It’s no secret that you’ll probably have to try a lot of things before you finally catch on to your success. It’s hard to give up on something you’ve invested so much time, and probably money in. But it can be far costlier to keep giving into a greedy no return investment!

I’ve been working a lot with Adwords lately for my affiliate marketing campaigns, and it has paid off to a degree. One of the things I’ve learned is that a lot of factors can affect your success. Namely competition, product appeal, CTR, and headlines.

Competition is one of the biggest on Adwords, because a lot of the good ‘general’ words such as “webhosting” or “tshirts” are going to cost you a fortune. If you can’t get to the top of the list then you just plain won’t get seen. You’ll see your relative position or get a little message about a ‘higher ranking ad’ being above you. By higher ranking they mean better paying. If you’re an affiliate marketer it’s worse, because you’ll likely be competing with your own URL if you don’t have a landing page. Further bumping you down the line.

So, the best thing is to establish yourself a niche advertising campaign. But even this can lead to poor results. For example I posted an ad for a popular shoe company’s website. I was confused for a while as to why my ad did poorly. I had low competition, 10/10 keyword quality, the top spots on searches for those words, and a CTR of over 13% which is pretty good.

However, my product just did not convert. The company itself is a big seller, but I was advertising a lesser known product of theirs that was a hard sell. In the end I decided it was not worth the time. Click through rate is irrelevant if it doesn’t result in any sales, and it didn’t. So I dumped the campaign. It was Etnies by the way.

I have similarly dumped campaigns due to their low percentage values. If you’re going to accept an affiliate deal make sure they’re paying you enough to be worth it. Some big companies can pay a piddly 3%. This will usually be hardly worth your effort at a place like Adwords.

Likewise, affiliates that pay big bucks will be stiff in the competition department. If you can establish a niche with them you could make some cash, but it will be hard if you’re using general keywords. Web hosting is one of the big ones. They pay GREAT commission, but sales are difficult without deep pockets or major traffic.

Once you have a converting campaign you can continue to streamline it further. I like to put in a good variety of keywords, and then cut the ones with low CTRs or that don’t convert. You may even slightly raise the bid on these good keywords. Since obviously a keyword that nets sales is worth more to you. (Or it should be!)

However, don’t take quality scores and CTR at face value. If you know a ‘low quality’ word or low CTR word is getting you money leave it be or try to improve it. You might for example be able to rephrase your ad copy to get more attention, and better CTRs.

Your quality scores are also subject to change I’ve noticed. Not sure if this might have to do with getting clicks, and google deciding your page is more or less ‘relevant’ or not. But perhaps.

I’ll continue my marketing experiments, and tidying up my offerings. Another note is that some of your affiliates may have ‘similar products’. My big converting affiliate does so I’m planning to expand on my sales by utilizing more of their offerings since they’re working out for me.

Good luck in your marketing ventures!

Originally posted 2010-09-08 21:58:13. Republished by Blog Post Promoter