Clickbank + PPC ?

SERPTurbo said:

I wasn't exactly trying to see whose dick was longer - just want to understand how this method is done nowadays, that's all. I'm open to learn, as I was on my day 1.

I got my first Clickbank sale as an affiliate back in 2007 by promoting a PSP downloads product via Adwords by direct linking, however I never managed to scale it into something consistent, as it has always been up and down with PPC for me.

So what tips would you give re product/niche selection, bidding strategy, keywords match, campaign settings, etc?

I've described how I do it in my previous posts, so where would you say I'm going wrong? Possibly I'm in the wrong niche, where the CPC is way too high? Because I simply can't bid less than $0.50, otherwise my ads don't show up - bidding $1, gets me top 3 positions.

I'd appreciate if you could give me some numbers to work with (CTR, CPC, lander CTR, conversion rate), because apart from the fact that you are making over 100% ROI on your campaigns, there's not much else to guide me in the right direction.

Click to expand...

I already provided you the same tips that I use myself in Bing. There is no magic pill to it.

However, if there is one advice I would give in Bing, it would be: learn how to make a good presell page or how to presell your prospects.

To give you an example, the current campaign I'm running right now is seeing roughly 3-4 visitors per order form impression, through my landing page. In other words, for every 3-4 visitors that go through my lander, I get an order form impression. That's the power of preselling.

So even if you are bidding over a dollar (as you say), if you do the preselling right, you can still be profitable.

@karmandy93

The latest campaign that I run, but now paused due to a loss, had 567 clicks (cost me $520), which resulted in 250 hops, 38 order form impressions (6 hops per OFI) and 8 sales with 3 upsells (1 refund), totalling $285 in sales.

Promoting one of the best-selling products on Clickbank with highly relevant keywords (checked search terms daily, added only a few negatives), targeting all search networks and US/UK/CA/AUS/NZ, using a landing page with almost 50% CTR and converting approximately 1:30 still results in a loss?

Average campaign CTR is over 7%, average position 1.89, QS for all keywords above average and even if my average CPC was $0.50, i.e. half of my current CPC, I would have a grand total profit of $1.50.

Tried the above method with 3 different niches/products - all very similar results.

Whatever you're doing to have a 100% ROI still remains a mystery to me, I can't see this method working in 2017, because the CPC for any meaningful keywords is just way too high - that's my conclusion. You are clearly doing something more than just your shared advice and if you are willing to keep it to yourself, then of course that makes sense - no one is here to give out their businesses for free.

What type of keywords do you use? product reviews, scam, pdf?

You guys are making it so much more difficult than it needs to be. Don't worry about the quality of the keywords so much when you're first beginning your campaigns, because you'll spend far too much time looking for "perfect" keywords and take forever with getting a profitable campaign going. Focus more on quantity.

My Bing Ads method is simple AF and it yields results. Here's what I do...

I first find the ads that are doing well, and then I pretty much say the same thing those ads say, but in my own words. Take what works and then use it. So I gather up around 10 variations of the best ads. There are tools that allow you to see which ads are doing well and which aren't.

Anyway, so now you know which ads to use, so here's the fun part... Keyword "research". What I do, is I go on a keyword hunting spree. Use whichever tool(s) you're most proficient in, with finding keywords, and find as many of them as you can! I generally don't start my campaigns until I've got a list of around 20,000 (note that you cannot add them all at once) keywords. Then, once you've got all your keywords added, you go to Keywords -> EDIT -> Select All, and then set the bid amount of all your keywords to, say $0.20, or something low, and then start your campaign with all the keywords bidding maximums of 20 cents. Let the campaign run for about 3 days straight, to collect some data. You may also begin it at $0.30 or wherever you feel comfortable. I generally don't BEGIN with anything more than $0.40. Then I'll let my campaign run for 3 days (or you may want to let it run for a week so you can also gauge when your traffic is most likely to perform actions/convert).

From there, you'll begin to pause keywords, try decreasing bid amounts for cheaper clicks, increasing bid amounts for those not getting impressions, etc... Play around with it.

Rasputin78 said:

Had a quick read and I don't think you understand what I am looking to do.
I want to link directly to vendor's cart from my custom landing page (bypassing vendor's LP). Apart from the vendor providing such an option there are other ways which used to work. But unsure what works right now in 2017.

