If I start an adwords account and I promote various different affiliate offers, testing them to see what works best of course, can I expect at least a 1% conversion rate or at least making my money back in most cases considering it's targeted leads?

I'm going to go to my various affiliate networks and find offers that pay enough, have a high EPC and have a good landing page and then I will target specific keywords based on the ad. I realize this will need a lot of testing, but I just wanted some pointers from the pros, whether I can at least be making a 1% conversion or my money back at first while testing. The goal is to get it to where I find the best offers and I'm eventually making a ROI.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

EDIT: Sorry, worded the question wrong. I meant to say can I expect my money back or at least a 1% conversion? Not the other way around...

1% conversion can be tough, especially on Google .. Getting your ad live is the bigeest challenge! Google HATE affiliates! If it's your own product, then you can make a killing from the G, but they are cracking down hard on affiliates, regardless of how ethical your marketing is

Originally Posted by ContentCreation

1% conversion can be tough, especially on Google .. Getting your ad live is the bigeest challenge! Google HATE affiliates! If it's your own product, then you can make a killing from the G, but they are cracking down hard on affiliates, regardless of how ethical your marketing is

What if I go from a bit.ly link to my affiliate link? Or what if I create a website which then has the affiliate banner on it? What are my options for doing affiliate marketing and getting accepted with adwords? I want to know what would be the most profitable form of doing this so I can test different things or just a direction to go with this at the beginning?

Testing ppc costs money, if you aren't prepared to lose money testing then don't bother. Ie. say you want to test whether 100 keywords convert or not on adwords search, it's gonna cost money to run and track those. Lots of them will not convert and you will lose money testing those to find keywords that are profitable. Same thing applies to the content network. You have to spend money, usually hundreds of dollars to eliminate non-converting sites. Don't fool yourself into expecting you are going to break even or convert at x% right away, it's not realistic.

Dont get your hopes high.

Google has a monopoly structured business. They inflate click prices with their ridiculous "quality score" bullshit that they assign on different keywords. And the only reason why this is happening is because there is no de facto alternative to them. Pure monopoly.

In the end of the day their platform requires you to lose a substantial amount of money before you get a good understanding how to optimize the campaign.

If you do decide to test things out I encourage you to give huge emphasize on tracking your goals properly so you can filter out the non converting keywords.

Another good idea might be to test adwords vouchers. I can't say I had success with those because I had only one account that worked through....nontheless I know people that use them on a daily basis. U just got to be real smart about it.

Originally Posted by Whisker

Testing ppc costs money, if you aren't prepared to lose money testing then don't bother. Ie. say you want to test whether 100 keywords convert or not on adwords search, it's gonna cost money to run and track those. Lots of them will not convert and you will lose money testing those to find keywords that are profitable. Same thing applies to the content network. You have to spend money, usually hundreds of dollars to eliminate non-converting sites. Don't fool yourself into expecting you are going to break even or convert at x% right away, it's not realistic.

That's why I said "I realize I'm going to have to do a lot of testing" and I'm prepared to lose money. I don't at all think that I will be profitable in this right off the bat. Like I said, I was just looking for some pointers and info from the pros on what direction to go and helpful tips, which I have gotten from all of you thus far.

I know I'm going to lose money along the way. I just hope to make money in the long run. Do you guys have any pointers on what to look out for or what to do and not to do when promoting affiliate link offers?

Thanks for the info all three of you!

Yep that's cool as long as you're being realistic about it. Your thread title and OP says "at least be making a 1% conversion or my money back at first while testing.", I'm letting you know that's prolly not gonna happen.

It's not to dissuade you, it's so you aren't in a cloud of delusion. Look into and research the adwords conversion optimizer, it can do a lot of optimizing automatically for you in regards to anything cpa based. Try to stick to clean leadgen offers and nothing that has a hint of scam. Direct linking cpa stuff on adwords search these days can be a bitch, I would give their content network a shot.

Originally Posted by Whisker

Yep that's cool as long as you're being realistic about it. Your thread title and OP says "at least be making a 1% conversion or my money back at first while testing.", I'm letting you know that's prolly not gonna happen.

