Made $11,600+ with Google Ads affiliate in 8 months — $0.04 avg CPC (screenshots inside)

As per checked, all programs he running is prohibited from brand name bidding (PPC) - including Everbee
 
As per checked, all programs he running is prohibited from brand name bidding (PPC) - including Everbee
Covered this earlier in the thread (post #30). Aware of the brand bidding prohibition that's the calculated risk mentioned. the commissions and data in the screenshots are real regardless. Anyone replicating this should verify TOS themselves and factor in the clawback risk before scaling. Not advising anyone to violate program terms just sharing what worked with full awareness of the downside.
brand bidding on saas affiliates is underrated, $0.04 cpc is crazy tho. good point about checking TOS first, seen guys get thier commissions clawed back for bidding on brand terms without permission
$0.04 is real screenshots in OP. Clawback risk is real too. Best practice: keep brand bidding campaigns isolated from compliant campaigns. Track at campaign and keyword level so if a program audits, you can kill specific traffic immediately without touching everything else. don't mix them in the same affiliate account if you want clean data and limited blast radius.

Awesome run! Don't forget to test Clickbank offers ;)
Worth testing for established Clickbank products with real brand recognition and search volume. The SaaS angle works specifically because people are already searching the brand name with buying intent and there's almost no advertiser competition on those brand terms. Most Clickbank products don't have that yet. Different research process — check brand search volume and CPC competition data first.

Rock solid method. And anyone can scale this too. If with the right brand. One question though..I always assumed some affiliates where doing this already? Why do you think the model they use now persists. Because its a celebrity popular award show? There's no other explanation. The typical affliate model is not made for tricks. Its made for people with huge audiences. That got that way the hard way. Or am I wrong?

I will be the first to admit. I dont know much about the affiliate game. However, I do know gatekeeping on their part. When I see it!
Most affiliates go SEO/content because it requires no upfront spend and scales passively. Paid brand bidding needs active management, ongoing budget, and you're always one enforcement away from a clawback. The people doing this at scale quietly don't advertise it. The method is counterintuitive and the risk profile doesn't suit most affiliates — that's what keeps CPCs cheap. If everyone did it the CPC would normalize.
 
Hey guys,

Been lurking and testing for a while. Finally have enough data to share something worth reading.

I run Google Search Ads sending traffic directly to affiliate links. No landing page, no funnel, no email list. Just ads → ref link → commissions. Total earned across two programs over roughly 8 months: $11,689.

I'll break down exactly what I did.

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The two programs I ran:

HeyGen (AI video tool) — heygen.getrewardful.com
- Total earned: $7,552.81
- Visitors sent: 103,823
- Leads: 16,165
- Conversions: 407
- Commission: 35% on all payments in first 3 months

Rork (AI app builder) — affilates.rork.com
- Total earned: $4,136.50
- Clicks: 22,775
- Customers: 279
- Commission: 20% recurring

Monthly ad spend: around $500. Monthly revenue: around $3,000. That's roughly 6x on spend, consistently.

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The method — brand keyword bidding

Most affiliates either do SEO or send paid traffic to a review blog. I skipped both.

Instead I bid directly on the brand name in Google Search. So when someone types "HeyGen" or "HeyGen pricing" into Google, my ad shows up. They click, land on the HeyGen signup page via my ref link, buy — I get paid.

Why does this work?

Someone searching for a product by name already knows what it is. They're not browsing. They're one step away from buying. That intent is worth a lot — but most people don't think to bid on it because it feels too simple.

The other thing: there's almost zero competition on these brand terms. Not many affiliates run paid ads. So CPCs stay dirt cheap.

My average CPC across both campaigns: $0.04.

At $500/month that's around 12,500 clicks. You don't need a crazy conversion rate to make the math work.

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How I set it up

Pick your offer first. What I look for:
- SaaS tool with a real affiliate program (not Amazon-level 3% commissions)
- Product that people actually search by name — meaning there's existing search volume
- Cookie window of at least 30 days
- Commission that makes sense at low ticket or has recurring upside

For keywords, I target exact and phrase match only. Never broad.

Examples of what I bid on:
[heygen]
"heygen pricing"
"heygen review"
"heygen free trial"
[rork ai]
"rork app builder"

I keep it tight. One campaign per offer, separate ad groups for different intent clusters (brand, brand+pricing, brand+alternative).

Starting bid I usually set around $0.10 max CPC and let it settle. Google pushes it down fast when your Quality Score is decent — and it will be decent because your ad is directly relevant to the search.

For ad copy I don't try to impersonate the brand. I write it as a referral:

Example for HeyGen:
Headline 1: HeyGen — Start Free Today
Headline 2: AI Video Tool Trusted by Creators Worldwide
Headline 3: No Credit Card Required
Description: Generate studio-quality AI videos in minutes. Supports 40+ languages. Try it free now.

