ComradeWolf's PPC Journal

Are you from UK and targeting US visitors?
(Just curious as your location says UK)
 


Hey Boozt,
My Bing ads are running in the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

Since my last post I got 2 conversions on CB, but the merchant decreased payout so I guess I will have to run a different offer to offset costs and break even. Right now I am directing people to a ripped CB page (which is much better designed than most of the pages I've seent on CB) where my CTA leads to the checkout.

I am adding new KWs on Bing as some of the exising ones are not converting after around 70 clicks (and I guess they won't). The search volume is pretty high, but for some KWs I just can't get people to click the ad so my CTR is incredibly low. I just testing ads with different angles hoping to find something more effective.

I have also started advertising the cooking offer on FB. Not many clicks so far, but I will just keep testing creatives.
 
Thanks a lot, Minderwinter, I will!

I had 3 more conversions, with 2 of them coming from broad and exact matches of a KW I've recently added. I am not sure if this increase in conversions can be attributed to my keyword-picking or just the lower price of the product.

Most of my ads have quite a decent CTR - 3-5%, some are 11%. But there is one KW that just won't get any clicks. After 2K impressions and 8 tested ads I only have 3 clicks, lol. I keep testing ads, but I've kinda given up the idea of getting it to generate any clicks. I am also adding a couple of new KWs.

I advertise on FB, got 60 clicks but not conversions yet (CTR is around 0.04-0.05%). Today I will upload and test some more creatives.
 
Had a conversion from FB. Definitely encouraging, but I am still testing creatives and ad copies. I hope one of these will eventually help me break even.

Yesterday Bing went full retard (but I guess it's my fault too as I should be checking my account more often than twice a day - now I am checking it every hour). All of a sudden my account was flooded with an enormous number of clicks (around 150) in around 4 hours - this has never happened before. Lo and behold, most of those clicks were coming from 1 KW with exact match (previously ad groups with exact match KWs got barely any clicks). After running a report I found out that these clicks were from the Bing partner website which I haven't seen before - it was some website dedicated to stock market, FX, etc.

Long story short, I've excluded partner websites and I am now getting clicks only from Bing and Yahoo. I've also contacted Bing support asking how this is possible but they couldn't figure out what was wrong but promised to have a look into this and email me (yeah, right, lol).

Well, at least I learnt a valuable lesson.

Besides, somebody got a refund for the product that was purchased a week ago. I wonder why - neither the ad nor the sales page was misleading or exaggerating.
 
I am pausing some of the KWs because they don't get enough impressions and consequently clicks (even though CTR is around 5-7%). Haven't added new ones and LPs for them yet, because I was busy adding creatives on FB. The testing will be similar to what I did with a weight loss offer on PoF, but this time I will test 10 ads with copy#1, then 10 ads with copy#2, and then the top performers will be tested with copy #3. For now I am targeting young guys and girls in the UK. If the offer doesn't convert in the UK I will test it in other countries.

Also on Bing I am limiting the budget allocated to the broad match KWs because these visitors don't click my CTA often (in contrast to visitors using exact and phrase match).

QS for some of the ad groups started deteriorating. I am tweaking the LPs, but I am not sure if it will help.
 
I've finished testing 5 creatives on FB, no conversions. At least clicks are cheaper than on Bing. :)

I have changed some of my LPs, but the QS is still low. I have increased budget so probably it will help (sometimes it does, I think). I've also changed some of the ads for my exact and phrase match KWs. Prior to this I wasn't indicating price, now I am - I am doing this to limit costs, as I am not getting conversions on Bing anymore (I've added several KWs but they haven't converted yet).

I've started testing a new offer on Bing - it's a relationship offer. It looks quite promising, but if it doesn't convert I will move on to the other one. I think it will be a dating vertical which I will promote on PoF as it looks like that I am not particularly successful with CPS offers so I guess I should focus more on CPA (I think this is what most affiliates do).
 
No conversions on FB either in the UK, nor in the US. Though I've learnt that images on FB are probably the most important factor: the image has to really stand out, otherwise the CTR will be close to zero, whereas on PoF even if the image wasn't that eye-catching, I could still get decent CTR. Probably is has something to do with the login count that can be chosen on PoF.

I wanted to try running a diet offer on FB, but then thought that it would be too silly and that it would get me banned. So I decided to keep doing this on Bing.

Also running a dating offer on PoF and a game offer on FB now. Today or tomorrow (depending on the workload in the office) I will relaunch a weight loss campaign on Bing (I've come up with a new angle which I want to test). I asked AMs to remove exit pops from several offers (LPs are quite different) and I will test them both.

I've also accidentally discovered that I am a bit better at writing copy after 1am - I don't really have to force myself, somehow it is easier to come up with ad copies at that time.
 
Thanks for the link, Mightier, a great read!

I think the first offer can be considered a rebill (1 trial bottle and then next month customers are billed and sent 1 bottle, but in subsequent months they are not billed anymore), the second offer is just a straight sale.

On Sunday I started promoting a new weight loss product (a straight sale one) with a different spin. LP looks even better than the one I used for cooking offers. KWs I am targetting have quite a lot of volume, though ads CTR is around 2-3%. I am testing more ads now to increase it.

Also I am now using BingAds desktop editor so creating campaigns takes far less time. It's an awesome tool.

On FB I keep running a game offer, now I am trying a different LP and creatives that look extremely tacky. I think that my CTR is supposed to be higher, but we'll see. By the way, I using CPC pricing instead of the CPM: whenever I set I change settings to CPM, CTR plummets.