It's not to dissuade you, it's so you aren't in a cloud of delusion. Look into and research the adwords conversion optimizer, it can do a lot of optimizing automatically for you in regards to anything cpa based. Try to stick to clean leadgen offers and nothing that has a hint of scam. Direct linking cpa stuff on adwords search these days can be a bitch, I would give their content network a shot.

So will they allow the Google Affiliate network offers direct linking to the offer with no troubles?

Otherwise it seems like my best bet is to send traffic to my own website(s) or create websites around products I buy in bulk and re-sell, right?

You're obviously looking for some paid advertising that you can guarantee a little bit of of a return with relative ease like a bank account, but that's just not going to happen with adwords.

Adwords do not like affiliate marketers and consequently give affiliate pages lower quality scores. You can list build on the page and sell later, but they give a lower quality score to sites with the explicit intent of gathering user data. N.B. I say explicit, so if you're a major site with a little email sub box but the main part of the landing page is not the email/data gathering part you won't be penalized. For you that's useless since if you can't sell on the page and you can't explicitly have a big "ENTER YOUR EMAIL FOR SOMETHING AMAZING!" then you're not going to get many emails/sales.

Adwords are really interested in businesses and product owners rather than affiliates since affiliate marketing is generally quite shady. In the past you could make great money on adwords as an affiliate but these days you really need to have your own product. Also with your own product your margins are MUCH higher. Affiliate marketers have a hard time competing against product owners because of the margins even when the affiliate marketer can get his page live with an ok quality score.

So your options are either to create your own product and use adwords, or if go for something like facebook's advertising program as it's better suited to affiliates just now. Plenty of Fish is an option too, but most find facebook easier.

You've also got the option of media buys which can be a hit or a miss. You might find you're really good at it, but it's certainly not easy. Generally though all paid advertising requires a large starting budget because what you want to be able to do is take say $10,000 and just run a whole bunch of campaigns, record the results and then pump more money into the campaigns that turned out to be profitable. If you burn $10k you're bound to find some profitable campaigns and the more you burn the more likely you are to find a profitable campaign.

Obviously that requires very deep pockets though which is why there aren't that many regular marketers who do well in paid advertising.

Originally Posted by Brainstorming

So will they allow the Google Affiliate network offers direct linking to the offer with no troubles?

Otherwise it seems like my best bet is to send traffic to my own website(s) or create websites around products I buy in bulk and re-sell, right?

You can't set an affiliate link as your landing page on adwords, no.

Originally Posted by BlueTurtle

You're obviously looking for some paid advertising that you can guarantee a little bit of of a return with relative ease like a bank account, but that's just not going to happen with adwords.

Adwords do not like affiliate marketers and consequently give affiliate pages lower quality scores. You can list build on the page and sell later, but they give a lower quality score to sites with the explicit intent of gathering user data. N.B. I say explicit, so if you're a major site with a little email sub box but the main part of the landing page is not the email/data gathering part you won't be penalized. For you that's useless since if you can't sell on the page and you can't explicitly have a big "ENTER YOUR EMAIL FOR SOMETHING AMAZING!" then you're not going to get many emails/sales.

Adwords are really interested in businesses and product owners rather than affiliates since affiliate marketing is generally quite shady. In the past you could make great money on adwords as an affiliate but these days you really need to have your own product. Also with your own product your margins are MUCH higher. Affiliate marketers have a hard time competing against product owners because of the margins even when the affiliate marketer can get his page live with an ok quality score.

So your options are either to create your own product and use adwords, or if go for something like facebook's advertising program as it's better suited to affiliates just now. Plenty of Fish is an option too, but most find facebook easier.

You've also got the option of media buys which can be a hit or a miss. You might find you're really good at it, but it's certainly not easy. Generally though all paid advertising requires a large starting budget because what you want to be able to do is take say $10,000 and just run a whole bunch of campaigns, record the results and then pump more money into the campaigns that turned out to be profitable. If you burn $10k you're bound to find some profitable campaigns and the more you burn the more likely you are to find a profitable campaign.

Obviously that requires very deep pockets though which is why there aren't that many regular marketers who do well in paid advertising.





