Anyone using PPC for affiliate marketing?

[scottmccloud]

I've used PPC successfully for bricks and mortar businesses, but never for any of the affiliate sites I've had.

Looks like a no-brainer if you have a decent budget and can find a high value niche with lots of searches and low competition.

Unless of course I'm missing something!

 

[max99x]

I've used PPC successfully for bricks and mortar businesses, but never for any of the affiliate sites I've had.

Looks like a no-brainer if you have a decent budget and can find a high value niche with lots of searches and low competition.

Unless of course I'm missing something!

only thing you're missing is finding that area where there are lots of searches, low competition and a high value item is near on impossible nowadays

 

[Itchen]

Traffic is ... traffic at the end of the day. If your site converts well, and commissions are good, ppc is useful and can produce a good roi.

Personally, I get better results from other methods. But as I say, once you get visitors to your site, half the battle is won.

 

[Sound]

you will probably find yourself restricted as to what keywords the merchant will allow you to bid on and most will track the keywords you do use and bid themselves in the future

 

[max99x]

back in the day I use to do loads of PPC for phone contracts, when you earn £30-100 commission per contract, it was great fun however the CPC's started to all go up, no matter how good your QS was, as more competition came in... and the merchants started doing it seriously themselves.

When they know the lifetime value of a customer and make bigger profit on each you simply can't compete.

e.g I produce and sell a hamper for £50 and make £25 on it, I give commission to an affiliate of 20% (a high %) so an affiliate has to make the PPC convert so a customer costs less than £10 to make profit. Me as merchant can spent double that and still make money

 

[bonusmedia]

The golden days are probably over. I know someone who used to pay 10p a click bidding on brands and get 1000% ROI...

Having said that, as with SEO, if you find a new or unexploited niche there is certainly money to be made.

Brand bidding is generally not accepted any more and for the most part brands can afford to outbid affiliates, although there are some cases where affiliate revenues from retained users are higher - such as major comparison sites.

You need a good budget and you need to be prepared to spend a fair chunk on test campaigns - and expect to make a loss on most of them

Personally I get much better returns on content and seo. The big advantage of PPC is seeing instant results. It's also fairly useful for testing conversion rates on different keywords, although rates for PPC traffic don't necessarily match organic traffic

 

[Edwin]

It's also crucial to strip out any traffic that is guaranteed to be unprofitable before you end up paying for clicks you can't actually convert.

For example, if the affiliate programme you're using operates in one country only, then you'll want to restrict ads from being shown to people browsing from anywhere other than that country. So if you're promoting a UK furniture etailer, don't show ads to people outside the UK! (it amazes me how often advertisers seem to forget this most basic step)

You may wish to sharpen your focus further. For example, if you're promoting a broadband service provider, you're unlikely to see many signups from people in the middle of nowhere (since the connection speed will be slow-to-nonexistent) yet they may be eagerly trying to find some way of getting decent internet. So you could restrict your ads to major cities by using geographical targeting
https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1722043?hl=en-GB

If you really want to fine-tune the process, you could even write a whole bunch of ad variations and target each one at a specific city - you might stand out from other advertisers that way.

Similarly you can target ads at people who speak a particular language (or filter a language group out) https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1722078

 

[Edwin]

Next, you want to sit down with a blank sheet of paper and think of every possible way of searching for the product/service you're trying to promote that is unlikely to result in a sale.

In other words, you're trying to sort the "informational" searches from the "transactional" ones, and the transactional ones you can't convert from the ones you can.

An example (contrived, admittedly): you're trying to advertise a site that sells NEW Mazda MX-5 cars.

Searches containing any of the following are unlikely to convert well:
- used
- second hand
- part exchange
- parts
- aftermarket parts
- value
- accessories
- tuning
- fuel consumption
- restoration
- specific parts references e.g. "tyres" or "hub caps"

Go on adding to the exclusions list until you've narrowed a flood of mostly useless searches down to a dribble of valuable ones.

Remember, even if people don't click (i.e. no direct cost to you) if your ads show up for too many irrelevant searches, that reduces your overall CTR and affects your quality score and hence how much you pay per click.

The way to get (relatively) cheap clicks is to show very highly targetted ads to the narrowest possible audience, already pre-culled for useless traffic. That way, you maximize your CTR and productive clicks, and minimise your per-click cost.

 

[scottmccloud]

Lots of very useful advice there Edwin, many thanks!