The Super Affiliate’s Guide to PPC Marketing

There are many ebooks out there that promise you riches for the low price of $97 (but only if you act within the first 24 hours!)… but in the end they are usually nothing more than broken promises, outdated strategies, or just an overall waste of time. I took the time to create this guide because I want others to learn how to make money online, without having to weed their way through expensive ebooks and other programs which pass them further along the path of shelling out more money. In this walk through I will show you how and where to find offers to promote, how to setup a new Google Adwords campaign, and at the end I give you my GOLDEN TIPS to help make your PPC Marketing Succeed. Though this is a long post, this is only my first chapter of many, which will be included in the master “The Super Affiliate’s Guide to PPC Marketing” when I feel it is complete. Feel free to post any questions or comments and I will get to them in the next chapter. (UPDATE: Promote your ppc campaigns through MSN AdCenter & Receive $75 in Free Clicks. Click here for my latest chapter in the Super Affiliate’s Guide to PPC Marketing.)

1.) Where to Find an Offers
One of the most important factors in making money with PPC Marketing is utilizing a high quality offer which will effectively bring in sales. I recommend using NeverBlueAds to search through a large amount of high paying offers that you can promote through PPC. In this guide (demonstration), I will use their network and one of their offers to walk you through the process. (If you are not already a NeverBlueAds affiliate, you can click here to signup and your account should be approved quickly.)
- Apply to NeverBlueAds
- I also recommend running PPC campaigns through PeerFly.

2.) Setup a Google Adwords account
If you don’t already have a Google Adwords account, you will need to signup for one now. Through Google Adwords, you will setup and track all of your pay per click campaigns. In addition to Google, I also recommend using MSN and Yahoo. However, this guide is based on the Google Adwords method.

3.) Selecting Your Offer to Promote
Once you are a member of NeverBlueAds, you can log into their system. On the main login page you will see a “search box” and you will also see a field for “Top Ten Search Campaigns”. If you want to try running an offer that others are already doing well with, you can simply grab one of the top ten offers listed, or you can search and find a campaign on your own. One benefit to finding an offer other than one listed in the “top ten” is that you will have less competition and saturation. Lately I have preferred working with higher end CPA offers, this way I can spend more on lower click amounts to test the campaign (example: 1000 clicks @ .05 = $50. If a campaign is paying $50 per lead, that allows me to test with a “1000 clicks to 1 lead ratio”, before losing any money. 1000 clicks at .05 will not be easy to obtain on most high paying offers and volume may be slow, but it’s still profit. Set this same method up for 10 campaigns and you are earning at a faster rate.)

For this PPC Guide, I will use the “Amazon Weight Loss” offer on NeverBlueAds. The offer currently pays a $32 commission and is ranked 5/5 for Network Earnings. I have not personally tested or run this offer, this is just for the walkthrough.

4.) Setting up your PPC Campaign
Once logged into your Google Adwords account.
A:) Go to Create a New Campaign, and click “Keyword Targeted”

B:) On the next page you will setup your “Campaign Name” and “AdGroup“. The “Campaign Name” of course should be the same as the offer name you are promoting. You can setup multiple “AdGroups” for a campaign. AdGroups are basically the different sets of keywords that you want to promote. To start out I would stay with ONE AdGroup. (On this same page you can also target by “Language” and “Country“. We won’t change these fields)

C:) The next page goes into more detail on “Country” tracking. We will stick with United States targeting.

D:) On the “Create Ad” page, you will write up your ad copy that people will see when they use Google Search or see your ad on a site using Google Adsense. The mock write up I did for the “Amazon Weight Loss” campaign is shown below.

E:) After writing up your ad copy, you will be sent to the “Choose Keywords” page. From here you will decide on all the traffic keywords that will target your ad to appear. Your keywords will greatly effect your traffic, conversions and pay per click bid rates. One way you can get more keywords is to use Google’s “Want More?” keyword feature. Simply enter any keyword or phrase, such as “weight loss“, and Google will provide you with a bunch of relevant terms. You can then click “Add” next to each term, and this will add it to your campaign keywords. Another tool you can use to gain relevant keywords is Google’s Keyword Tool.

F:) I went through and selected the first ten results from the Google “Want More?” keyword tool for “weight loss“. On the next page you will decide how much you are willing to pay per click, and set your daily budget. I setup bid pricing at a max of .05 per click and my daily budget is at $100 per day. Setting the daily budget is very important, as this will limit your ad costs and any loss you may incur while trying to make your campaign profitable. You will also need to be more creative with your keywords (for a particular weight loss campaign like this), as bid pricing on these targeted terms is much higher than .05 per click.

