knownerror's PPC Journey

knownerror

knownerror

Working On The Line
Feb 16, 2012
707
3
0
Ontario, Canada
So I have been using Facebook Ads for a bit now. I decided to take it a step further and document what I will be trying out.

I briefly discussed my strategy here and have finally decided to go through with it. I will admit, my budget is rather small being $5000 but I'm going through with it anyway.

If you didn't click that link above I will explain my plan here. I plan on making the LP focused primarily around capturing the visitor's email address and adding them on a newsletter list. Once they subscribe an email will be sent to them and prompt them to sign up for the offer. How my offer works is I receive REV profits from all new clients. If you haven't guessed, it's focused in the "investing niche." After that is done, I will provide weekly newsletters featuring industry news and always reminding anyone who hasn't already signed up for the offer to do so.

I decided to take this approach because I see myself being able to get much more out of my subscribers. If I just had them reach the offer directly, they may just leave and be gone forever. Over time I plan on offering other offers to sell even more. I will be using MailChimp as my mailing service and decided to use BlogHue's awesome landing page he provided free here on Wickedfire. (Check it out)

tl;dr

Budget is $5000.
Facebook Ads.
Collecting emails.
Newsletter and promoting offer upon sign up.
Profit??

I hope to update this as often as possible. Questions are welcome.
 


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Completed the LP and decided to go with MailChimp. Tested the system out and am adding a couple finishing touches. I will be attempting to use the split testing from Clicky to try out various buttons as well.

Once I finish these I will create a campaign and work out how I will be presenting the weekly industry news.
 
Just wanted to add that I figured out Clicky's tracking tools. Tomorrow I plan on creating a campaign and getting that side of things set up. I also plan to start sending traffic on Monday.

I also created a visual of my landing page, was hoping to get feedback on the layout I created. Getting an opinion from another side is always great.

l7for0P.png
 
Decided to get an update out today.

I checked how everything was going this evening and noticed some problems, there was a bug in the submission so when you entered your information and clicked submit, nothing happened. So I lost $40 for nothing today which is luckily not a lot at all. I was planning on posting some statistics today for the site but since they would be skewed, I will be waiting until tomorrow.

I forgot to add earlier, I currently require the visitor to enter their email address and their name. I want their name since I want the weekly newsletters to be at least semi personal.
 
I'm not around here as often as I got a real job.

But you seem different than other noobies, mainly because your sentences are structured correctly.

Anyways, if this is an investing niche, I got great results from a newsletter type thing I did for a friend. I do a lot of Machine Learning, if you're not too afraid of coding, I'd do a simple algorithm to give "picks" on the stock market based on past data. Hell, there are a bunch of excel add ins that do time series prediction, throw some Yahoo historical data in there and give your newsletter some stock picks.

Advertising picks is a great way to get signups to a newsletter, especially a "Sign up now to receive Tomorrow's exclusive top picks!" type of deal.

Additionally, your stock picks will statistically do better than most of the retards that usually sign up for investing mailing lists etc. so they'll actually get value out of it and probably convert multiple times on different offers.

Tread carefully though, and never actually invest in any of these picks or the FTC will fuck you in the ass for Pump & Dump. Either way, I'd just use it as some bait for investors to sign up for and then do what you're doing already aka shoving any investing related offer in their face periodically.

Anyways, wish ya luck, may thoust bank hard and often.
 
ptpatil said:
I'm not around here as often as I got a real job.

But you seem different than other noobies, mainly because your sentences are structured correctly.

Anyways, if this is an investing niche, I got great results from a newsletter type thing I did for a friend. I do a lot of Machine Learning, if you're not too afraid of coding, I'd do a simple algorithm to give "picks" on the stock market based on past data. Hell, there are a bunch of excel add ins that do time series prediction, throw some Yahoo historical data in there and give your newsletter some stock picks.

Advertising picks is a great way to get signups to a newsletter, especially a "Sign up now to receive Tomorrow's exclusive top picks!" type of deal.

Additionally, your stock picks will statistically do better than most of the retards that usually sign up for investing mailing lists etc. so they'll actually get value out of it and probably convert multiple times on different offers.

Tread carefully though, and never actually invest in any of these picks or the FTC will fuck you in the ass for Pump & Dump. Either way, I'd just use it as some bait for investors to sign up for and then do what you're doing already aka shoving any investing related offer in their face periodically.

