Are the $75/100 vouchers enough to test a CPA offer?

I'm getting really impatient with my SEO campaigns, and while I know they will be profitable, I want to start making higher profits than with my blackhat iframe e-mail submit leads, which I'm scared of relying on for long periods of time.

Since my initial PPC test niches are pretty common, I don't mind telling them to you a few right now: finance (primarily general debt, tax debt), education (scholarships), and [a not so common one that shan't be named] (referred to as [secret]).

I have access to lots of coupons so I think running a whole campaign on one coupon should produce at least 1-2 conversions, because there's no way in hell I'm paying $75+ for 1 conversion when all commissions are lower than that.

Okay, so anyway, [secret] has the highest margin with $65 payout and cheap keywords (currently bidding $2.10 on my best keyword but only paying $0.60). I don't know the conversion rate, but I'm assuming 4% and assuming $0.70 per click average, which is 107 clicks on a $75 coupon, and so theoretically 4 conversions, grossing $260 and netting $185.

With [secret], the user is required to buy [something secret] (starting at $65 for this offer), so does any experienced PPC strategist know if the voucher is a reasonable testing "investment" for offers that require this kind of user spending?

The tax and scholarship offers are usually 1-2 page submits averaging a $20 payout. However, the competition is a lot higher and keywords have a much higher CPC. However, conversion should also be a lot higher (a similar insurance offer boasts 19%, we'll assume 15%). Debt is much too competitive, netting (in theory) about $5 at the 19% conversion and going in the red at the 15% (assuming $3.63 CPC, which is what I've been getting), so that campaign is thrown out unless someone can suggest better keyword ideas (using generic crap like "online debt help"). I guess I could try things like "car debt help" etc...

Which leaves me with scholarships, which allows a lot of keyword diversity. Staying away from the too competitive keywords, I planned to go with less-competitive keywords (of course) but also minority keywords, because, not to be racist, minorities are easier to convert. (I work in retail and have to sign people up for rewards cards; minorities are easiest, just from my observation.) So those keywords should have a low CPC (assume $0.90) and a theoretical 15% conversion. So 12 conversions (gross $240) netting $165. Is this reasonable expectation of return on a $75 coupon?

I'm not sure where this topic went off to and what it's about now. It's more of a rambling on PPC from a PPC noob. Lol.

If you opt for tl;dr, get the gist:
Is a voucher enough to determine if a low-to-medium competition campaign is going to succeed?

107 clicks is probably a large enough sample size for a keyword, could change based on whats going on in the world at the time though, always little changes. Oh and how about young minority females? They are probably pretty good for the free offers.

jecter82 said:

107 clicks is probably a large enough sample size for a keyword, could change based on whats going on in the world at the time though, always little changes. Oh and how about young minority females? They are probably pretty good for the free offers.

Click to expand...

I thought so too, but I've had 44 clicks and no conversions. Mathematically, I should have at least 1, but I'm afraid I may have been to generous with myself with a 4% conversion? It seemed like a good number because a lot of pharma affiliate programs I'm with (for self-run pharmacies) say they have 1/20 conversion rate (or a tad lower). So I based my assumptions off that. Not the same niche at all, but the products for pharma are more expensive than this niche.

That's actually the audience I'm hoping to pitch to most for the scholarship offers. Hispanic and African-American indexes are well over Internet average for education offers, as well as 13-17 year olds, and most are female.

The thing with PPC is that you need first few weeks to just collect or "buy" the data, which would allow you to optimize the campaign further. And since you would be using a voucher code only once in the account- I don't think that a voucher is enough to do the job.

Secondly, you mentioned some conversion rates for each niche of yours. However, for what traffic was that conversion rate calculated? Was it organic traffic, media buys, PPC or Social media traffic? If it was the total conversion rate as is the case usually, then you would need a pretty well optimized campaign to attain similar conversions. Thins includes not just ppc campaign structure but also how you are using Analytics to review the traffic as well as the landing page optimization you have performed.

I am not saying that you would not be able to make profit, but it is just that a single voucher seems insufficient for the task. And if you are planning to use multiple adword campaigns by creating one for each new voucher- then it would become very cumbersome for you to migrate the campaigns each time and even then analyzing the overall data would be tough.

Very interesting topic. Would like to know more about it

Basically impossible to say since we have no idea of how good your marketing is. I would say that 15% conversion from a CC signup sending traffic straight from Adwords is highly optimistic for a first timer. Like beazt says, accept the fact that you will lose (a lot of) money to start with at first while you learn what to do. Keywords and ad groups need to be tweaked, ads need to be rewritten, landing pages need to be split tested. You're buying yourself an education.

Generally with PPC if you can break even on your first campaign for an offer then you're on to a winner because you will pull it into profitability with further tweaking. If you're making bucket loads of money on your first go (and you're not cloaking) then you're either extremely lucky or a marketing genius.