G:) We are now at the last step of setting up your ppc campaign, and this is to simply review everything you have setup.

H:) You have now completed setting up your campaign, and it should now be live. If there were any problems with your campaign, Google will send you an email letting you know if your campaign was denied and why. Depending on your keywords and bid prices, traffic should start flowing through your new campaign. If at anytime you want to pause or stop the campaign, you can do so at the main page of your Google Adwords account.

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GOLDEN TIPS TO MAKE YOURS PPC CAMPAIGN SUCCEED!
1.) SubID Tracking: When first grabbing your offer from NeverBlueAds to promote, make sure you go to the offer creative page, click “Paid Search Creatives”. Once on this tab you should see an area that says “Use Subid”. You can put a simple tag in here like “googlediet“. A new url will be given to you in the above url section. You can grab this url and promote it on your Google Adwords campaign. By doing this you can pull separate tracking reports based on your campaigns. If you were two run this same offer on Google, Yahoo and MSN, create three separate subid urls and you can easily track your campaign performance for each.

2.) Pixel Tracking: In addition to SubID tracking, you can pull a pixel code from Google Adwords. With a pixel in place on the offer confirmation page, Google can then provide you with some really great stats on your campaign. Instead of just seeing what your click, impression and cost amounts are, Google can now show you your conversion rates and average price to obtain a lead. (To setup pixel tracking, go to any of your existing campaigns on Google Adwords, then you can click “Conversion Tracking” on the top menu”.) To place a tracking pixel on a CPA offer run through a network like NeverBlueAds, you will need to contact your affiliate manager about having them place the pixel for you. There are also several ppc tracking methods and services for you to choose from.

3.) Content Network vs Google Search: To get listed on Google’s main search, you will need to create your own landing page and have your own hosted site and worry about quality score rankings, which will effect your bid pricing. If you are advertising on the “content network”, you don’t need to create your own site. Through the content network you can send traffic directly to the campaign you are advertising. (To advertise on the Google Content Network, go to your campaign main page on Google Adwords, click “Edit Campaign Settings“, then only check off “Content Network“.)

4.) Link Url: When setting up your Google Adwords campaign, you were asked to give a “Display URL” and a “Destination URL“. If you are going to advertise on the “content network”, here’s a tip that can really improve your CTR. Instead of listing your “Display URL” as http://nbjmp.com/click/?s=444&c=33790&subid=googlediet, you can purchase a domain through GoDaddy and redirect the url to your offer landing page. You can only imagine how many more people would show interest and click a link that said something like http://www.MyBestWeightLossNow.com (fake url), rather than a long string of letters and numbers that aren’t relevant to the ad. Once you have done some testing with your campaign, throw a few bucks into a referral domain name and see how much it may improve your overall campaign numbers.

5.) Ad Variations: Having more than one advertisement for everyone to see, can greatly improve your ppc campaign. Setup a new ad creative and add it to your rotation by going to your main campaign page, clicking on an “Ad Group“, then click the “Ad Variations” tab near the top right. Click “Text Ad” (next to Create New Ad) and repeat the process above for writing your new ad copy. Once you have a few ads in rotation, you can further optimize your ppc campaigns by seeing which are pulling the best click through rates as well as conversion costs.

6.) The Big 3: Google, Yahoo and MSN are the big three search engines and between the three of them, they will produce enough volume for you to successfully make money enough with PPC. There are a ton of second tier search engines out there, and plenty of them offer clicks as low as .01 each. I highly recommend staying away from these search engines for marketing, at least until you have some experience with PPC. The majority of the second tier search engines will send low quality and/or foreign traffic. Stick with the BIG 3… test with each and see where your ad dollars are converting best.

- Apply to NeverBlueAds

DISCLAIMER: As much as I would like for everyone who reads this to make money, I’m sure it isn’t possible. This is a disclaimer to state that I have no affiliation with Google, Yahoo, MSN, NeverBlueAds, AffiliateFuel or AzoogleAds, beyond the aspect of being an affiliate and or advertiser. Zac Johnson and ZacJohnson.com are in no way responsible for your actions, gains or losses from ppc marketing after reading this guide. Please feel free to ask or comment with any questions or comments you may have.