[Journey] Pay-Per-Call to $100/day

[Deleted member 859235]

Hello,

I've been a marketer for quite awhile online, but only found success once and that didn't last long due to issues out of my hand. I work as a contractor and I may possibly lose my contract in a few months which means I will lose my job. So I'm giving myself 90 days to find success and I'm going to post to this thread to hold myself accountable. I chose Pay-Per-Call because it's Whitehat and the explosion of mobile pay-per-click platforms. I won't reveal my niches, but will try to answer questions as I go along. I recently came across stoicism and I'm currently reading the meditations of marcus aurelius. It's a life changing book. I've also started going to the gym seriously too. My goal is to be financially independent and travel the world while also providing for my family.

Day 1:

• Set up 11 ad groups
• Set ad spend at $100/day

Results:

• Ad Spend: $203
• Revenue: $14
• Profit: -$189

Learnings:
I wasn't able to properly track which keyword the conversions came from because I think I set up the conversion phone tracking for too many seconds. I will try lowering it tonight. Google spent twice my budget even though my ad spend was only $100/day. I think I will lower ad spend to $50/day until quality score levels out and I get better idea for what keywords are working and what isn't.

 

[TheVigilante]

You using adwords for this ?

 

[Deleted member 859235]

You using adwords for this ?

Yes, I will also try using Bing and other platforms.

 

[adiseshu]

Good luck. You can try youtube ads.

 

[goodperson]

Recommend you reddit ads. it's cheap and effective

 

[Gravitylab]

@goodperson i am also doing paypercall but i never used other platforms, do we have paypercall option in reddit ads too? and any other platform also supports and can we setup the same camp as in adwors? if yes then please share the link to signup and ill see if it helps me. TIA

 

[Deleted member 859235]

Day 2:

• Removed 11 broad match modifier ad groups and decided to forego alpha-beta structure in favor of SKAG (single keyword ad groups)
• Added 10,500 national geo SKAG ad groups
• Added 32,000 SKAG keywords in broad match modifier, exact match, and phrase match
• Started to research keywords on Bing
• Lowered adwords call tracking conversion seconds from 150s to 90s for offer
• Uploaded 2 ads per SKAG ad group for a total of 21,000 ads
• Set bids at $1 due to targeting low competition keywords

Results:

• Ad Spend: $75
• Revenue: $0
• Profit: -$75

Learnings:

• SKAG has dropped my CPC to below $1 CPC instead of $6.50 avg like Day 1
• Following this guide for SKAG: https://klientboost.com/ppc/single-keyword-ad-groups/
• I'm hoping my conversion tracking will start to track properly now
• Using adwords editor now to bulk manage campaigns
• Researching a 2nd offer to begin a new campaign with
• Will start writing articles for local seo pay per call niche website in same niche
• Looking for adwords scripts that can help with campaign management
• Looking at different scripts to fend off bot traffic, clickguard is a contender
• Looking at using mouseflow to track onsite clicks
• Downloaded 200 pay-per-call templates from a call tracking platform account manager

 

[Deleted member 859235]

Day 3:

• Reduced ad group bid to $1.75 per ad group. I keep messing with the ad bids too much.
• Added 10 negative keywords that appeared in the search term reports.
• Found out that my conversion tracking isn't broken and that Google can take up to 24 hours to reflect conversions. So I may start checking conversions only on a weekly basis instead. I came from CPVLab before and it reports conversions differently with a SubID token and a hash from the CPA network so it's faster.
• Found a great webinar on Facebook Pay-Per-Call and I am reviewing some other courses to get more Pay-Per-Call tricks and Adwords knowledge under my belt
• I decided I am not going to optimize the campaign until I have at least a week's worth of data. So it's too early to change stuff ad group or keyword wise until I have more data, but I will add more negatives on a daily basis to trim the fat with keywords that are not relevant.

Results:

• Ad Spend: $163
• Revenue: $43
• Profit: -$120
• ROI: -73.62%
• Calls Generated: 35

Learnings:

• My quality score is really dependent on my CTR rate it seems!
• I ran GTMetrix on my landing page and found that my images are not optimized.
• I'm really investing time into learning Google Adwords because it seems like a massive platform and there's sometimes 10 ways to do 1 thing. You just have to find what works for you.
• I need to do some research on building effective landing pages. At the moment, I am repurposing ones I find on Google.
• I need a way to record phone calls. TrackDrive seems like a solution!

 

[Vlad71]

I would suggest you to start with lower ad budget, till you find you "gold mine" then increase the money to the ad.
Thats how I used to make fb ads, btw I am complete noob to ppc, can someone tells me how that works, and how you should gain traffic with that ?
Good luck

 

[xoomerz]

interesting thread. following

 

[wano]

My first time seeing a pay per call journey.

