Internet Business Daily

Introduction
A few weeks ago I had started my first PPC to CPA marketing campaign. Although I lost money (about 15% of my $500 investment) I gained valuable data and experience. Since then I have been doing research on my second attempt at affiliate marketing. Zac Johnson was promoting this Ultra Green Tea diet campaign through Advaliant and it looked very interesting.

I knew there was already a good amount of competition because Advaliant is running a contest that gives big cash bonus’ to the affiliates with the most conversions. I decided to go with the Ultra Lean Green Tea diet campaign anyways. This campaign was different than my first campaign because instead of a simple zip code submit as a conversion, a conversion would only count after a 2 page form including a credit card submit. Obviously this will have a much lower conversion rate than the zip submit but it pays $26 CPS (cost per sale).

Research
The first thing I did in the process was research who else was running the same campaign as me. I learned this strategy later in the process during my first go at CPA marketing. This is exactly what I meant by gaining valuable experience even though I took a loss. There were 4 or 5 other competitors in Google’s sponsored results running the same Green Tea campaign. They all had very similar landing pages that matched the advertiser’s page. I did some quick keyword research with Google’s keyword external and found that I would be paying between $1.25-$2 for the top 3 spots in sponsored results. I grabbed a bunch of keywords for my campaign and began the setup process.

Calculations
Next I had to set goals for my campaign. This is an important step in the creation process because without a goal, you will just be spending money and will not know how to tweak the campaign properly. Using the same formula as the first time (CPA/ROI * CR = CPC), I plugged some numbers in and got a general idea of my goals for this campaign. ($26/2 * CR = $1) Calculating this formula gives me a conversion rate goal of about 7.7%. I wanted to give myself enough room to hit my targets, which is why I went with a CPC of $1. This also means I will get less clicks because I will be in lower ad positions.

Creating the Landing Page
The next thing I did was get a landing page. It used similar graphics to the advertiser’s sales page. One thing I did not want to do with this campaign was iframe the form onto my landing page like I did with the last campaign. The landing page is important for “pre-selling” your visitors, which increases the conversion rate. I also included all of the normal components of a quality landing page: contact info, terms of service, privacy policy, about etc.

Setting Up Adwords
The next thing to do was setup Google Adwords. I used my previous method of creating an ad group for each keyword variation, which allows me to directly test the quality score of each keyword. I setup a broad match version and exact match version ad group for each keyword. After setting the campaign live I closely watched the real time traffic of the site and for each keyword that came through, I would create another exact match and broad match ad group for it. I would continue this process until I extracted all of the different keyword variations from my broad match terms. My goal was to have traffic only coming from my exact match keywords.

The Results
I will cut the suspense here and now, I made money on this campaign:). After talking to a few of my affiliate marketing buddies, they all agree that making money on only my second try at PPC to CPA marketing is rare. That being said, let’s get into the results:

The above image shows the data for the entire life of the campaign, including the time it took optimize the keywords. Overall, I had 60 conversions (according to Adwords, which I will discuss soon) at a cost per conversion of $17.84. Since my CPS (cost per sale) was $26, you can easily calculate my profits with the following formula: ($26-$17.84) * 60 = $489.60 profit. Keep in mind this is only according to Adwords.

Many of you will ask: why didn’t you just leave the campaign running if you were making money? When I started the campaign about a week and a half ago, I was making around $100/day profit. My campaign was converting at ~10% and all was going well. I hadn’t even optimized my keywords or CPC’s and I was already making great money. Obviously this was very exciting for me and I thought I finally could move up in the affiliate marketing world. Then, basically overnight, my conversion rate dropped from 10% to 1%. I am still not sure what happened. I kept optimizing my keywords and ad groups, and they were optimized well. My QS was good, my CTR was good, everything seemed to be the same or better but no one was purchasing the product any more. Maybe everyone had purchased the product and there was no longer a market for it, but that seems unlikely. I kept spending money for another 5 days or so, losing money every day. Finally, I turned off the campaign and was happy with the profit I made.

The Curve Ball
One thing that really screwed with my profit margin was the fact that Advaliant was reporting 10 less conversions than adwords was. This wouldn’t be a big deal if the CPA was $1.20 like my first campaign, but since it was $26 per conversion, I really felt the discrepancy in my profit margins. I am still working with my account manager at Advaliant to try to figure out a way to level off the discrepancy, and hopefully they will do good by me. Since 10 conversions equals $260, that means my profits dropped from about $500 to about $240. Advaliant said that the discrepancy was caused by Adwords double counting conversions because of visitors reloading the page, but I do not agree with that. I proved that individual keywords that were converting were not being counted, so that meant double counting was impossible.

Conclusion
Overall, this was a positive experience. I made money and gained even more experience with PPC to CPA marketing. I spent about $1000 and came out with anywhere between $1300 to $1500 depending on whether I get the missing conversions. I am still confused as to what happened when my conversion rate dropped to basically 0%, so maybe someone reading this will have an answer. My experience with Advaliant was decent and I am still waiting to see if they make up the missing conversions to me. I will update everyone with whether they do or don’t. Keeping affiliates happy is very important, so hopefully they do the right thing. I would like to note that they were willing to wire me my money early so I can pay off the credit card bill I had accumulated, which was a big plus for them in my mind. I am already doing research into my third campaign, so check back soon for updates!

Related posts:

1. My First Try At PPC to CPA Affiliate Marketing
2. PPC Arbitraging
3. eBay Banner – Affiliate Marketing
4. SEO Tips (Part 2)
5. How to Deal With Repeat Clicks (Aff Marketing)