Frustration with PPC and Making It Work
Over the past few days I had been working on a new site and marketing campaign, which I focused on promoting through PPC. Once I had my idea together I quickly got everything up and running and started testing. Initial numbers showed me that the volume was there, then the next day was the evidence that my idea could be quite profitable. My campaign results from the first five days are shown below.
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These numbers were killer and got me super excited. All through Thanksgiving, Black Friday and the holiday weekend, I was psyched! I was pumping out new landing pages and ad groups to test all different measures. I was extremely excited because the past several months have been a bit slow. Not horribly slow, but more boring than anything else. I have a few big projects and ideas in the work, and I hate the setup or programming jobs… I really like to work on web sites and marketing new ideas I have. To see this one succeed so fast, it was pretty awesome!
It was finally Monday and I was anxiously awaiting to talk with my network ad reps so they could see the numbers. Everyone was thrilled and were so happy with the numbers. Unfortunately I then talked with them again later that night and they were just notified that the ad campaign was actually setup incorrectly on their end. The advertiser wasn’t too happy and they weren’t going to pay for the leads, but the network made good on all commissions owed to the affiliates. The problem was that the tracking pixel was placed on the confirmation page of the first page and not the second. The campaign was pulled and is coming back at the same rate, but with the pixel on the second page… meaning conversions this time around will be much lower. Since I already had my new sites and landing pages in place I was able to jump around and try a few different offers from other networks and see if they convert. Unfortunately none had the same results and were much lower.
Over the past ten years of online marketing I have seen a million different campaigns and tested and tried a million different methods. It’s ones like these that keep you up at night and make you just want to keep working all of your ideas. Then when your massive earnings come to an end, your heart sinks… but then you realize you made it work in the first place and can make it work again. Sure, I was extremely disappointed to hear my campaign wouldn’t be racking up 5,000+ clicks while I slept that night, but now I’m motivated now more than ever to make it work and earn even more!
Ever since I released my "Super Affiliate’s Guide to PPC Marketing" I get new emails daily from blog readers asking "what campaigns to run?", "how do i make this ad campaign profitable?" and so much more. The ones I really appreciate are the ones thanking me for introducing them to this new market and that they are now making money online. The point of this post is not to show you that I can earn upwards of $500 a day from a new ppc campaign, but how rapidly this industry changes, and to make the most of it with your creativity and dedication. PPC IS NOT EASY, DO NOT GET DISCOURAGED! PUT IN THE DEDICATION AND TIME AND YOU WILL MAKE MONEY!
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"With great power comes great responsibility".... my Uncle Ben told me that. Haha, just kidding! I'm Zac Johnson and I've been making money online for over 10 years now. In short, I started making money online while I was in high school... but my passion for marketing and making money goes back way earlier than that. I created ZacJohnson.com to help motivate you to start making money online, and live the life the you always dreamed of.
Another frustration comes from a limited budget, earlier today I set up a killer campaign thanks to my AM Jaeson at neverblue, I went through my daily budget in literally 30 minutes, however, I made a 200% return on my ad expenses, so, it was fine. Hopefully tomorrow it will be just as nice. I think I will give him a call and see if he can bump that offer a little bit for me
nice stats - too bad mine wasnt really like that even thoug I made like 6 campaigns and all was ehh - I even did a facebook campaign CPC campaign and it sucked, nice work - hmmm I must see how you do it……hmmmmmm
I think I finally cracked the combination on the facebook ads. I asked my AM for a list of what is working well. Right now I am getting a ROI at %185. I wish I had more money to put into it and the limit wasnt $250…
These ads can be very tricky, you have to be careful with how you word it and what picture you display. It took about 10 tries before I got one approved. My best advice is to us e the keyword selector to your advantage and narrow down the list as much as possible. I am only targeting about 180K people out of like 20 million but thats fine, quality over quantity, that way your CTR is higher and your CPC will be able to go lower.
Zac,
OK first off, thanks for the info here and the guide.
One question - is it that ppc was hard here or that the tracking pixel was just in the wrong place making your data inaccurate? One of the things I like about PPC is that you can drive traffic right away and start gathering data immediately vs waiting for a site to rank in Google, etc.
