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Case Study : Diet Pills : How I Ran It

by UberAffiliate on January 25, 2008 in Affiliate Tips, Niche Selection, PPC with 61 Comments

Note : This is probably as far as I’ll ever go when it comes to “revealing” things to you guys. I’m giving you a niche I researched myself, keywords I used, and how I designed my landing page.

I have an old campaign that’s been sitting around forever now, and I’m not doing any testing with it so why not tell you guys and maybe you’ll make some money from it. I did some research a while ago and it looked like diet pills would be good to get into. All of the offers gave out a free trial bottle with just a shipping and handling fee. Hoodia, Phentermine, that sort of thing. I only did maybe five days of testing in Yahoo, got some data but had so many things going on I had no time to pursue it. So what I’ll do is walk you through how I set things up, how I researched keywords, built my page, etc.

How I Planned Things Out

I knew there were a bunch of great products out there, so what I decided to do was build a comparison/review page. I picked 4 offers from various networks and “reviewed” them. First I looked at the diet/weight loss campaigns on a bunch of networks, and then asked all of my affiliate managers what their top converting offers were. I got some stats, payouts, and EPCs, and then picked some offers. If I can remember correctly, the offers I tested were :

2DaySlimDown from Neverblue – $33 CPA
Phenterthin from Hydra – $30 CPA
PureHoodiaX from CPA Empire – $32 CPA
and another Hoodia offer from Azoogle, which they don’t have anymore.

Now you know exactly what offers I ran, time to explain how I build my landing page…

How I Built My Landing Page

Like I said I used a review page. I included those offers in a list, and picked an order I wanted. Based on the EPCs my affiliate managers told me, I put the highest offer as the #1 and called it the “Top Rated”, and then the lowest EPC I put at the bottom and rated “Good Choice”. They each were rated 1 to 5 stars. The top rated was 5 stars, and the bottom of the list was 3 stars. You don’t want to rate everything five stars or else it looks fake, and people can tell. I wrote a small description about each product, and highlighted some facts. Things like “Average weight loss 13lbs in two weeks”, “Try a bottle free”, etc. I sold myself as a legit review site that was there to help the visitor find the best diet pill for them. I’m not going to give away the domain I used, because that will just open doors to people to try and find out as much about me as they can, lol.

How I Chose My Keywords

Next is keyword research. Well, I’m promoting diet pill offers, so it makes sense to use diet pill keywords. I had quite a few ad groups with very targeted ads. The Yahoo campaigns I ran them in are deleted now, so I can’t go in and get the exact ad groups and ad copy, but I’ll do my best. For my first campaign, every keyword had “diet pill(s)” in them. I broke down the adgroups something like this :

-diet pills
-best diet pills
-compare diet pills
-review diet pills
-safest diet pills
-cheap diet pills
-free diet pills

Each group had 100 or so keywords in it, some more some less. I used Keyword Companion to break the groups down.

As stated before, I just started with a campaign in Yahoo. I just wanted to test the waters for a couple days and see what kind of volume it produced before I got a little more serious and moved to Adwords. I think I bid $1.50 on everything to start. Once campaigns got rolling, my CTR was around 6-8% I believe. This is attributed to the tight ad groups displaying exact what the searchee wants.

The first couple days I think I lost maybe $30-40 each day, my revenue was around $300/day I think. This was on a small list of keywords and just Yahoo keep in mind. After seeing those numbers, I at least concluded that there was potential in this niche. Then I got busy with a more important thing, and that was replaced by another, etc, and I haven’t touched the campaign since around October. If I tracked my results and started dropping bids to make all keywords profitable, it could have turned out to be a pretty decent niche. I would then expand my keyword lists, and start scaling the living daylights out of Google to really up my revenues.

This should give you all some insight as to how I run some things. I don’t run everything like that, but it’s a pretty solid case study. Hell, I just told you a niche that I made money off of that had potential. Set things up just like I did and test it out. Good luck and if you get it to succeed make sure to tell me a couple of your best keywords that I can run ;).