I also started reading Traffic Black Book 1 and 2. Looks quite interesting, though I am not sure if that advice will work. I'll test it and write about it here.
 
Made 2 conversions (weight loss offer), then bids skyrocketed and I had to stop bidding on a lot of keywords. Now I am searching for KWs with lower CPC and trying to my QS to 9-10 to get CPC of the current KWs to drop a bit.

Game offer didn't convert particularly well (I made around $20), so I am now targetting a different age band.

I am also going to try a new offer on AdWords. It's really quite difficult to tell that it's an affiliate offer so I think I won't get banned.
 
I've added new KWs (weight loss offer) that are cheaper and have more or less enough volume, waiting for enough data now. Meanwhile, CPC for existing KWs dropped quite a bit because of increased QS, though CPC is still fairly high.

Game offer on FB still isn't converting properly, so I've changed targetting again.

Besides, I started running a cooking offer on FB again, it's a new angle and a change in the style of creatives in general. This time creatives are as tacky as it gets and I am not just using food pics. Based on the previous data, my CTR is supposed to jump above 0.5, hopefully it will reach 0.7% (my previous all-time high was 0.52%).

I am also testing ads for the AdWords offer, because CTR is still below 1%. Have tested 18 already, found 1 with a 3% CTR. QS is quite low - 6/10, though I am trying to bump it.
 
Stopped promoting weight loss offer and game offer - I get conversions, but campaigns don't break even.

On the other hand the cooking offer converted and after hundred clicks my profit was $18 after 3 days, lol. I managed to get an average CPC of $0.14. I keep testing images to drive it even lower. I am also testing the offer across gender, age groups and interests - CTR for the same images varies drastically for different targeting, so right now I can't really figure out any pattern for high CTR images.

On AdWords the campaign isn't profitable yet, but I am getting rid of non-converting KWs, so I think soon I will break even.
 
My profit was $500 yesterday - it felt awesome. However, the party was kinda over quite soon, since the payout was slashed almost two times and conversion conditions were changed. I am not sure if I will profit over $100 today, if at all.

Out of the 10 KWs I have tested only one was converting, though the conversion rate was high - 20%. After I decreased my KW bid a bit, CR increased from 16% to 20%.

I plan on trying out either social ad ninja or lots of ads (I lean towards social ad ninja). Probably this will help me break even on FB.
 
Dude, thanks for this. I can't help but feel discouraged in trying this for myself seeing all the issues you are facing. Trying to get away from SEO.
 
Hey Scott, I am glad you find it helpful. Yeah, there are a lot of issues, but over time I tend to be less annoyed by them, and I think so will you.

I profited approx $60/day from the offer I wrote about in the previous post until the advertiser removed it from the network.

I have been testing new offers: no conversions yet, but I keep my hopes up. I've also managed to increase my QS to 9 by (at least I think that this was the reason for it) adding a lot more KWs to my LPs. I've done this before, but I didn't have as many keywords on LP as I do now, and this usually resulted only in a 1-point jump. This time QS rose by 2 points in 8 ad groups with CTR and the ad copy remaining unchanged.

I am also testing ads on FB. I am using data from SAD as the basis for my creatives: I am looking for a pattern among the ads that have been running for quite a while and then testing my hypothesis.

I've also noticed a lot of bitcoin, biz opp and "grow-your-hair-back" offers on FB. Quite unusual, as I have never seen them on FB before.
 
Had several $50 profit days in a row with a new offer, then the campaign started slowly dying as competitors raised the bids massively and I couldn't even get to the 5th position with $15 bids. I am breaking even on another campaign but not profitable yet.

I've finally completely realized what K-Noop meant on the previous page in his post about KWs: after some testing I've found a KW that was converting with 3 different LPs all of which were horrible in terms of design and copy.

The problem which I am now facing is the low payout/high bid issue on most of the offers I have access to: even if the KW is converting, the bids are way too high for me to profit. Right now I am trying to lower the bids by going for lower ad positions, but I don't have enough data yet.
 
I didn't realize that I haven't written anything for almost a week.

So 4 out of 5 campaigns I was testing didn't convert. The 5th one started converting (an entertainment offer) after I spent ~$400 on testing. Out of around 20 KWs only 2 were converting. I was going for lower ad positions and CR was even a bit higher than when I was bidding high (a few months ago when I was testing other offers I had a different result I think).

I am not sure how long this one will last (right now average profit/day is about $70), so I keep testing other campaigns.
 
I've been testing 2 campaigns for 2 weeks, I broke even, but didn't profit. This time I tested them more or less properly: I compared this week's data to the previous one (earlier I just did Tuesday vs Monday, Wednesday vs Tuesday, etc.). I had more conversions on Thursday and Friday, but I have no idea why. Probably by the end of the week people thought that it was about time they solved some of their problems.

I was also split-testing two ads per ad group from the very beginning: if the commercial intent of the KW was pretty low, then no matter how enticing the ad copy was, clicks and conversions were low or non-existent. Though this time I had fewer KWs that would attract people in the "browser" mode. On the other hand, even if the KWs seemed to be of high commercial intent level, CR would sometimes be low.

By the way, sometimes I read on other forums that higher CTR would result in higher CR, but in my tests this wasn't the case: high-CTR KWs would sometimes have low CR, and the other way around. So as you can see, there isn't much consistency in the results. Moreover these results in part contradict the ones I've had before. I guess it all depends on the niche and offer.
 
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