Hi Zac,
How do you manage to get such a high click thru with only a avg CPC of only $0.06?
I am also doing a small scale ppc campaign with one of my affiliated program.
Budget is really a problem for me. I can’t really justified spending more when I don’t see the results. On the other hand, spending so little results in a small sample size. I can’t gauge if this program is profitable. Chicken and egg dilemma.
I can’t seem to choose the right program. The normal ones (webhosting, electronics) are so competitive. My average CPC is about $0.70. Not sure if I am doing things wrongly or the program is too competitive.
Enough of my ranting, this is enough for a mini blog post.
Ok first thing I’m kinda of a noob when it comes to ppc. I’ve had some sucess a good few months ago but it seems that was a fluke.
It gives me hope to see you went through so many clicks just to get a few leads. I have a campaign that has a horrible CTR. Gets only a few clicks and only 2 conversions. How the hell do I do volume?
I agree with you, just keep at the ppc sooner or later, after testing diligently will come through with it. Yeah sucks to kill it and then go down
You know I was thinking the other day, you should write a guide up on landing pages. I think my biggest turn off from ppc has been the landing pages, but I really don’t know what they should be like. To me it doesn’t make sense to have a “middle man” page after a PPC click that is just trying to get a user to click again to the actual offer?
I’d be interested if you could shed more light on that.
I’ll see what I can do. I’ve been getting a lot of requests on this.
you always have the cool topics .. how to make money.
I am also getting frustrated with ppc.
That’s happened to me a few times, glad to here they are going to cover the leads for you. It’s the right thing to do since it was their mistake.
Weird.
I started a campaign at hydra yesterday, and literally hours after I launched it, the campaign was paused due to tracking issues on the advertiser end.
I’m getting credited for the leads, though, so I’m thankful for that.
My question is how the hell do you get those kind of impressions at such a low cpc? I’m lucky if i get 5k impressions a DAY with a .20 cpc rate…
Another great post by Zac. Thanks for helping to put it into perspective. Seems one of the big hurdles noobs (who often tend to be broke) is budget and financing their campaigns. Only thing worse than not being able to find a formula that works with affiliate marketing if finding one that works great but not having the budget to really push it for what it is worth lol.
Zac (or anyone else), any suggestions on which ppc engines noobs should concentrate on first? I hear/read that adwords might have the most traffic but with so much competition the cost vs profit margin goes down unless you really know what you are doing. Do you suggest we start with say Yahoo then MSN live then move on to adwords? Or another variation? Or is it better to just go ahead and lose the money while learning with adwords thinking that once you get adwords down you can conquer them all?
Count another vote here for a more in depth breakdown on landing pages ;). Would be nice to know what best to use to make them (just plain small html pages or use some cms?), how much content, if any, to put on them beyond the sales copy, what pages/links are needed to try to make sure you get a good quality score (privacy policy, contact and TOS always a good idea?). Not many affiliates share their landing pages so it would be nice to get the facts from someone we trust…meaning you Zac ;).
Thanks again for another great post! It’s what really sets you apart from the others out there.
I agree with you 100% as you just have to continue to test and try out new things. Luckily it’s not super easy or then everyone would be trying to do it. The challenge is what makes it fun, especially when you succeed.
Great post Zac. There are times that it can get very frustrating, but in the end it will pay off, It just takes time. If it happens to me, I just walk away for a little bit, get refocused and then jump right back in there.
“ppc IS NOT EASY, DO NOT GET DISCOURAGED! PUT IN THE DEDICATION AND TIME AND YOU WILL MAKE MONEY!” ~ Zac Johnson
Greatly said. I think I lot of people went into PPC thinking that they will see the money instantly. I would say that it is like a kind of business model. You need to lose some in order to gain. In term of business thinking, the attractiveness of PPC would in the ROI, which is unbelievably much higher than any conventional business vehicle.
I’m feeling this frustration first hand on my very first campaign. I’m noticing little things here and there are improving things like CTR and quality score, but still not a single conversion
Zac thats a great start with your ppc campaign, although there are roadblocks along the way but reading from your article I bet you can turn it around for the better. Really amazed how you do it. Did you have those Adwords in your PPC campaign?
Wow, that certainly highlights the fact that the ppc industry changes lightning fast…