PPC Tactics & Landing Pages

Hello People,

So earlier this year I was making a descent living for affiliate marketing using PPC and sending people to my landing pages. But after a few months, the conversions just dried up.

I have a few questions that some of you PPC gurus can maybe help me with please.

1 - I was using a large list of keywords (phrase match) and slowly pausing the ones that didn't convert. But I was also tracking the search terms people where using to trigger a keyword and adding the converting ones as "Exact" keywords. So my question is, was I being to precise and over thinking it and cut out other potential buyers maybe?

2 - Once you have a list of converting keywords, if you change up the landing page, do you essentially have to start again? As in the converting keywords only worked with the original landing page?

Thanks so much

1) No, actually you were doing the quite important thing of adding highly converting keywords as exact match. In almost all cases it is better for cost, performance, and tracking to use exact match. This might be a question of ad groups rather than keywords, though. Keep them separated in order to track. If you want to keep broad match or phrase match, you probably need to keep them in a special ad group. Don't use SKAGs because that method scales terribly.

2) If you totally changed up the landing page, then this might be an issue of the landing page converting worse rather than your ads. Did you change it up enough that your ads had a lower quality score/performed worse overall? It's always important to keep your landing page as relevant to your ads as possible.

3) I'm not seeing people have a lot of long-term success with affiliate offers, at least on Google, these days. It's expressly against their doorway/thin content policy and even if your account isn't suspended they definitely won't give you a helping hand. Something to be aware of.

Hey @AneaKr

Thanks for your reply.

So do you think the offer I was promoting just had its day and its run its course and that why the conversion stopped?

Yes, the landing page was completely different, so think I'll try starting again with my keywords list...

I'm using Bing Ads who seem fine with bridge pages for now, but I know its only a matter of time before that comes to an end...

Cheers

If you totally changed your landing page, it seems like that's the thing to look at. If you change one aspect of a campaign drastically, you can't really compare performance over time accurately.

It can be surprising: even older websites or seemingly outdated/non-salesy content can perform much better than flashier landing pages. That's why it's always important to test constantly, and stick with the aspects of your campaign that work.