Anyways, wish ya luck, may thoust bank hard and often.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the compliment ptpatil (if it was one). Regarding the coding and stock picks, I'll take a look into that. May come in handy to entice more subs and keep them around for more offers later down the road.
 
Haha yea, it was definitely a compliment.

Also, as a general PPC tip (really any paid traffic tip), for the most part the cost of a keyword or traffic in a certain category reflects how much that traffic or niche is worth in terms of visitors (every click).

A lot of people go about PPC trying to find "secret" keywords or specific ones to try a lower cost, which is definitely a good thing. But they often forget about what that cost for the keywords mean, it also means that someone is profitable at that price (again, for the most part, especially on established keywords).

This means that should be your target revenue per click, I usually shoot for double. And, if your not in the black, you should take a look at your funnel as well and optimize it the best you can. You are essentially paying to get the people you want in the sales funnel you want, make sure you get as much as you can from each successful conversion.

For investment niches, mailing lists were often above at least $90+ in lifetime revenue per member on the list for my buddy's ops. This makes it far far easier to setup successful campaigns.
 
Thanks for the tips ptpatil. I never thought about targeting a specific keyword, I really just want the most targeted traffic I can get. I feel I can make a good amount off of this traffic, reason being I've earned some nice coin from past leads that turned into clients.

In regards to the stats I was going to post today. I still am but need to calculate the data a bit differently, MailChimp has been a pain, I caught the same problem from yesterday even though I thought I fixed it. Will be posting the stats tonight, just need to remove the traffic that is still skewed.
 
Following this thread...

Man, PPC is so much more fun than SEO! It's been a little while for me (in terms of affiliate offers, I've been doing big things with local lead gen via Adwords), but this inspired me to get back at it.

PPC is fastball compare to organic. I love finding a good offer, choosing and angle, whipping up a sweet lander with tracking, and then running some paid traffic. It's seriously a thrill, somewhat like educated gambling.

It really sucks that Adwords is so against bridge pages though, I've gotten rather good with Adwords optimization and tracking over the last year. I actually took a client to #1 in their city for (INSERT BUSINESS) with just a simple lander, split testing, and some good tracking.

Now I've decided to give affiliate offers another go. I chose an offer in the gaming niche with a fairly low payout (CPA). I guess I'll try out Bing, but I feel like there is so much more opportunity with custom image ads and Bing only has text ads - I've done some pretty powerful things with animated banners. That or, maybe I should give FB another shot....

Good luck man.
 
metalshark said:
Following this thread...

Man, PPC is so much more fun than SEO! It's been a little while for me (in terms of affiliate offers, I've been doing big things with local lead gen via Adwords), but this inspired me to get back at it.

PPC is fastball compare to organic. I love finding a good offer, choosing and angle, whipping up a sweet lander with tracking, and then running some paid traffic. It's seriously a thrill, somewhat like educated gambling.

It really sucks that Adwords is so against bridge pages though, I've gotten rather good with Adwords optimization and tracking over the last year. I actually took a client to #1 in their city for (INSERT BUSINESS) with just a simple lander, split testing, and some good tracking.

Now I've decided to give affiliate offers another go. I chose an offer in the gaming niche with a fairly low payout (CPA). I guess I'll try out Bing, but I feel like there is so much more opportunity with custom image ads and Bing only has text ads - I've done some pretty powerful things with animated banners. That or, maybe I should give FB another shot....

Good luck man.
Click to expand...

Facebook is rather touchy. They banned my account a couple weeks ago because of irregular logins out of nowhere. I guessed since I logged in from somewhere else than my home computer it somehow got a red flag. I got that fixed up but they barely have any kind of support team, it appears to be mostly automated. Just don't piss them off..

And regarding Bing Ads, isn't there a lot of problems on there? Someone here mentioned the watered down traffic it has. Anyways, good luck.
 
Just a quick update. Turns out the problem I have been having for a couple days has been due to a change I made with MailChimp. I'm pretty sure it is completely fixed now. I'll be checking a couple times tonight to make sure it still works. For some reason before it would work for a second and then decide not to the next.

So with that said, I will finally be posting proper stats tomorrow evening (I get a lot of traffic around 4-6pm).

