Tagged - ppc

The Most Important Variable in AdWords: QS

Friday, September 25th, 2009

Okay, so you start a campaign and you get a 3/10 QS. Can you get it to go higher? You bet. How? Easy, just create 3-5 different text ads and find the one with the highest CTR and delete the rest. I do this all the time anyway, even when I start out with a high QS. Sometimes, Google doesn’t like my LP or something and I’m slapped at 3/10 before I even start.

What I do when I’m sitting at 3/10 QS is split test my3-5 text ads and work on the LP to maximize CTR on it. I spend something like $32 on the campaign for 32 clicks. Not a good deal, but the next day I deactivate poor performing ads and keep the one with the highest CTR and usually at that point, my keywords are sitting at 7/10 QS. At that point I can sometimes lower the bid all the way from $1 to $.10.

QS can REALLY affect your ROI. The lesson here is just to ALWAYS split test text ads and get a high CTR going on, because even if you start out with a high QS, if you don’t split test and get a high CTR your QS will drop. CTR IS the most important factor. I rarely pay attention to anything else. Then you optimize the LP for CTR. (To the offer)

Just a bit of AdWords advice.

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InfoLinks Review

Friday, April 24th, 2009

So, InfoLinks has been pestering me for a review. Not really, it’s just some contest for a Wii. I don’t want a Wii. I’ll give them one anyway, though I’m not entering this in their contest. In short: If you don’t have a boatload of traffic, don’t bother with them. They have a minimum payout of $100. I guess that isn’t too bad. However, most of the clicks I get are $.01 clicks. Great. I guess I could write articles specifically for InfoLinks, trying to target higher value keywords but really I’m not going to.

I have gotten about 60 clicks, totaling $2.26 or so. Yea, I’m so close to the $100 they want, I can just feel the money  pouring in. Not really complaining, but I think that Adsense or similar would bring in a lot more. (I don’t have Adsense up because I think Entrecard violates their ToS)

I’m still going to keep InfoLinks up, just to see if I ever hit that $100 mark some day.

Anyway, if you can tell I’m not all that impressed with InfoLinks, and if I was rating it out of 10 I would give it about a 6/10.

Questions they wanted me to answer..

  1. When did you join Infolinks?

    2. March 20th.

  2. How did you hear about Infolinks?

    3. A blog.

  3. How did you integrate Infolinks? Was it easy or difficult?

    4. Took about 5 seconds editing the header.php.

  4. Did you have to change your website to use Infolinks?

    5. No.

  5. Are you happy with Infolinks earnings?

    6. Not really.

  6. If you worked with in-text before, how would you compare Infolinks and your previous provider?

    7. Haven’t had in text advertising before. I’m sure Kontera or similar would pay the same low amount.

  7. Did you get payments on time?

    8. I have not hit $100 :)

  8. Is the Infolinks support responsive?

    9. Never contacted them, didn’t need to.

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Clickbank, ClickBooth, and Commission Junction Review: CPA instead of PPC

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

CPA: Cost per action.

PPC: Pay per click.

InfoLinks

You may notice the green highlighted text, this is InfoLinks in action. This is PPC. I have made less than $2 since I started it, from about 40 clicks. Not very good. On top of that, the minimum cash out is $100.

Commission Junction Experience

The majority of my ads are run by Commission Junction, mostly because I was able to get accepted into this program right away. I’ve been with Commission Junction for a year or so and I have made decent money by running Google Adwords campaigns with their offers. I just recently started to use them for site based advertising. They have many banners and links to choose from. Whenever I write a post that relates to a certain product I will post the banner/image. I have already made a small amount from Commission Junction that by far exceeds my total made from PPC.

It seems to me that with my current traffic, CPA is a better advertising method. This means that if a user clicks through my link, and buys something or participates in a trial I get a small commission from it. Nothing extremely large, but one completion can be up to $20 or more. All you need is 1 person to go through with it.

Unfortunately I need $100 to cash out, but I feel I will get to $100 far sooner than my PPC campaign, which is going basically nowhere. If I can’t get to $100 quick enough though just on site advertising I’ll start some adwords campaigns again.

ClickBank

Basically the same thing as Commission Junction, but I did not see any easy to use images and html code like Commission Junction. I have not used them yet. There was no real screening process.

I did notice a lot of  “scammish” products on ClickBank that I would never promote.

ClickBooth

For whatever reason, they have NOT told me why, but I was denied for this program. My best guess is that they do not want anything to do with Entrecard or other traffic generating programs. That or my site is simply not high traffic enough for them. Their denied message is vague at best.

I regret to inform you that we have denied your publisher application to
participate in the ClickBooth Network.
We typically deny applications because we do not feel your site
complements our offers. According to our program Terms & Conditions, we
reserve the right to deny participation for any reason. If you believe you
have been wrongfully denied participation, you are encouraged to write
back with your explanation.

No big deal. I don’t expect to get accepted into the larger CPA programs anyway since I don’t have a 10K unique/day site. I did e-mail them and ask for them to be more specific, I’ll see if they write back.

I’m going to be mixing up my ads, to see if I can indeed make over $10/month, because really I just want to pay for my hosting and maybe get a little side income :) Making $10 a month is a bit harder than it looks, or maybe it’s my niche not clicking links or buying products.

Updated: I was accepted into clickbooth, and if you want to sign up (and don’t mind referral links :) ) check them out here.

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