mrsmirf
Regular Member
- Aug 2, 2008
- 231
- 169
I was asked the following after stating my $10k average earnings on CJ.
For my Cj campaigns alone (I work with many other networks) I generally end up spending around $2k-2.5k on my PPC and media buys per month. It changes from month to month though. But lately been able to push down costs further by optimizing my landing pages with more text tweaking. Also it seems the longer the campaign history the cheaper the per click rate becomes. People usually set and forget landing pages that's like giving up on 50% of the battle. Yes keywords and adcopy are extremely important but once you find keywords that convert well you need to tweak your LP to bring down your bidding costs.
To start off I went through CJ and applied to a whole bunch of merchants I even contacted some telling them that I was going to put some serious effort in promoting them so if they had a better CPA or sales rate they should send me that offer. It worked a couple of times ofcourse those companies moved up to the top of the priority list. Then I slapped together some very generic landingpages (generic graphics and images) studied the merchants website to answer the simple question. "Why would anyone buy from you?" Once you figure that out you have all the best calls to action you can use on your landing pages. The key is K.I.S.S theory you have to Keep It Simple Stupid. Remember you usually have a few seconds to convince a buyer that your offering them exactly what they've been looking for. Don't worry about stuffing your page with details. The max amount of points you should stress are 10 if that. I try to stick to top 5 reasons that answer the why question.
Now depending on the niche you can pull up some wikipedia material to copy and shrink font size and have be directly below you ad text or graphics. I've experimented with making my page just an image so their bot can't read it and optimized the wiki article again to get a better quality score and bring down costs. This method works great and seems to be able to get a better Ctr from landing pages to the merchants page.
People often feel that these landing pages must be these masterpieces of art. That isn't the case trust me I'm no artist and I've been successful building my own. Your placement of words the flow through writing and calls to action are the most important factors. When you start finding sales then you can invest in a snappy graphics designer and such. Don't waste your money.
Anyways, now you've been accepted into a CJ merchants account also possible at a higher rate. You studied their pages developed 5 to 10 calls to action. Then you researched the market for keywords. A great way to do this is go to the merchants site look at their page source and hopefully there you will find meta tags with keywords or in their title tags. Now go to google and search up those keywords. Look at the top three ads and how their structured. The top ads are often the most successful. Try to experiment with variations of those ads or remix elements that they had. Also look at the top results in the search take a look at their source you should find more keywords to target for your PPC campaign and more to do testing with.
Now to the fun part you have your keywords ( you can use keyword tools on the web to find more), you have an idea of what successful ads look like and generic landing page has been put together. So all their is left to do is setup your campaigns on adwords (you can later on expand to other adnetworks, adwords tends to have the best quality traffic so always use them to test out campaigns first). Make sure to start off your per click bid high so you end up on the first page results. Make sure to also set a daily budget or you might end up with a nasty suprise the next time you login. Depending on competition, quality score, and ctr of your campaign you should never end up actually ever hitting your max bid. Make sure you also have a good tracking tool to log which keywords brought in traffic that ended up clicking through to merchants.
Split test your campaigns targeting only up to 10 keywords and make your ad copy highly customized to those campaigns. You can take this further when you land some keywords that convert and also customize your landing pages for those keywords to increase sales.
Now let it run for alteast a week to get a proper idea of how the keywords perform. Running a campaign for only a day is not useful enough info to make decisions with. At the end of the week take a look at the best preformers and try to figure out why. Then try applying it to the other variations and adgroups. The campaigns that are doing real bad dump them. The ones atleast covering your costs work on them some more they have great potential and the ones going great export those campaigns to other adnetworks to multiple your successes.
Finally move on to the next merchant and repeat the whole processes again. I use this process across several different cpa networks and its worked everytime.
I try to seekout merchants that are stable and not running limited time offers or campaigns. That means less work for you in the future (ie updating campaigns and such).
