Evan Hood.com

My First Crack at PPC

So after setting up accounts with Google Adwords, Yahoo Marketing Solutions and Microsoft Adcenter I chose a dating offer from Neverblue Ads. I also registered a relevant domain name with my hosting company, HostMonster. After being approved for the campaign, I simply set up a 301 redirect on my registered domain to point to my affiliate link.

To do this, go into your file manager and edit the code of your index.php. Erase all of the code there and put in your 301 php redirect.

<?php
header(”Location: http://www.YOUR-AFFILIATE-LINK-HERE.com/”);
?>

For the slow, you replace that URL with your affiliate link. After that, I used Google’s keyword tool to come up with about 150-200 related keywords and used the dynamic keyword insertion tool. What is a dynamic keyword insertion? It is a command that allows you to place whatever keyword the user searched for in your ad with a default keyword if the title is too long. The syntax is:

{KEYWORD: DEFAULT}
Where DEFAULT is the default keyword you wish to use. So say, for example, you want your ad to read “Low Cost KEYWORD” where KEYWORD is whatever they searched for. You would enter “Low Cost {KEYWORD: Stuff} and if their keyword is too long for the ad it would simply display “Low Cost Stuff”.

Then I made 1 adgroup, put in moderate bids, made 2 ads for split testing and hit GO! ………………The results?

Let’s see the specifics. The middle campaign is the campaign we’ll be discussing.

The campaign cost me $82.55 and brought in a whopping $19.80 for 6 conversions and a net loss of $62.75. What went wrong? A lot of things. After pausing my campaign (stop the bleeding! please!), I went back to reading forums, blogs and garbage ebooks and came up with a few answers.

Reasons My Campaign Failed

• Adgroups not targeted to Keywords
• CPC too high
• Quality Score too low

Stay tuned for my explanation, tweaking, and subsequent results.

Tags: PPC, Affiliate Marketing, Fail