Clean, relevant, no tricks. Google rewards this with lower CPCs.

For the destination URL — I send straight to my affiliate link. No intermediate page. For brand searches where someone already knows the product, the product's own landing page converts better than anything I'd build anyway. One less step = less drop-off.

---

What I'd do differently

Early on I wasted about 3 weeks testing broad match keywords. Burned maybe $200 for almost nothing. The lesson: if you're bidding on brand terms, exact and phrase match only. Broad will serve your ad to people who never heard of the product.

Also — check the affiliate program TOS before running paid ads. Some programs explicitly prohibit bidding on their brand terms. Both HeyGen and Rork allowed it. Always verify first.

---

Where I'm at now

HeyGen is shutting down their affiliate program on June 22, 2026 — so that income stream closes soon. I'm already shifting budget to test 3 other AI SaaS programs with similar search volume. Will post an update when I have meaningful data.

Rork is still running. That $4,136 came from 279 customers, which tells me the product converts well once people land on it.

---

Happy to answer questions on campaign structure, how to find programs worth bidding on, or anything else. Drop them below.
What geos were you targeting, and did CPC/conversion rate vary significantly by country?
 
This is exactly what I was thinking when reading this thread.. IYKYK.
What geos were you targeting, and did CPC/conversion rate vary significantly by country?
Both of these come down to the same thing so let me answer them together, and add screenshots since the CPC number keeps coming up.On geo. I wasn't targeting US only. Location setting is All countries and territories, language All languages. Screenshot of the campaign settings attached.That's the whole explanation for the CPC. Loveoverenvy is right that you can't get $0.04 in the US, nobody can, and I never claimed I was running US traffic. The average across all geos is what's low, because the volume comes from tier 2 and tier 3 markets where brand terms have almost no competition. Someone in Indonesia searching a SaaS brand name costs a fraction of what the same search costs in California.Second screenshot is the campaign table. The heygen search campaign: 134,151 impressions, 50,486 clicks, $860.40 spend, avg CPC $0.02. Account total across all campaigns is $1,565.75 for 53,352 clicks, so $0.03 average. Date range on the screenshot is Jan 6 to Aug 17.Note the brightdata row in the same screenshot, $1.70 avg CPC. Same account, same setup, 85x the cost per click. That's what happens when a brand term actually has competition on it. I'm not cherry picking the cheap one and hiding the rest, they're both in the same table.One thing I should flag before someone else spots it. Conversions column shows 0.00 on the heygen campaign. That's not a mistake and the campaign wasn't failing. I never set up Google Ads conversion tracking on these, because traffic goes straight to the merchant's page and there's no pixel on my side to fire. All commission tracking happens in the affiliate dashboard, which is where the $7,552 figure in the OP came from. I mentioned this earlier in the thread when someone asked about conversion measurement, but it's worth repeating since it looks bad without context.On the conversion rate by country question, yes it varies a lot and roughly inversely to CPC. Tier 1 traffic converts several times better but costs much more per click. Tier 3 is cheap but a lot of it never buys. The blended result is what made the math work, not any single geo being great on its own.Fair enough on the skepticism by the way. A $0.04 average with no context does sound made up, and I should have put the geo setting in the original post instead of making people ask.
 

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ah yes makes sense for those tiers. what were your tier 1 avg cpc's then?
Tier 1 is expensive, exactly like people said it would be. Pulled the matched locations report so you can see it broken out. Screenshot attached. United States: 59 clicks, 220 impressions, avg CPC $2.17, $127.84 spent. So US is running at $2.17 per click on brand terms. That's actually well above the $0.30 floor Loveoverenvy mentioned, not below it. He was right about the principle and if anything understated how expensive tier 1 gets. Compare that to the same account in tier 3. Afghanistan $0.01, Syria $0.01, Ethiopia $0.01, Senegal $0.02, Dominican Republic $0.02, Serbia $0.03. The interesting part is the ratio. US accounted for 59 of 53,352 clicks, so roughly 0.1% of volume, but $127.84 of $1,565.75 in spend which is about 8%. One tenth of a percent of the traffic eating eight percent of the budget. That's the whole reason the blended average lands at $0.03. Worth saying that 59 clicks is a small sample, so I wouldn't treat $2.17 as a reliable US benchmark. It's directionally right but the confidence interval on 59 clicks is wide. If someone wanted a real US number they'd need to run US only with proper budget behind it. Also worth noting the CTR difference. US came in at 26.82% versus 15.69% account average. Tier 1 intent is genuinely better, it just costs 70x more to buy.
 

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