Good luck to you!

 

[Deleted member 859235]

I would suggest you to start with lower ad budget, till you find you "gold mine" then increase the money to the ad.
Thats how I used to make fb ads, btw I am complete noob to ppc, can someone tells me how that works, and how you should gain traffic with that ?
Good luck

Most people do the auto bid on FB, which is what I did in the past. Most of the keywords are "city + kw" so the competition is super low thus setting a lower MAX cpc will help I surmise. I am seeing 10/10 quality score on a lot of keywords. So my max CPC will not even matter at the point. Manual bidding is definitely the way to win. I don't want to give the power of my campaigns to google.

 

[IlyesPoke]

Good luck !

 

[seoxz]

I would suggest you to start with lower ad budget, till you find you "gold mine" then increase the money to the ad.
Thats how I used to make fb ads, btw I am complete noob to ppc, can someone tells me how that works, and how you should gain traffic with that ?
Good luck

Seems. Like you are expert in fb ppc can you please help me with that

 

[Holzr]

Following along. Good luck.

 

[Sristy]

All the best!!

 

[Deleted member 859235]

Day 4:

• Imported Google campaign into Bing to see how traffic would perform there. Bing makes this really easy with their import tool. I thought there would be a lot of errors, but the only thing I ran into were some policy violations for keywords but they got approved after I appealed.
• Testing out different max CPC bids on Google. I'm currently taking my avg cpc and adding about 30 cents to it
• Added additional 10,000 ads to my ad groups for this campaign
• Researched additional niche to start local pay-per-call SEO
• Bought dragon professional 6 to write articles. I can't really trust article writing services to write for me because every time I hire a writer, it comes out bad for some reason. But I guess, this is sort've one of those "you get what you pay for things". I absolutely hate writing articles because it takes me so long, but I've been watching some review articles of the new dragon professional software and it looks to have come along quite a ways since I last used it 6-8 years ago.
• I made a stealth FB account on one of my VPS so I can get pixeled on niches to spy on facebook funnnels. Facebook pay-per-call seems like my ultimate goal which is something I can hope to conquer within these 90 days.

Results:

• Ad Spend: $107
• Revenue: $22
• Profit: -$85
• ROI: -79.44%
• Calls Generated: 20
• Paid Calls: 3
• Call Conv Rate: 15%

Learnings:

• Revenue dropped off the cliff since yesterday, but obviously I think that's due to ad Google sending me less traffic than on Day 3.
• I'm really getting anxious to start optimizing, but I have to hold out for 5-6 more days so I can collect more data.
• I think I'm one of those marketers who was scared to spend money on campaigns, but I realize this is something I have to do in order to get positive ROI. Like meek mill says, "Scared money don't make no money".
• I think I'm going to use Bing to test out campaigns due to the lower competition and CPCs, then if I find something that's working I'll move it to Adwords. Google is currently raping my budget every day until the campaign gets optimized.
• Quality Scores are really high, most keywords are 8-10/10 which is awesome! The power of SKAG is crazy.
• Going to test out accelerated budget ad spend on Bing to see if that makes a difference.

See you guys back in the money lab tomorrow.

 

[honestIM]

Day 4:

• Imported Google campaign into Bing to see how traffic would perform there. Bing makes this really easy with their import tool. I thought there would be a lot of errors, but the only thing I ran into were some policy violations for keywords but they got approved after I appealed.
• Testing out different max CPC bids on Google. I'm currently taking my avg cpc and adding about 30 cents to it
• Added additional 10,000 ads to my ad groups for this campaign
• Researched additional niche to start local pay-per-call SEO
• Bought dragon professional 6 to write articles. I can't really trust article writing services to write for me because every time I hire a writer, it comes out bad for some reason. But I guess, this is sort've one of those "you get what you pay for things". I absolutely hate writing articles because it takes me so long, but I've been watching some review articles of the new dragon professional software and it looks to have come along quite a ways since I last used it 6-8 years ago.
• I made a stealth FB account on one of my VPS so I can get pixeled on niches to spy on facebook funnnels. Facebook pay-per-call seems like my ultimate goal which is something I can hope to conquer within these 90 days.