Good luck and much success to everyone. All it takes is a lil work. I'm sure once you see things working you'll be even more motivated to do better and better!
For my Cj campaigns alone (I work with many other networks) I generally end up spending around $2k-2.5k on my PPC and media buys per month. It changes from month to month though. But lately been able to push down costs further by optimizing my landing pages with more text tweaking. Also it seems the longer the campaign history the cheaper the per click rate becomes. People usually set and forget landing pages that's like giving up on 50% of the battle. Yes keywords and adcopy are extremely important but once you find keywords that convert well you need to tweak your LP to bring down your bidding costs.
To start off I went through CJ and applied to a whole bunch of merchants I even contacted some telling them that I was going to put some serious effort in promoting them so if they had a better CPA or sales rate they should send me that offer. It worked a couple of times ofcourse those companies moved up to the top of the priority list. Then I slapped together some very generic landingpages (generic graphics and images) studied the merchants website to answer the simple question. "Why would anyone buy from you?" Once you figure that out you have all the best calls to action you can use on your landing pages. The key is K.I.S.S theory you have to Keep It Simple Stupid. Remember you usually have a few seconds to convince a buyer that your offering them exactly what they've been looking for. Don't worry about stuffing your page with details. The max amount of points you should stress are 10 if that. I try to stick to top 5 reasons that answer the why question.
Now depending on the niche you can pull up some wikipedia material to copy and shrink font size and have be directly below you ad text or graphics. I've experimented with making my page just an image so their bot can't read it and optimized the wiki article again to get a better quality score and bring down costs. This method works great and seems to be able to get a better Ctr from landing pages to the merchants page.
People often feel that these landing pages must be these masterpieces of art. That isn't the case trust me I'm no artist and I've been successful building my own. Your placement of words the flow through writing and calls to action are the most important factors. When you start finding sales then you can invest in a snappy graphics designer and such. Don't waste your money.
Anyways, now you've been accepted into a CJ merchants account also possible at a higher rate. You studied their pages developed 5 to 10 calls to action. Then you researched the market for keywords. A great way to do this is go to the merchants site look at their page source and hopefully there you will find meta tags with keywords or in their title tags. Now go to google and search up those keywords. Look at the top three ads and how their structured. The top ads are often the most successful. Try to experiment with variations of those ads or remix elements that they had. Also look at the top results in the search take a look at their source you should find more keywords to target for your PPC campaign and more to do testing with.
Now to the fun part you have your keywords ( you can use keyword tools on the web to find more), you have an idea of what successful ads look like and generic landing page has been put together. So all their is left to do is setup your campaigns on adwords (you can later on expand to other adnetworks, adwords tends to have the best quality traffic so always use them to test out campaigns first). Make sure to start off your per click bid high so you end up on the first page results. Make sure to also set a daily budget or you might end up with a nasty suprise the next time you login. Depending on competition, quality score, and ctr of your campaign you should never end up actually ever hitting your max bid. Make sure you also have a good tracking tool to log which keywords brought in traffic that ended up clicking through to merchants.
Split test your campaigns targeting only up to 10 keywords and make your ad copy highly customized to those campaigns. You can take this further when you land some keywords that convert and also customize your landing pages for those keywords to increase sales.
Now let it run for alteast a week to get a proper idea of how the keywords perform. Running a campaign for only a day is not useful enough info to make decisions with. At the end of the week take a look at the best preformers and try to figure out why. Then try applying it to the other variations and adgroups. The campaigns that are doing real bad dump them. The ones atleast covering your costs work on them some more they have great potential and the ones going great export those campaigns to other adnetworks to multiple your successes.
Finally move on to the next merchant and repeat the whole processes again. I use this process across several different cpa networks and its worked everytime.
I try to seekout merchants that are stable and not running limited time offers or campaigns. That means less work for you in the future (ie updating campaigns and such).
Good luck and much success to everyone. All it takes is a lil work. I'm sure once you see things working you'll be even more motivated to do better and better!