Popularity: 10% [?]

The Secret to Beating Yahoo’s Quality Score

by UberAffiliate on December 8, 2007 in PPC, Quality Score, Yahoo Search Marketing with 21 Comments

So anyone who’s anyone knows that Yahoo’s quality score sucks, and nobody can understand it. Hell, they can’t even understand it themselves. A while back I ranted about it and talked about a phone conversation with Yahoo where the rep told me not even he knew how their quality score was done. Since I’m a nice guy, I’m going to post my secret that’s been getting me “around” it for quite some time now. Before anybody thinks this is the key to making millions, read the following points :

It’s not really some super-secret hack, just utilizing something most Yahoo users have access to.
It deals with the campaigns that either are random non-related keywords (like for ringtones), or campaigns where even though your quality score should be great, Yahoo slaps a nice “you suck” on it with 1 or 2 bars.
You need a Gold account for this.

Okay already, now what is it?

Like I said I’ve been doing this for quite some time, as I got into Yahoo Search Marketing long before I attempted Adwords. What I noticed was, whenever I started a new campaign, I got a ridiculous amount of traffic for the first couple days, and then every day after that I got emails from Yahoo saying (this is a cut and paste out of one I got today) :

Dear Advertiser

Ads and/or keywords you submitted for account ‘My Account’ [xxxxxxxxxx] were reviewed to ensure that they comply with the Editorial Guidelines.

Keyword results:
Pending: 8
Declined: 0
Removed: 10

Note that this was my ringtone campaign where the keywords weren’t related to ringtones. Every day Yahoo took away 10-20 keywords, and these were keywords that were converting. My ads all had 1-2 bars in quality score, but I was still getting decent position because of the no competition. But over time, my accounts started to die because 1/2 the keywords had been removed by Yahoo. After even more time, Yahoo introduced it’s “Low Quality Ads” thing, where if you have too many, Yahoo turns off the entire campaign. And in an account where there’s 100+ “low quality ads”…yeah it got shut down.

So I got thinking, “Hmm…you get a really nice traffic burst when you first create the campaign, then it dies after a couple days.” This is because Yahoo throws your ad up nice and high to test out how it’s going to do. Then they calculate your quality score and if it’s low (which happens most of the time because their QS is whacked), your position drops and they start removing keywords. This is where your Gold account comes into play.

With a Gold account, you’re given the feature of importing .csv files. On a quick note about getting a gold account, you have to spend $500 in 3 months, or $1,500 in 1 month to get one. You can call and whine about it but they’re usually pretty stingy. So do what you can to get a Gold account. Now for the secret. What I did was download my campaign and open it up in Excel. I turned all the keywords back to “On” (as the status for a lot change to ‘Deleted’), changed the campaign start date to today, and then messed around with any bids that I wanted to using a simple find+replace. Then I deleted my campaign from Yahoo and reuploaded it. Voila, I was seeing that nice traffic burst again. Two days later comes and it dies. Delete that campaign, change the start date in your import file, and reupload. So it’s not really beating their quality score, more of getting around it since you’re going to be deleting your campaign before it even has time to calculate it.

I’m sure it’s easy to automate just changing the date and reuploading, but it takes literally 30 seconds to do. So for an extra few hundred bucks a day, it was well worth it. Feel free to quote me on this :

“Affiliate Marketing Problems : if you can’t beat them, get around them.”

Hope you can make some good use of this if your campaigns keep getting slapped. I was able to get more traffic for a cheaper cost, so it really helped some of my stuff. Look what you guys have done to me, making me start to give away secrets…

Popularity: 6% [?]

10 Adwords Mistakes

by UberAffiliate on October 20, 2007 in Google Adwords, PPC with 31 Comments

Instead of always look at what to do, it’s sometimes just as useful (or even more useful) to look at what not to do. You may be doing a bunch of things right with your campaigns, but not realize that you may be doing this one thing wrong. So let’s take a look at some common mistakes in our Adwords campaigns :

Mistake #1 : Combining Search and Content Networks

One reason this happens is people simply forget to turn the content network off when they start a new campaign. But people also just naturally run search and content under the same campaign. Separate search and content campaigns, they’re two different ways of playing the game and you have to play them both differently. Different bids, keywords, everything. It’s just easier to spread them apart. I personally split them between different accounts. My accounts are either search only or content only.

