model makes sense to me, advertise, look at click-thru rate make a profit, cut out keywords that don't convert.

So I start reading about affiliate marketing, and I'm like fuck yeah: no customer service, no dealing with returns, no shipping, no talking to customers, just collect a check that's great!

well I tried a few to test the market put up a simple site, did some ppc, tried to figure the highest I could bid, remove shitty keywords, let the money flow.

Here's the problem with affiliate marketing from what I have been experiencing. you are always competing against the advertiser who gets 2x the margin on the product than you do. so lets say you promote online education. you are competing against devry, phoenix and all the rest. they'll pay you like 20% of the gross which is probably their conversion cost. So they are paying you $20 on a $100 sale (of which lets assume $50 is gross margin), and make you figure out how to get that same sale for $10 and you make a glorious $10.

So my question is, many of you are doing this successfully, am I wrong? I mean the way I see it, ppc is a tough thing to do, a couple successful strategies would be:

1. just do SEO;
2. find some shitty keywords that are semi-related and crucify the non-converting ones; or
3. just bid at the bottom of the page on competitive terms. Where your traffic will most likely be pretty low anyway.

Any thoughts?
 


computerblue said:
Either because I am a douche or you are full of shit.
Click to expand...

the former :)

computerblue said:
Here's the problem with affiliate marketing from what I have been experiencing. you are always competing against the advertiser who gets 2x the margin on the product than you do. so lets say you promote online education. you are competing against devry, phoenix and all the rest. they'll pay you like 20% of the gross which is probably their conversion cost. So they are paying you $20 on a $100 sale (of which lets assume $50 is gross margin), and make you figure out how to get that same sale for $10 and you make a glorious $10.
Click to expand...

Yes, but here is what your overlooking.
1.Devry and Phoenix probably know very little about PPC advertising. They are bidding on the obvious keywords, and some semi-obvious keywords. You gotta go very longtail and pick up on what they missed out on.

2. ok, so some big companies actually have vast PPC campaigns that cover a lot of niches and they pick up even long tail keywords. Most of those companies have ads in the top 1-3 spots, so they are likely paying a lot more than you would be in the 15th spot (although not always true b/c they may have good quality score and paying low CPC) so while they may have a larger margin than you, they are possibly paying more per click and getting a ton of ppl clicking just b/c they are the first result. If you are in the 15th spot and have a clever ad that prequalifies people, you will get less overall clicks, but you will be paying less per click and you will get more qualified clicks.

(You would be surprised at how lazy/ cheap some companies are when it comes to PPC. I work for a huge Advertising, Webdesign, Promotions agency in chicago and a client of ours sent over a PPC keyword list that iCrossing put together for them. And it was such a joke of a campaign that it was just gonna waste their money. We brought it up to them but they didn't wanna pay us to really think it out so they just went with it)

3. most of the big companies do not have very targeted landing pages. They have big budgets and they just send lots of people to their homepage. Or maybe a general splash page. But if you can create specific LP's that target each ad group, you will get much higher conversion.

So all in all if you get cheaper, more targeted clicks, and a better converting page, you can easily do PPC and make a profit and not worry about the big companies. You may be doing less volume of clicks, but the idea is that they convert way better.

(big company get $50 on a lead they generate and you get just $10, but they have to spend $10 in clicks to have one lead convert, while you spend $1.50 per $10 conversion)
 
Good advice there.

Also; don't be afraid to try out the content network on Google. Many people shy away from it and say it doesn't convert, but it can actually do really well if you play your cards right. Again - go for phrase and match search and consider placement targeting where you can pick the sites where you want your ads to show. Do some research on sites or forums that would have the type of visitors you are interested in attracting. You can also test bidding per CPM instead of the CPC model. :)

SEO will take you much longer time (if ever) to reach the same results as you can achieve with a good PPC campaign. But it doesn't hurt to still SEO optimize your landing pages as well.
 
Great input. One thing I'd say is that you may want to optimize your conversions before expanding into the content network. Once your conversions are maximized (careful tweaking for us has resulted in > 20% conversions) then you can also expand into other networks like MSN, Yahoo, MIVA, Bidvertiser, 7search, etc. where you'll pay less per click.
 
sure, good advice all around. Thanks!

I agree with you on the point that we can get huge gains from high quality pages / copy. I have one term that I have 2 competing sites on the same term. One site has been advertising that term for 2 years, the other is new. I am bidding 20% higher with the new site and still in a lower position. So yeah, that is definitely a great way to do things.

Additionally, landing pages can really boost conversions, and I admittedly have not been technical enough to test them the way I should. Every time I try to install website optimizer I always screw it up, but simple A/B testing through 2 different ads can work well too.


I think people have been (for the most part) not sending traffic to home pages, maybe 2 years ago, but I think people are a bit more in tune now. So here I go again, trying more campaigns and testing. I have a new one that I am working on so we'll see I'll give it a couple weeks, and hopefully don't lose my ass.
 
computerblue said:
so we'll see I'll give it a couple weeks, and hopefully don't lose my ass.
Click to expand...

Also, start small. Maybe focus on one campaign instead of trying to spread all your time, effort and money over multiple offers.

I made that mistake at first. I was trying to test 5 offers at once and i ended up not being able to properly focus on any one of them. So i took a step back, slowed down, and started with just one offer and put lots of time to it. Now it's performing quite well and i'm moving on to my next offer and starting to make progress there too.

go slow...
 
rgordon is right...start slow...works great in a number of situations.

The point made earlier regarding these companies not having a clue about ppc is true. You can get clicks off 2nd and 3rd page submissions with shock ads.

ie:
Still Flipping Burgers Douchebag?
Let Us Get Your Head Outta The Toilet
Even With Your Rotten Breath
hxxp://theshortbus/CanIRide

slow, test, rewrite

By the way, i went the retail route when I started, and the customer care was a pain in the ass....so good luck getting away from that shit!
 
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