Still looking for a solution ....

Click to expand...

Just click through to the landing page while logged into your CB account. Find the "Buy Now" button or whichever button they've got designated, and then copy the link address (make sure it has your affiliate ID in the URL). That is the URL that you'll want to cloak and send people to.

Tosmekop said:

Just click through to the landing page while logged into your CB account. Find the "Buy Now" button or whichever button they've got designated, and then copy the link address (make sure it has your affiliate ID in the URL). That is the URL that you'll want to cloak and send people to.

Click to expand...

That doesn't work, But I found a solution. Thanks for the reply

@dlyhai

free/download/pdf/ebook type of keywords are all neg'ed in my campaign. However, I do bid on product related keywords, such as product review, product scam, does product really work, etc. That's obviously in a combination with all the other relevant keywords.

@Tosmekop

I wish the ads were my problem. The way I write my ads is very simple - relevancy, so keyword in the title, keyword in the description with a few benefits and that's it.

Your strategy of not bidding more than $0.20-30 makes sense, because that allows quite a bit of room for profit, however from my experience if I bid less than the minimum required for any given keyword, then my ads simply don't run, getting very low quality score and Bing asking me to increase my bid to the minimum amount.

Have you had this yourself? Or you just have to keep digging until you find keywords where bidding $0.20 is enough to show the ads? While doing the research, surely we don't want to bid on any generic type of keywords, which are too broad to lead any sales?

And just to clarify, the above method works for you while promoting CB products via a landing page on Bing? Is it a matter of finding a very low competition niche or what's the catch? Any meaningful keywords for decent products are usually $0.50+, or if I follow your strategy, then the above happens.

SERPTurbo said:

@karmandy93

The latest campaign that I run, but now paused due to a loss, had 567 clicks (cost me $520), which resulted in 250 hops, 38 order form impressions (6 hops per OFI) and 8 sales with 3 upsells (1 refund), totalling $285 in sales.

Promoting one of the best-selling products on Clickbank with highly relevant keywords (checked search terms daily, added only a few negatives), targeting all search networks and US/UK/CA/AUS/NZ, using a landing page with almost 50% CTR and converting approximately 1:30 still results in a loss?

Average campaign CTR is over 7%, average position 1.89, QS for all keywords above average and even if my average CPC was $0.50, i.e. half of my current CPC, I would have a grand total profit of $1.50.

Tried the above method with 3 different niches/products - all very similar results.

Whatever you're doing to have a 100% ROI still remains a mystery to me, I can't see this method working in 2017, because the CPC for any meaningful keywords is just way too high - that's my conclusion. You are clearly doing something more than just your shared advice and if you are willing to keep it to yourself, then of course that makes sense - no one is here to give out their businesses for free.

Click to expand...

Okay, since you think I'm hiding something, here is my bing screen-shot for today 4/20/2017 and profit included.

As you will see, I got sells from canada and united states @ an average of .59 cents.

Also, today was not even that good. I normally gross around $250 for that product.

Like I said, I already provided you everything that I use. But if you are convinced that I didn't, then so be it.

karmandy93 said:

Okay, since you think I'm hiding something, here is my bing screen-shot for today 4/20/2017 and profit included.

As you will see, I got sells from canada and united states @ an average of .59 cents.

Also, today was not even that good. I normally gross around $250 for that product.

Like I said, I already provided you everything that I use. But if you are convinced that I didn't, then so be it.

Click to expand...

Thanks for replying and the screenshots - I'm just trying to figure out where's my problem, because I can't understand how you get completely different results from me, if we are doing pretty much the same thing?

The Bing screenshot, I'm assuming those are campaign stats, not just a specific ad group? If that's the case, then quite impressive CTR - the highest I had was 11%, but the average was probably around 7-8%.

As for CPC, that's quite pricy, although looks like it's still not enough to get you the top position, but probably you don't necessarily need the top spots, because often you just get random clickers from there, while those who look a bit lower down the search results seems to convert better?

The sales screenshot, is that from some sort of a tracking service or those conversions are from another affiliate network, not Clickbank? 123 visits, that's from 181 clicks? If so, well done - my best is around 50% landing page CTR...Yeah, couldn't figure out where the 2nd screenshot is from?