Mistake #2 : Dropping Bids too Fast

Another mistake people make is getting too anxious about dropping their bids and making the transition from the “losing money” phase to the profitable phase. Example : you start a new campaign and you’re bidding for the front page. You have an awesome CTR and your conversions are pretty good, but you’re losing money. You start your bids at $1.00 and you’re in position 3. After the first day, your average CPC naturally falls from $0.98 to $0.95. You’re sick of losing money and want to turn things around, so you drop your max CPC down to $0.95 to match the average. Wrong move. Your position is now going to drop, along with CTR. You didn’t give Adwords enough time to “love” your campaign. In this current situation, I’d wait until average CPC drops to about $0.85 before I start pulling down my max CPC to $0.95. Slow and steady wins the race. Maintain that position while ultimately paying less and less for each click.

Mistake #3 : Starting Bids too Low

Cool, so you start your campaign and all of your keywords have an OK quality score with a minimum bid of $0.10. Let’s start our bids off at $0.10 then, right? Wrong again. Starting your bids off at the minimum will start you in a crappy position (unless theres 0 competing ads), which will then translate into low CTR and everything that follows. Quality score gets slapped, you’re paying more with no improvement in position, etc. Ignore minimum bids and focus on what you need to bid in order to get you into a position that you’ll see good CTR.

Mistake #4 : Broad Matching From the Start

Don’t start your campaigns with broad matching keywords (unless you have a completely insane list of negatives). Broad matching will get you a lot of impressions, also a lot of which aren’t targeted enough to get a good CTR. Start off using just phrase and exact match, and you’ll start off with a better CTR. Play that for a little until your bid prices start falling and QS starts increasing, and then introduce some broad matched keywords.

Mistake #5 : Not Enough Testing

Many people simply aren’t testing enough ads in their campaigns for optimal CTR. They’ll split test 3 or so ads and once they find the best ad, just leave that one up and let her ride. Never be content with your ad CTR – always fight to increase it. Find the best ad out of that three, and then match it up against a new one. Test everything. Turn on “rotate ads evenly” and give each ad their fair share.

Mistake #6 : Too Many Keywords in Adgroups

I’m not going to spend too much time on this one because it’s boring and you’ve heard it 100 times before. Less keywords = more targeted = higher CTR and conversions. Don’t pull 2,000 keywords from Wordtracker and put them all into 1 group. Keyword Companion is an awesome tool to break up keyword lists. So don’t be lazy, the more time you spend optimizing, the more money you’ll make.

Mistake #7 : Not Tracking Everything

You have to track things other than just your ads – track keywords too! You may think your campaign is going well with a 3% CTR – which isn’t bad by any means. You look into one of your adgroups and see that there’s a keyword getting 1/2 of the impressions and has a 0.53% CTR. Taking out this keyword will skyrocket your CTR. Track the CTR of keywords and how they convert – it’s important.

Mistake #8 : Not Testing by Time of Day

When I say “track everything”, I mean track everything. Track down to the hour of the day. When you look at hourly stats, you can see times of the day when CTR is awesome and so are conversions. You can also see the “gaps” in your day that CTR and conversions are down – you may be losing money during these times. By optimizing this, you’ll increase your profit and CTR. Both good things for your Adwords account.

Mistake #9 : Realizing That Landing Pages Effect Adwords

Many people believe that Adwords is all about what’s in your account, and once they click the ad it’s now all just about the CTR on your landing page and how it converts. Adwords also looks at your bounce rate, or how many people leave your page after just 1 initial impression. Bad bounce rate = bad page in Google’s eyes. It’s tricky, but work on getting users to stick around your page for a little before moving on to the offer and converting there. You can actually increase conversions while decreasing bounce rate, it just takes some effort and testing on your part.

