WebDiggin.com: An Adventure to Make Money Online

We have one Pay Per Click Search Marketing campaign that makes us $30 per month in our sleep. We don’t write sponsored posts to make the money. We don’t go on forums and link back to our sites to build our search engine rankings. We don’t pay people to be our friends to make money with this campaign.

What we do is buy traffic using Yahoo Search Marketing and send that traffic directly to our Commission Junction affiliate links. Some of the traffic buys our online retailer’s products, and we make a commission.

We check our Commission Junction account and our Yahoo Search Marketing account daily to make sure the numbers look right: number of clicks, commissions coming in, advertising costs, etc. When things are a little off, we spend some time to tweak the campaign.

Lately, we’ve been trying to turn this one working campaign into a bigger cash cow.  So, we decided to track our ads based on the keywords that are being used. (We just added a sid to our affiliate links.)

Return Per Click based on Keywords

Here’s what our affiliate campaign looks like from Apr 1 to Apr 15, 2008. (We’ve hidden our actual keywords because we’re not too confident in our ability to beat the competition for this product.)

When we look at our campaign as a whole (instead of keyword by keyword), we noticed that our campaign has an earnings per click (EPC) of around $0.20 per click (tier 1 commission) or $0.25 per click (tier 2 commission if we sell over $2000 of merchandise).

So which keywords are dragging us down? 

Lets look at our 3 top keywords which account for the bulk of our advertising costs.

• Keyword 1 has an EPC of $0.11 per click.
• Keyword 2 has an EPC of $0.28 per click.
• Keyword 3 has an EPC of $0.41 per click. 

In other words, Keyword 1 is dragging us down. It’s way below our campaign EPC of around $0.20 to $0.25 per click. Turn it off.

What about the other keywords

We’ve got 18 keywords here, but we’ve only looked at the top 3 keywords. Why? Because we don’t have a lot of data on the other keywords. Some of them have only been clicked a few times. The EPC for those keywords could be a fluke.

We read somewhere to wait until you have around 200 clicks before you make the call. We got burned in the past where we should have turned off a campaign a long time ago. So around the 100 click mark, we’ll start to make our call.

Bottom Line: Tracking a campaign at the keyword level can take some time and effort. But it can help you spot some of your underperforming keywords. We have less than 20 keywords in this campaign, so it was relatively easy. I don’t know what we would do if we had 200 keywords in the campaign.

Question: Have you ever thought about using PPC advertising for your website or affiliate marketing campaign? Do you track the keywords in your PPC campaign? What did you find?

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