SERPTurbo said:

Thanks for replying and the screenshots - I'm just trying to figure out where's my problem, because I can't understand how you get completely different results from me, if we are doing pretty much the same thing?

The Bing screenshot, I'm assuming those are campaign stats, not just a specific ad group? If that's the case, then quite impressive CTR - the highest I had was 11%, but the average was probably around 7-8%.

As for CPC, that's quite pricy, although looks like it's still not enough to get you the top position, but probably you don't necessarily need the top spots, because often you just get random clickers from there, while those who look a bit lower down the search results seems to convert better?

The sales screenshot, is that from some sort of a tracking service or those conversions are from another affiliate network, not Clickbank? 123 visits, that's from 181 clicks? If so, well done - my best is around 50% landing page CTR...Yeah, couldn't figure out where the 2nd screenshot is from?

Click to expand...

It is from another affiliate network, which maybe is softwareprojects.com

SERPTurbo said:

Thanks for replying and the screenshots - I'm just trying to figure out where's my problem, because I can't understand how you get completely different results from me, if we are doing pretty much the same thing?

The Bing screenshot, I'm assuming those are campaign stats, not just a specific ad group? If that's the case, then quite impressive CTR - the highest I had was 11%, but the average was probably around 7-8%.

As for CPC, that's quite pricy, although looks like it's still not enough to get you the top position, but probably you don't necessarily need the top spots, because often you just get random clickers from there, while those who look a bit lower down the search results seems to convert better?

The sales screenshot, is that from some sort of a tracking service or those conversions are from another affiliate network, not Clickbank? 123 visits, that's from 181 clicks? If so, well done - my best is around 50% landing page CTR...Yeah, couldn't figure out where the 2nd screenshot is from?

Click to expand...

Yes, affiliate network is software projects. But that doesn't matter. If you know how to presell a product well, you can make money with any affiliate network (click-bank included) - assuming your traffic is targeted of course.

As for the CPC, you said is quite pricy... didn't you say you have to bid over a dollar, which often results in a loss? I'm just showing you thats not the case. In fact you can still get a decent amount of traffic for .33 cents. Yes, .33 cents.

Also, you can still be in average position 5 and even 8 and still be very profitable - I know this because I've done it before.

Best of luck

EDIT: Yes, I'm using a tracker. So from the 180 clicks you see, multiply that by 66% CTR for my landing page, and that should give you the amount of actual people that saw my offer.

karmandy93 said:

Yes, affiliate network is software projects. But that doesn't matter. If you know how to presell a product well, you can make money with any affiliate network (click-bank included) - assuming your traffic is targeted of course.

As for the CPC, you said is quite pricy... didn't you say you have to bid over a dollar, which often results in a loss? I'm just showing you thats not the case. In fact you can still get a decent amount of traffic for .33 cents. Yes, .33 cents.

Also, you can still be in average position 5 and even 8 and still be very profitable - I know this because I've done it before.

Best of luck

EDIT: Yes, I'm using a tracker. So from the 180 clicks you see, multiply that by 66% CTR for my landing page, and that should give you the amount of actual people that saw my offer.

Click to expand...

Do appreciate your contribution to this thread, it really helps - great to talk to someone who actually does what he says, not a keyboard warrior.

Totally agree with you about being able to make sales with any affiliate network, if you know how to set up a campaign right and choose a good product.

However, I've heard and read too many stories about Clickbank not crediting sales properly or shaving sales or very unnatural fluctuations from affiliates and vendors of all levels, so since this thread is titled as "Clickbank + PPC", I thought you would post CB stats, rather than from another affiliate network, which makes me think Clickbank is not working out well for you either? Correct me, if I'm wrong though.

Funny thing is, in all these years of my PPC experience, I've never tried promoting products from any other affiliate networks, apart from Clickbank, so maybe that's where my problem is? Sounds like a newb excuse to say that I'm making a loss, because Clickbank is doing something dodgy, considering they've been around since 1998 and claim they've never missed a payment since then....

Any affiliate networks you would personally recommend?

And as for CPC, I mentioned in my other reply, that for the particular campaign I run earlier this month, even if I had $0.50 CPC, it wouldn't make a difference, because I would still make pretty much nothing or as above $1.50 profit. So possibly poor product choice or the niche is too competitive.

