- Dec 18, 2011
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Awesome run! Don't forget to test Clickbank offers 
Made $11,600+ with Google Ads affiliate in 8 months — $0.04 avg CPC (screenshots inside)
- Thread starter LUONG VAN VIET
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hoanganhly
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- Apr 22, 2025
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As per checked, all programs he running is prohibited from brand name bidding (PPC) - including Everbee
LUONG VAN VIET
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- Feb 13, 2020
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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.
$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.
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.Awesome run! Don't forget to test Clickbank offers
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.
- Dec 18, 2011
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This is exactly what I was thinking when reading this thread.. IYKYK.
LUONG VAN VIET
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- Feb 13, 2020
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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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- Dec 18, 2011
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ah yes makes sense for those tiers. what were your tier 1 avg cpc's then?
LUONG VAN VIET
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- Feb 13, 2020
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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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LUONG VAN VIET
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- Feb 13, 2020
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Mostly by watching which tools are gaining traction and checking if they even have an affiliate program yet a lot of newer SaaS products spin one up quietly before anyone's paying attention to it. Worth checking the footer or a "/affiliates" page on any tool you already use daily. the oness still in growth mode are usually the most open to this kind of traffic.
Appreciate the suggestion, genuinely considered it early on. the issue is intent someone searching a brand name by exact match already knows what they want, so an extra step before the product page just adds friction and I'd expect it to cost me conversions, not add them. Might make sense for broader-non-brand traffic though, that's a fair point for a diffferent setup.
Pretty much that, yeah. In my experience it's been contained to the specific program they pause the affiliate relationship and claw back unpaid or recent commissions, not something that follows you across every platform you're on. That said I don't treat it as "safe until caught," i keep brand campaigns isolated from the rest of my account so if one program does flag it, it doesn't put everything else at risk too.
r4ven had it right no domain involved, I'm linking straight to the affiliate ref link, nothing in between. simpler setup, and for brand search trafffic the merchant's own page converts better than anything I'd build anyway.