WebDiggin.com: An Adventure to Make Money Online

We thought we were a goner when Yahoo announced they were changing the way they handled keyword bids in their Yahoo Sponsored Search. But recently, we’ve made some changes to the wording of our ad, and our ad has reached a quality index of 5 out of 5!

We have one successful Pay Per Click (PPC) affiliate marketing campaign. Basically, we run PPC ads for a major online retailer. We sent traffic directly to the retailer from Yahoo Search Marketing and we get a commission if anyone buys something.

Here’s what we’ve learned so far about PPC affiliate marketing using search engines.

• We know that advertising copy affects your success with PPC Ads. (You can get a difference in your click through rate between 1 and 2% just by changing words like cheap to discount.)
• We already know that what you say in your ads can directly affect how much people buy. If you specify a minimum order to get free shipping, most people will try to reach that minimum order.
• Now we know that what you say in your ad can improve your quality index to a 5 and can lower your cost per click.

Our ad was initially running around a quality index of 2 or 3.

Here’s how we improved the ad.

• We ran a Yahoo search on the keywords that we were fighting for to see what the competition was saying in their ads.
• We noticed that one of the competition had the phrase, December Savings! (Yes, I know we’re in March. They forgot to update that ad. Their loss.)
• So, we added the words: March Deals! to the start of our ad. These two words alone have pushed our ad to the top position. (We ran our old ad against our new ad, and the March Deals ad won with a higher click through rate. Yahoo automatically turned off our old ad.)
• We haven’t increased our bids. In fact, we’ve noticed that the average cost per click has dropped around 5 to 10 cents compared to what we were paying before when we were a quality index of 2 and 3.
• We think the ad works because it creates a natural sense of urgency for people to buy. Especially as we head towards the end of March.

Here’s what our commissions look like.

This is the commission summary report from Commission Junction for the past 30 days.

Sure it’s exciting that we’re getting double digits of commissions per day, but we’ve also increased our advertising budget from $5 per day to $20-$30 per day.

(We’re hoping to break even between our advertising costs and our commissions in March. Our strategy is to move over $2000 of merchandise and hit the next commission tier where we’ll get a 20% bonus on our commissions.)

Interesting Things We’ve Noticed

We tried to run this identical campaign on Google and it didn’t work. Google kept telling us to increase our keyword bid to $12 just to run the ads.

That’s why we tried Yahoo Search Marketing. That’s also why we thought our campaign would stop working when we found out that Yahoo Search Marketing was going to change their keyword bidding strategy to mirror Google’s.

Our increased Ad score and the decrease we’ve seen in our average cost per click might have nothing to do with the changes we made.

• Maybe another affiliate marketer came in and is bidding really aggressively to get the number one spot. (So, we have a lower spot, and pay a lower price - dropping our average cost per click.)
• Maybe we’re getting an ad quality rank of 5 because we’ve been running the ad for so long.
• Maybe the changes to our ad ranking and average cost per click is a result of the changes behind the scenes at Yahoo. Who knows. We run a duplicate ad group campaign in a different geographic region with Yahoo. Our old ad text without the “March Deals!” runs at a quality index of 4.

Bottom Line. Changing the wording of your ad can improve your Quality Index score which can result in better ad positions and lower average costs per click. We’re still tweaking our ads to minimize our advertising costs and to maximize our returns.

Question. Do you use sponsored Pay Per Click ads to run your affiliate marketing campaign? Why or why not?

(1 votes, Rating: 5 out of 5)

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