SERPTurbo said:

Do appreciate your contribution to this thread, it really helps - great to talk to someone who actually does what he says, not a keyboard warrior.

Totally agree with you about being able to make sales with any affiliate network, if you know how to set up a campaign right and choose a good product.

However, I've heard and read too many stories about Clickbank not crediting sales properly or shaving sales or very unnatural fluctuations from affiliates and vendors of all levels, so since this thread is titled as "Clickbank + PPC", I thought you would post CB stats, rather than from another affiliate network, which makes me think Clickbank is not working out well for you either? Correct me, if I'm wrong though.

Funny thing is, in all these years of my PPC experience, I've never tried promoting products from any other affiliate networks, apart from Clickbank, so maybe that's where my problem is? Sounds like a newb excuse to say that I'm making a loss, because Clickbank is doing something dodgy, considering they've been around since 1998 and claim they've never missed a payment since then....

Any affiliate networks you would personally recommend?

And as for CPC, I mentioned in my other reply, that for the particular campaign I run earlier this month, even if I had $0.50 CPC, it wouldn't make a difference, because I would still make pretty much nothing or as above $1.50 profit. So possibly poor product choice or the niche is too competitive.

Click to expand...

Clickbank is great. . . Although I've seen some affiliates complaining that they don't credit sales. I cannot comment on that, because my experience on Clickbank has been nothing but positive.

Clickbank works. . . but why promote other products when you already have a couple that's profiting for you? That's exactly my situation with software projects. It's not that I cannot make sales with Clickbank. . .

You can try out softwareprojects and see how it goes for you. . . they have some great products, but I cannot guarantee you will be profitable, because at the end. . . a converting product is a converting product, whether it be clickbank or other affiliate networks.

karmandy93 said:

Clickbank is great. . . Although I've seen some affiliates complaining that they don't credit sales. I cannot comment on that, because my experience on Clickbank has been nothing but positive.

Clickbank works. . . but why promote other products when you already have a couple that's profiting for you? That's exactly my situation with software projects. It's not that I cannot make sales with Clickbank. . .

You can try out softwareprojects and see how it goes for you. . . they have some great products, but I cannot guarantee you will be profitable, because at the end. . . a converting product is a converting product, whether it be clickbank or other affiliate networks.

Click to expand...

Ok, thanks for your help. I've applied to join them, so let's see what they say and then I'll dig through their products, see if I can find anything interesting to promote.

I use Bing Ad to promote product from clickbank.
I am success

maskkill said:

I use Bing Ad to promote product from clickbank.
I am success

Click to expand...

After long time dreaming a sales from clickbank, now i have 2 sales on my cb dashboard. I'm using direct link to sales page, did you used pre sales page?

escobart said:

After long time dreaming a sales from clickbank, now i have 2 sales on my cb dashboard. I'm using direct link to sales page, did you used pre sales page?

Click to expand...

I'm using direct link to sales page

Im having a similar problem promoting Clickbank products with Bing ads.

This year, I've spent about $290 on traffic and earned about $330 in sales. So I can't make any sort of worthwhile ROI.

Im not paying $1 per click. However, sales are inconsistent and the money wasted on campaigns that don't convert eats into the budget.

I really wish I knew how people make $50/day or $100/day. Although I know it's possible, it just seems incredibly hard to fathom. It's far harder to succeed with PPC than any ebook or course says it is because the vast of majority of people who click an ad don't buy anything, even if your keywords are highly targeted and your advertising to tier 1 countries.

Do people need to build a list to become successful with PPC?

The reason I haven't built a list isn't due to laziness, it's because I don't have knowledge about any particular marketable niche, so I wouldn't know what to send subscribers to build a relationship with them.

@caramelrocks

You're clearly doing something right, if you are almost breakingeven, so possibly it's a just matter of neg'ing a few keywords, improving the ads or the landing page CTR? And no, you don't necessarily need to build a list - plenty of people making a decent income via PPC without a list.


A little update on my experiment with promoting a product from Software Projects - waste of time, clearly nothing to do with affiliate networks. It's all down to the campaign, so whether your offer is on Clickbank or anywhere else, it should convert well, if your campaign setup is right, which wasn't in my case....