Results:

• Ad Spend: $107
• Revenue: $22
• Profit: -$85
• ROI: -79.44%
• Calls Generated: 20
• Paid Calls: 3
• Call Conv Rate: 15%

Learnings:

• Revenue dropped off the cliff since yesterday, but obviously I think that's due to ad Google sending me less traffic than on Day 3.
• I'm really getting anxious to start optimizing, but I have to hold out for 5-6 more days so I can collect more data.
• I think I'm one of those marketers who was scared to spend money on campaigns, but I realize this is something I have to do in order to get positive ROI. Like meek mill says, "Scared money don't make no money".
• I think I'm going to use Bing to test out campaigns due to the lower competition and CPCs, then if I find something that's working I'll move it to Adwords. Google is currently raping my budget every day until the campaign gets optimized.
• Quality Scores are really high, most keywords are 8-10/10 which is awesome! The power of SKAG is crazy.
• Going to test out accelerated budget at spend on Bing to see if that makes a difference.

See you guys back in the money lab tomorrow.

Good luck to your journey. One of the biggest issue that I found with call campaign using adwords is that CPC is really high with those keywords with buying intention. Example, i get paid $21 per call but each click to call easily cost me $5 and above. Assuming a 15% conversion ratio, every 10 calls that I receive only about 2 calls get converted, I will be getting around $42 and spending $50 or more. This results in negative ROI. Regardless of optimization, the CPC cost to target only mobile phone users for call campaign is really high.

Bing ad wise, you are not able to target specifically only mobile phone unlike adwords, in this case adword is still much better in terms of targeting. Facebook call campaign is equally expensive. I think the trick for facebook is content advertising rather than advertising the service directly in the hope that the content will go viral.

For call campaign, nowadays I prefer to focus on SEO and ranking local sites.

Example, plumping services in Chicago. [Best plumber in Armitage Ave] would be one of the keyword that I attempt to rank. As well as submitting this site to different business directories. Cost is much cheaper than advertising on adwords.

This is just one of the many ways to do this. Think and explore beyond this to get even more ideas.

 

[Deleted member 859235]

Good luck to your journey. One of the biggest issue that I found with call campaign using adwords is that CPC is really high with those keywords with buying intention. Example, i get paid $21 per call but each click to call easily cost me $5 and above. Assuming a 15% conversion ratio, every 10 calls that I receive only about 2 calls get converted, I will be getting around $42 and spending $50 or more. This results in negative ROI. Regardless of optimization, the CPC cost to target only mobile phone users for call campaign is really high.

Bing ad wise, you are not able to target specifically only mobile phone unlike adwords, in this case adword is still much better in terms of targeting. Facebook call campaign is equally expensive. I think the trick for facebook is content advertising rather than advertising the service directly in the hope that the content will go viral.

For call campaign, nowadays I prefer to focus on SEO and ranking local sites.

Example, plumping services in Chicago. [Best plumber in Armitage Ave] would be one of the keyword that I attempt to rank. As well as submitting this site to different business directories. Cost is much cheaper than advertising on adwords.

This is just one of the many ways to do this. Think and explore beyond this to get even more ideas.

I definitely agree on the ROI. The MATH part of CPA is always something to consider and will let you forecast what a campaign is worth or if continuing is worth it. You are actually able to target only mobile phones now on Bing (was previously available too but you couldn't decrease bid adjustment lower than 50% I believe). You set the Tablet and Desktop bid adjustments to "Decrease by 100%" and make your call extension only show your "phone number" without your website link. So your ad actually becomes a call-only ad. I am purposely avoiding Call-only on Google because of the higher CPC and less traffic available for Call-only. For SEO, I'm definitely on the same page but PPC will always be king if you can dial it in and find low competition keywords. It's all about account structure and campaign management.

 

[honestIM]

I definitely agree on the ROI. The MATH part of CPA is always something to consider and will let you forecast what a campaign is worth or if continuing is worth it. You are actually able to target only mobile phones now on Bing (was previously available too but you couldn't decrease bid adjustment lower than 50% I believe). You set the Tablet and Desktop bid adjustments to "Decrease by 100%" and make your call extension only show your "phone number" without your website link. So your ad actually becomes a call-only ad. I am purposely avoiding Call-only on Google because of the higher CPC and less traffic available for Call-only. For SEO, I'm definitely on the same page but PPC will always be king if you can dial it in and find low competition keywords. It's all about account structure and campaign management.

Low competition keywords.. hmm.. I think buying intention is equally important. When I first started call campaign, i had many conversions with cheap clicks with low buyer intention. So even when I was getting paid for conversion to calls that last more than 3 mins but eventually advertisers disabled my access to these campaigns due to POOR QUALITY leads (aka not converting into sales). So this might be something that you have to consider when running PPC campaign. Try to target only keywords with buying attention. I once had $4k commission reversed as advertiser was complaining to the network that the conversion are none buying traffic. So I ended up with losses on those campaigns that I ran for this particular advertiser.