Mistake #10 : Getting Discouraged too Easily

One big thing to realize is that Adwords is certainly not an easy beast to tackle. I’ve talked to affiliate marketers that are making $5,000/day off of Yahoo and MSN, and still are having a rough time with profiting in Adwords. Too many people make a couple attempts at Adwords, fall flat on their face, and then walk away with their tail between their legs. Adwords takes a lot of time and more importantly patience to master. I’m not even close to mastering Adwords yet, but I’ve had the patience to lose a lot of money with it for the sake of learning a few things that I’m now sharing with you. Six months ago, I didn’t have the patience. I put up a few campaigns, had them run for about two days before they got slapped, and then called it quits with Adwords. Don’t be that me six months ago, because I know that’s how a lot of you are now. It’s like a David and Goliath sort of thing. Adwords is the Goliath, but a few small tricks here and there can have a big impact.

I know this was more of a “classic” article that’s been done many times before, but I hope you maybe pulled something new from this one. Cutting out the number of wrong things will increase the number of right things, which means more money in your pocket.

Happy Googl’ing.

Popularity: 6% [?]

PreviewMyPPC.com

by UberAffiliate on October 11, 2007 in PPC with 2 Comments

This nifty little tool from Kieron allows you to test out and see what ads will look like in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. It’s most useful (for me) to see what my ads will look like in the premium spots. If it’s going to look too long, how much I can fit in, doing the arrow trick. The one thing I noticed with it was, in certain situations with Yahoo for example, I’ll type in a long display URL, and if your ad shows up in the right hand column ads, the display URL will get cut off. PreviewMyPPC doesn’t show the cutoffs. Maybe it’s just my computer or something, anybody else notice this in Yahoo?

Still a really neat tool though check it out : PreviewMyPPC.com.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Google Adwords Account History

by UberAffiliate on October 9, 2007 in Google Adwords, PPC, Quality Score with 36 Comments

A little talk has been going around here and there about Adwords and how your account history/age can affect your bid prices and quality score. But what has a bigger impact, account age or CTR/spending history? In lieu of all of this, I did what is my favorite – tested. Here’s what I tested :

I have Account A – my personal and oldest Adwords account. I’ve had it for about a year now, it’s my oldest account and I’ve done the most testing in it. Overall CTR has been BAD before in this account (as I made plenty of noobie mistakes in it), but I’ve spent a good amount of cash in it. I’d put the overall account CTR (for search) at about 1%, not the best.

I also have Account B – an account for a company I own. This Adwords account is very new, just barely 2 months old. Although it is a much higher quality account. I’ve spent about the same as in my personal account A, and my overall CTR is around 8-10%.

Here’s where the fun comes in. I threw up a new campaign for business cards (not really a niche I do heavily right now, but I have a landing page for it) in account A and bid on just the very top keywords. I then put that exact same campaign into my corporate account B. Same keywords, landing page, ad copy, bid prices. Here are the results :

Account A – 1 Year Old Account

google adwords account snapshot

Account B – 2 Month Old Account

google adwords great quality score

As you can see, there’s a VERY nice difference between the accounts here. Account B has great quality scores and minimum bids $0.26 cheaper. With my $2.00 bid, ads for Account A would show up on the 2nd and 3rd page of search results, while Account B’s ads would show up at the top of page 1.

From this test, we can conclude that a more “productive” account in Google’s eyes will start you off with lower bids and better quality score. Account age isn’t everything, even with an account with an ok CTR and decent spending history.

Why is this post useful?

If you’re thinking “ok great…so how will this help me?”, well it may help you. If you have an account that’s really old but have had some bad quality and CTR on it in the past, it’s probably better just to start with a new fresh account instead of staying with your current one thinking that the bids will stay good because of the account age. In my case, my personal account will be used no more and if I wanted to run any more campaigns on it, I’d start fresh with a new account.

Popularity: 6% [?]