@karmandy93

A few questions for you...

Looking at your campaign CTR (16%), I believe that's only achievable, if you bid exact or phrase match only, putting very similar keywords into a separate ad group and writing highly-relevant ads for those keywords. Is that correct? So does that mean that you only bid on very few keywords, which you could easily brainstorm simply by looking at a product or doing a quick keyword research and picking the most relevant keywords with decent volume?

I do use the above method, but I only apply it to relevant keywords, which have a reasonable volume for me to put them into a separate ad group and write specific ads for them. Otherwise, I usually bid something like "+buy +widgets", which then allow me to reach out to hundreds of relevant keywords containing those words, which won't be necessarily displayed in a keyword tool.

Obviously, applying the method of bidding exact/phrase on every single keyword that gets 1 click a day would take ages and you would have hundreds of keywords/ad groups, which wouldn't really make sense....Is that the case with your campaigns or you use the method I described above, where you only bid exact/phrase on a few good keywords?

The reason why I'm asking this, is because my CTR is in double digits (usually 15% +) when keywords have their own adgroups with highly relevant ads. However, for anything which is broad match modified, then the CTR drops to 5-8% range and results in higher CPC compared to those with better CTR.


As for landing page CTR, assuming you get 60-70% on regular basis, then that's significantly better than what I get (40-50%), so it would definitely make quite a bit of difference to my campaigns, if I could improve my rates.

So what would be the key points you would recommend for achieving a 60-70% lander CTR? Average word count? Mine's around 1k, which is possibly a bit too excessive? Best call-to-action techniques? Big anchor-text links or better an image with "click here"? Possibly use of banners from the product's affiliate tools? And generally the actual content or the tone of the landing page? Is it just a strict review of the product or an experience from someone who tried it?

Thanks for your help

@karmandy93 @SERPTurbo

So do you guys setup country specific cloned campaigns? I guess this will get you even cheaper clicks if you're not aiming to be #1?

Like @SERPTurbo I to am having a hard time converting. I use both Clickbank and Software Projects and get plenty of checkout impressions (about 1 in 10) but know one seem to buy...

SERPTurbo said:

Thanks for your reply - this is what I'm looking for, a more in-depth look into Bing advertising.

1) I'm targeting just the US only, because I know from own experience that 90% of the sales come from the US. I used to target UK, Canada and Australia as well, but usually it results in a lot more traffic, but no additional sales.

2) At the moment, yes, I'm targeting Bing/Yahoo search network only, however I tried targeting all networks in the past, but the CPC was pretty much the same. Yes, you get slightly more traffic, but I'm more concerned about sales. If I get tons of clicks from their search partners and no sales, then that volume is no use to me. I've read that the traffic quality is pretty low from their search partners.

3) I'm fully aware of how the quality score works and my lowest CTR is 3% on broad match modified keywords and as high as 14% on phrase match keywords (data based on over 1000 clicks). Related keywords are tightly grouped into their own ad groups with highly relevant ads, so my quality score is usually 10/10. No problems with the landing page relevancy either - I'm usually getting approximately 40-50% CTR from my lander to the vendor's sales page.

Haven't tried lowering my bids, but if I did, then we would be talking about more than 80% reduction in bid amount, because even if I bid $0.50, it hardly leaves any room for profit. My hops to order ratio is 1:30, which is pretty decent I believe.

4) I'm after traffic that converts and as far as I know, it can't get better than desktop users typing keywords into the search box, although I target all devices anyway.


Indeed, your average CPC would be no use to me, unless you are doing this exact method and managing to make a profit? The reason I'm asking what's your average CPC, is because I want to figure out whether Clickbank affiliates make any money on Adwords/Bing by paying over $1 per click? That is, if you are using a landing page as well, because let's face it, direct-linking has been dead for a long time...

You could argue that I should try a different niche, but there's nothing financially viable out there, where you would be allowed to bid anything less than $0.50 and get a decent amount of traffic, so this is where it all stops. Clicks are too expensive > advertising costs are more than the sales generated > you make a loss, as a result.

Thanks for the journal link MisterF, I'll follow it.

Click to expand...

I am facing the same situation as you, did you find any solution to it?