You can't set an affiliate link as your landing page on adwords, no.

If I redirect through say bit.ly or something and that's the link I provide, will they still be able to look into it enough where they see that it was an affiliate link? Like for the affiliate links that once they are visited, it tracks you through cookies and only shows amazon.com for example, opposed to still being in the address bar.

I guess what I'm getting at is, if I want to try with affiliate offers and want to try them on Adwords, what do I need to do? Create my own website/landing page with a banner that then links to the offer, or what would my options be? Obviously I know different methods, I'm just wondering what Adwords will accept, because you guys obviously have a pretty good idea of what will be accepted and declined.

I've tried with Facebook. I had a little success, but overall it wasn't worth it with conversions.

As far as money goes, that's not really an issue. I have money to spare testing ads and was actually planning on multiple campaigns with a few thousand between all offers after doing a ton of research, putting together good worded ads and finding affiliates with good landing pages that seem believable or an actual real product opposed to a scam. You guys are kinda making me second guess even trying this though since you say they won't accept affiliate links and that's pretty much what my whole thing was based around. Hopefully there are just certain things I need to do to have affiliate offers accepted?

You guys are the experts and I'll take your word. I couldn't be more thankful either! You guys have all saved me countless hours of research, confusion and frustration.

Hi there.

A 1% conversion rate is definitely achievable.... In fact that's really the minimum you should be aiming for, especially if you're using highly targeted keywords. If your keywords are targeted, then it really just comes down to your landing page. If you'd like, message me your landing page URL and I'll be happy to give you some feedback.

Cheers.

Originally Posted by ClickClickMedia

Hi there.

A 1% conversion rate is definitely achievable.... In fact that's really the minimum you should be aiming for, especially if you're using highly targeted keywords. If your keywords are targeted, then it really just comes down to your landing page. If you'd like, message me your landing page URL and I'll be happy to give you some feedback.

Cheers.

Message sent. Hopefully you have skype so we can chat real quick about it.

1% is more than doable, just make sure you have a well structured landing page. Add testimonials, images of people using the product, clear calls to action, and if possible a video. But keep in mind, how much you spend per click will fluctuate depending on your experience with PPC. Knowing what keywords to bid on, how much to bid on, etc. will determine how much you are paying per click. Also, the relevancy of your landing page and impressions & clicks will dictate your quality score and affect your cost per click as well. If your going to be throwing money at Google do everything you can to lower your cost per click.

^ spot on.

Originally Posted by ozone100

1% is more than doable, just make sure you have a well structured landing page. Add testimonials, images of people using the product, clear calls to action, and if possible a video. But keep in mind, how much you spend per click will fluctuate depending on your experience with PPC. Knowing what keywords to bid on, how much to bid on, etc. will determine how much you are paying per click. Also, the relevancy of your landing page and impressions & clicks will dictate your quality score and affect your cost per click as well. If your going to be throwing money at Google do everything you can to lower your cost per click.

Interesting, thanks. Now, in the past I have promoted my website on an old account a year or two back, but completely forgot the details and made a different account instead. Is it a problem if a make a campaign on the new account for the website again or will they not allow that?

Originally Posted by Brainstorming

If I redirect through say bitly or something and that's the link I provide, will they still be able to look into it enough where they see that it was an affiliate link? Like for the affiliate links that once they are visited, it tracks you through cookies and only shows amazoncom for example, opposed to still being in the address bar.

I guess what I'm getting at is, if I want to try with affiliate offers and want to try them on Adwords, what do I need to do? Create my own website/landing page with a banner that then links to the offer, or what would my options be? Obviously I know different methods, I'm just wondering what Adwords will accept, because you guys obviously have a pretty good idea of what will be accepted and declined.

I've tried with Facebook. I had a little success, but overall it wasn't worth it with conversions.

As far as money goes, that's not really an issue. I have money to spare testing ads and was actually planning on multiple campaigns with a few thousand between all offers after doing a ton of research, putting together good worded ads and finding affiliates with good landing pages that seem believable or an actual real product opposed to a scam. You guys are kinda making me second guess even trying this though since you say they won't accept affiliate links and that's pretty much what my whole thing was based around. Hopefully there are just certain things I need to do to have affiliate offers accepted?

