Reflections on our First 48 Hours in PPC

Posted by Luke | May 8, 2008 .

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Right around this time Tuesday evening, Nate and I officially launched our first ever Pay Per Click (PPC) affiliate marketing campaigns. Since then it’s been nearly constant, boarder-line obsessive monitoring (when I could steal a minute away from my day job or when I was home on my lunch break, that is), tweaking and, well, sleepless nights. And with that, here are my thoughts on the whole thing, so far:

1. PPC marketing is tough

For anyone who thought it was easy, it’s not. There is a ton of research involved; it’s definitely not just plugging in a few related keywords, paying 10 cents a click and away you go. There is, of course, the initial work of finding a niche which has the traffic, the programs to market, the money to make, and isn’t too overcrowded (unless you have the investment capital to fund the high bids needed to convert). Once you’ve discovered your niche, and picked your keywords, there is the actual launching of the PPC campaign - ads to make and test, bids to choose, daily budgets to determine, etc. etc.

Then comes the monitoring - probably the toughest part of the last 48 hours, in my opinion. Seeing what keywords are converting and which aren’t; then upping the minimum bid on the ones that are converting and lowering — or even deleting — the ones that aren’t. And the same goes for the ads themselves, are they converting? What can be done to improve them? How much can you afford to spend per day? How much do you need to spend to get the clicks you need? How’s your quality score, and what can you do to make it better? Should you have all of your keywords in one ad group, or two, or three, or even more? How will you group them?

And maybe most importantly, are the clicks you’re getting quality clicks? Is someone who is searching for your long-tail keyword (let’s say its “Hoodia Weight Loss Pills”) and clicking on your ad the type of person who is going to eventually buy the product you’re promoting? Getting clicks is really the easy part, getting those making the clicks to buy your product is the hard part.

2. PPC marketing is easy

but… but… you just said…. I know, I know. But it is. When I first learned about PPC marketing, it sounded to me like some big scary monster that I would never be able to figure out, let alone be successful at. I thought it would take a huge investment (in either time, money or both) to even just get started. But that’s really not the case. Nate and I have spent the entirety of the last two days at our day jobs and have launched, monitored and and begun to optimize our PPC campaigns really in the few hours between dinner and bed. Really all it takes is the will to just do it; to take the plunge.

3. Research is key

The old adage “measure twice, cut once” I think really applies to PPC marketing. As I mentioned in caveat number one, unless you have a whole bunch of money you can invest (and throw away) in your campaigns from day one, you really need to do your homework. You need to find the high traffic, low cost niches you can compete in for cheap. Then the long-tail keywords within that niche that people are still looking for. THEN the affiliate offer that has the best offer to you, the highest EPC (earnings per thousand clicks), the nicest landing page… really, the offer that will actually convert.

And once again, those are just the steps needed to take before your PPC campaign goes live. Once that happens, there’s a whole new set of things that need to be researched; but I mentioned those already, didn’t I?

4. Experiment

Similar to the “tough/easy” argument - you can research for hours before you launch a campaign (and you must!) but eventually you just have to launch it. You can plan keywords and ads until you go cross eyed and you can swear up & down that you know what people will click on but you really don’t know until you try. Until your campaign is up for a day or two and you can actually see for your self (and then tweak and optimize from there). All research aside, you really don’t know until you try.

5. Clicks don’t necessarily mean conversions

Nate and I launched our campaigns Tuesday evening (it’s Thursday evening right now, for those not keeping track) and by the time I checked how everything was doing before I went to bed that night, we had already had nearly $20 in sales and a whole bunch of clicks. I was ecstatic! I knew a profit on the very first day was rare and we had done it. Our keywords were all converting (some better than others, of course, but nearly all had at least a couple of clicks), or quality score was high and things seemed to be rolling along. I thought to myself “if it’s this easy, we’ll be making serious bank in no time!”

Now, two days later, those few sales from the first couple of hours of our campaign are the only sales we’ve had. Although our clicks have stayed high (we reached our daily budget very early both yesterday and today) and our CTR, quality score, etc. are all still good we haven’t had any more conversions.

We need to figure out where the problem is - is it in the product we’re pushing? I doubt it; the traffic and the clicks are obviously there. I think they’re all niches with a TON of potential. The landing page? Possibly, but we’re direct linking since we don’t have any real experience yet making our own landing pages (or any coding experience…), so there’s not much we can do about that at the moment. Is it the keywords we’re choosing? I think there’s a good chance that’s the case. We have good looking ads that are leading to clicks, obviously, but are they worthwhile clicks? Apparently not. We need to find which keywords the people looking to buy are searching for, not just the ones the people who are just kicking tires are using.

6. At some point you just gotta do it

I think that is the single most important lesson I’ve gotten out of these 48 hours - you have to just do it. PPC is stressful, it’s tough, but it’s fun. It’s been a lot of fun. To me it’s a lot like playing the stock market - you need to research the companies you’re using, the potential they have for you, and the ways in which you can optimize what you’re doing to have the greatest ROI.

I would absolutely recommend finding a coupon code for free clicks when signing up for AdWords or Yahoo or any other PPC engine (most web hosting plans these days come with such codes)! I had $50 in clicks for Google from my hosting plan and it’s definitely been helpful. It allows you to maybe spend more in the first few days than you otherwise would (because you have that $50 that isn’t yours to play with) because you’ve got nothing to lose, so you can take calculated risks you might not otherwise take.

Once you’ve done your research, picked your niche, chosen your keywords and written your ads - go for it. You’ll certainly be enjoying yourself and hopefully making some money before you know it!