New to affiliate marketing - need some advice

[Aveligand]

Hey guys!

I'm new to affiliate marketing (just started 3 days ago, in fact) and boy, am I addicted.

Here's what I've been doing for the past 3 days: I choose a popular affiliate product and started an Adwords PPC campaign with a $5 per day limit. Within 1 day, I had my first sale (beginner's luck because I haven't had any since. lol.) My average per click costs are 15 cents, and I've spent 8 dollars so far on marketing. But on the bright side, I've made $25 from that one single sale. Now have 2 unrelated questions regarding AM and adwords:

1. Why is that a lot of people create separate landing pages for their affiliate products? Is there an inherent disadvantage of just doing a direct affiliate link from Adwords, like what I've been doing?

2. Adwords seems to be giving me pissy fits. The first night of my campaign, I registered almost 5000 impressions. Then, myseriously, for the next 1 and a half days, it registered no impressions or clicks. Zip. Nada. I've since upped my daily limit to $50. Does that make a difference?

 

[sleepylee]

My short (and not fully developed answers):

1. You get to do your own tracking; you get to set the customer up for the sale; you may be able to get a higher quality score with adwords; some merchants don't like PPC->merchant

2. Is your maximum cpc too low? It will tell you if it is. Try upping your maximum cpc. Daily limit shouldn't matter. Contact Google (although be prepared for a long wait and an unhelpful answer).

 

[Aveligand]

Thanks for your reply, sleepylee

1. Ok, I can certainly see the case for that. But here's where I'm coming from: if you use a landing page, that'll mean the user has to go through google -> your landing page -> publisher squeeze page, rather than just google -> publisher squeeze page. So it means the visitor requires more clicks to go where you ultimately want him to (assuming all you want to do is promote the product). Isn't this kind of inefficient from a pure sales point of view? Besides, if the publisher is already doing a very good job selling the product on the squeeze page, what're the chances that you can do better on the landing page?

2. I don't think my price is too low. At least, that's what Google tells me. My problem is more like... they display my ads for a few hours, and then it goes totally MIA for the next 2 days before they display for another round. I don't know what's going on, since the ads weren't even hitting my $5 /day limit.

 

[griff]

did you check the 'date range' in the adwords? When i first started i had a campaign goin and couldnt see any impressions or clicks for a few days and got pissed.. turned out i had the 'date range' set to before i even had the campaign going and since google keeps your last setting.. i never noticed..

 

[john3232]

The most likely reasons that you you have stopped getting impressions is that your campaign was not as good as Google would have liked it and now you most probably have to pay more per click than $0.15. I hate it when it does this. It could also be the fact as mentioned above that you didn't use a landing page, but directly had the affiliate link in your campaign.