You guys are the experts and I'll take your word. I couldn't be more thankful either! You guys have all saved me countless hours of research, confusion and frustration.

Affiliate marketing with adwords is harder than affiliate marketing with facebook. So you can draw conclusions from that.

You can't use url shorteners with adwords. Your display url must match your destination url. They're very strict about that.

You can have a landing page with a banner, sure, but that's not going to convert well. That compounded with the fact affiliate commissions are low unless you're talking about CPA, but then you're REALLY into shady territory. They don't like CPA at all. I've not done adwords in a couple of years so I'm not sure on the exact current rules about CPA but they certainly won't allow any of the high paying CPA offers, biz ops, diet stuff etc.

Email submits and the like won't have an epc high enough for adwords and CPS for physical products provides far too low a commission to compete directly with the retailers.

Your options are just very limited. There's some people still making money with CPA on adwords I'm sure, but it's an uphill battle.

If you have a few thousand to spend then why not just take the easy road? Create your own product and sell it through adwords. Info products are easy to create.

Originally Posted by BlueTurtle

Affiliate marketing with adwords is harder than affiliate marketing with facebook. So you can draw conclusions from that.

You can't use url shorteners with adwords. Your display url must match your destination url. They're very strict about that.

You can have a landing page with a banner, sure, but that's not going to convert well. That compounded with the fact affiliate commissions are low unless you're talking about CPA, but then you're REALLY into shady territory. They don't like CPA at all. I've not done adwords in a couple of years so I'm not sure on the exact current rules about CPA but they certainly won't allow any of the high paying CPA offers, biz ops, diet stuff etc.

Email submits and the like won't have an epc high enough for adwords and CPS for physical products provides far too low a commission to compete directly with the retailers.

Your options are just very limited. There's some people still making money with CPA on adwords I'm sure, but it's an uphill battle.

If you have a few thousand to spend then why not just take the easy road? Create your own product and sell it through adwords. Info products are easy to create.

Yeah, I was just thinking about creating my own product. But then I got to thinking "What can I create?". I was thinking maybe some E-books or something? Any other suggestions?

Also beside the above put in mind that with 1% conversion rate your commission per lead/sale must be higher than the cost of the 100 clicks so if your commission is 20$ then you have to make sure the cpc on adwords is < 0.20$

Originally Posted by Brainstorming

Yeah, I was just thinking about creating my own product. But then I got to thinking "What can I create?". I was thinking maybe some E-books or something? Any other suggestions?

Do some research. Go to a big magazine store and browse all the hobbyist mags. Check google trends/insights etc.

Originally Posted by Scripteen

Also beside the above put in mind that with 1% conversion rate your commission per lead/sale must be higher than the cost of the 100 clicks so if your commission is 20$ then you have to make sure the cpc on adwords is < 0.20$

Yes, indeed. This is why it's a losing battle with affiliate marketing. Not many things give a commission in affiliate marketing over $20 so realistically for say a $5 commission you'd be maxing out at $0.05 clicks which is minimum and 1% would only break even. 1% being quite hard to achieve too. You're up against the retailers who are making 40-60% profit margins on physical products or info product owners who make 100% profit margins so that gives them 5x-20x the breathing room you as an affiliate have.

Originally Posted by BlueTurtle

Do some research. Go to a big magazine store and browse all the hobbyist mags. Check google trends/insights etc.



Yes, indeed. This is why it's a losing battle with affiliate marketing. Not many things give a commission in affiliate marketing over $20 so realistically for say a $5 commission you'd be maxing out at $0.05 clicks which is minimum and 1% would only break even. 1% being quite hard to achieve too. You're up against the retailers who are making 40-60% profit margins on physical products or info product owners who make 100% profit margins so that gives them 5x-20x the breathing room you as an affiliate have.

Yeah, now that you put it that way, it's pretty clear I need to make my own website(s) selling different products.

Thanks for all the help so far guys!

Also, how quickly can I expect to use 100$ with about 500-1000 searches a day? All in one day, or can I control how fast or how slow? I probably should just test this, I just was curious real quick.