Budget for Testing PPC

[TRD23]

Roughly how much should I be looking to spend when testing keywords and an offer for PPC?

Is it fine for testing just to have the adwords (or whatever I am using) to link straight to the affiliate offer?

I understand this may negatively effect my CPC but I thought just for testing an offer out it would be fine.

The idea would be when I feel an offer is offering a satisfactory ROI then I will create a landing page.

Alternatively I can buy a domain with a generic name and then create subdomains with landing pages to be used for testing.

However I wonder if the extra effort is worth it, is my linking straight to affiliate offer idea fine for testing?

 

[Skeletor]

It depends on the offer really. If it is an offer with just a submission form on it and not much information on the merchant page not many people are going to buy it and so therefore your testing is kind of wasted all together.

What I have read from other peoples posts around here is that when you directly link to the merchants page you are taking the gamble that they are in the buying mindset. So if they know exactly what kind of diet pills they are looking for and google a free trial they are likely to order them.

But most people who are just searching around for some more info about how to lose weight, diets, ect. are going to hit the merchant page and see no information and back out.

When you send that traffic to your own landing page though you can hype up the product a bunch causing them to be much more likely to buy it once they click through to the offer.

So my guess is that if you try direct linking to see if you get a "satisfactory ROI" you are not going to get one, and then you are not going to run the offer when in reality it could be the best offer ever and convert for every keyword if you just made an awesome landing page and hyped it up for people.

You will spend a lot less money on a $10 domain then you will wasting money to test directly linking offers. (but then again I have never direct linked so idk 100%, I am just going off other stuff I have read)

 

[justo_tx]

The idea would be when I feel an offer is offering a satisfactory ROI then I will create a landing page.

The general concensus around here is that a landing page will increase conversions. So if you skip the LP the # of conversions via direct linking may not be high enough to get to a "satisfactory ROI" before you feel a LP is worth it and you end up chucking the offer, but if you started with the LP you probably would have got more conversions and determined the offer was a keeper.

 

[TRD23]

The general concensus around here is that a landing page will increase conversions. So if you skip the LP the # of conversions via direct linking may not be high enough to get to a "satisfactory ROI" before you feel a LP is worth it and you end up chucking the offer, but if you started with the LP you probably would have got more conversions and determined the offer was a keeper.

How does domain name tie in with this?

I tried testing an offer with a straight redirect but the QS score is 1 and by extension the CPC is ridiculous.

I will create a landing page (and considering the above will probably create a landing page for all PPC tests) how important is the domain I host it on?

In order to keep costs down I do not want to have to buy a new domain for each test, what I was thinking of doing is buying a generic domain name (like redmonkey.com) and then just doing all my tests off that site.

Is using a generic site like this fine or will it have a strong impact on my QS?

If the generic site idea is fine, are subdomains better for testing in regards to QS (ie for a salmon fishing test salmonfishing.redmonkey.com) or having it as just a seperate page going to have the same effect (redmonkey.com/salmonfishing)?