CPC advertising is.
Seasoned internet marketers often present CPC advertising as *the* way to promote affiliate programs, and rather than write article after article to fight for a handful of sales I could be more efficient and leveraged using paid ads. But CPC is so complicated, and the only time I ever tried it in the past, I had no clue what I was doing and the $100 I put into my account got eaten up in a couple of days, wasted on $1 clicks in the dating niche. Lame. But this time I've gone into CPC expecting a learning curve, and expecting to bomb and learn from my mistakes.
Before starting this campaign, I studied CPC with a program available online called Google Cash. This program consists of a 200+ page ebook, along with a collection of demonstration videos and bonus ebooks. After using this program I feel armed with a lot of knowledge I didn't have the first time I dipped my toes into CPC. But, of course, that knowledge is useless until I apply it in the real world, and that's when the real learning takes place. So here we go.
For my first test campaign I decided to promote Google Cash itself, because I just finished it so I'm very familiar with the program. Promoting an online marketing course might be a dumb idea - it's a competitive niche, but I was anxious to get started, and however catastrophic it is, I will learn from it.
Today I used my credit card to add $100 to my Adwords account, and I created a new campaign with two add groups (I plan to add more). Actually, I added a third ad group who keywords included the terms "Google Cash" but it seems that Adwords rejected the ads. After completing the ads they appeared nowhere in my account, and I tried a few times. Maybe they object to having the Google name used in an ad.
My other two ad groups were accepted. I have 2 ads in each group which are almost the same, except for one change so I can split test and see which variation does better. The problem is that so far my ads are not showing. It seems like they're not showing because the ads have been given a low quality score, so the minimum bid price must be higher than the amount of my bid. Google gives you a quality score for your ads, and if they are deemed low quality they don't reject the ads--they just charge you more money. I think this is what murders most small time Adwords users and drives them out of the business, because they blow a lot of money and give up. I want to conquer this.
Inside Adwords it tells you a few details about your quality score. It says that my selected keywords are relevant to my ads. But it says that my landing page is not relevant enough. I am not using my own landing page, but rather Google Cash's landing page, to which I directly link with my affiliate link. So maybe I will have to rewrite some ads and choose different keywords that better reflect the words used on the Google Cash landing page.
Another option is to try increasing my maximum bid price so I start to get some traffic at the higher "low quality score" price, and then if I can get a good clickthrough rate I'll start to lower my bids as my quality score goes up. Your clickthrough rate is another factor that influences your quality score and determines your cost per click.
That's my first day of Google Adwords in a nutshell. I didn't really achieve anything concrete, but the learning process has begun. Tomorrow I plan to add more ad groups with different keywords, and hopefully some of those will get better quality scores and I can keep those and weed out the poor-performing keywords/ad groups. I will also take a closer look at the Google Cash landing page to see if there're any keywords on it that I can better target in my ads to make them more "relevant". If those things don't bring any progress I will increase my minimum bid, which is currently set at $.10 per click. Maybe if I increase it to $.15 or $.20 that will be enough to make up for the low quality score. We'll see.
I'll sleep on it and hopefully wake up with fresh ideas and insights. Good night!
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