To keep today interesting, I should update about how my ads on Facebook are doing. I created two different ads to start out with. Currently Ad A has a CTR of 0.048% and Ad B has a CTR of 0.042% (They both have been increasing daily). I will give it another day or so and then choose the best ad and focus on that one by making different variations of it to see what could work better. Eliquid made a great note in his awesome thread that I am using in this journal, which is working with only 2 ads and split testing off of those two.
 
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Actually, ya know I was looking for a fun project to do, so I'm going to start working on a Django deployment of a neural network or SVM to track given ticker symbols with the Yahoo Finance API and recommend picks. I'll be using PyBrain and webfaction as hosting.

I wanna trade in my current car (word to the wise, the new X1s suck); so lets see if I can get enough revenue from my own list to cover it. Don't worry, I won't touch FB or any ad platform your using (I'll probably use Adwords). Maybe this will make the thread interesting with a little friendly competition :)

Once I'm done with the django app you can use it or get the source to host on your own server if you want and see if it helps you with this current project. I really don't care if people copy it since its not my bread and butter but maybe it can help some people who aren't afraid to put in a little elbow grease.

The domain for my capture point for leads as well as the prediction app is going to be NeuralTip.com

Just gonna throw up a WP site on there and have a particular URL be the endpoint for the django app.
 
ptpatil said:
Actually, ya know I was looking for a fun project to do, so I'm going to start working on a Django deployment of a neural network or SVM to track given ticker symbols with the Yahoo Finance API and recommend picks. I'll be using PyBrain and webfaction as hosting.

I wanna trade in my current car (word to the wise, the new X1s suck); so lets see if I can get enough revenue from my own list to cover it. Don't worry, I won't touch FB or any ad platform your using (I'll probably use Adwords). Maybe this will make the thread interesting with a little friendly competition :)

Once I'm done with the django app you can use it or get the source to host on your own server if you want and see if it helps you with this current project. I really don't care if people copy it since its not my bread and butter but maybe it can help some people who aren't afraid to put in a little elbow grease.

The domain for my capture point for leads as well as the prediction app is going to be NeuralTip.com

Just gonna throw up a WP site on there and have a particular URL be the endpoint for the django app.
Click to expand...

Sounds like fun, I'd be interested to see how successful it can be. Keep me updated on the progress you make.
 
knownerror said:
And regarding Bing Ads, isn't there a lot of problems on there? Someone here mentioned the watered down traffic it has. Anyways, good luck.
Click to expand...

Bing traffic has never done anything great for me. Bing allows you to import your adwords account with all its settings (sans image ads), and even some of my best campaigns didn't turn anything.

Since my new project is in the gaming niche and is "free", I believe I may give FB a go. I ran dating on FB in the past and saw conversions, but couldn't seem to profit. I also looked into some media buys from other gaming niche website that sell adspace. That actually looks like it may be a decent idea, but I'd want to do some light testing before I commit to it.
 
OK, update on my site today (btw, knownerror if you want me to fuck off and create my own thread thats A-OK just let me know).

So usually what I do with brand sites that I want to advertise via PPC is I actually give it some SEO and some link love. Because I used and am going to use mostly Adwords, this is important. Google cares about what is advertised on their networks, and they will make PPC expensive for sites that are shitty and unknown.

One of my friends works for the Big G, they even have Machine Learning applications that take IMAGES of your lander/PPC target URL and decide how user friendly it is (they do this via Deep Learning, Google it). Its not the only metric they use, but they use it as a attribute in their PPC bid priority algo.

So, I made sure my site is nice, clean and web 2.0 like, most spammy landers tend to use color palettes that are wildly bright and contrasting, you can take a look at my lander and notice that only a few colors are used.

Next, I ordered a few high quality links from this dude on BST, a bit expensive but hell you're going to be spending PER CLICK, might as well invest now in anything that can reduce your continous costs with a one time cost:
http://www.wickedfire.com/links-seo/177026-brand-builder-club-authority-high-pr-magazine-posts.html

I don't know how good it is, but judging from reviews given by people that are not fucking morons on this site it looks good enough. This starts to complete the 2nd part of my "Pre-PPC preparation" equation (Nice Looks + Authority link love).

I will wait for ~3-4 weeks before starting PPC to let the site marinate in the link love. In the mean time I'll work on my funnel and my Mailing list progression of emails as well as the prediction app.
 
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