Internet Marketing Blog

Lessons Learned

Make sure you optimize your landing page, ad content and keywords. Basically put your keyword in the title of the ad and the url.

Ad:

Refinancing Loans
Fill out a simple application
Fast Free quotes in minutes.
www.lendingarea.com/refinancing-loans.htm

Keyword:

Refinancing loans
home refinancing loans
etc….

Landing Page:

Meta title, description, keywords: i.e. <title> Home Refinancing Loans </title>
Heading 1 or 2: <h1> Home Refinancing Loans </h1>
Outbound links: <a href=”http://vendorswebsite.com” Refinancing Loans</a>
Inbound links from other pages on your site to the landing page: <a href=”http://lendingarea.com” Refinancing loans</a>
Bold text in body content/article: <b> Refinancing Loans</b>
Image alt text on your images “refinancing loans”

Then I analyze the clicks. Which keywords are getting the most clicks? Is there a corresponding day that I get more sales or did I waste money on those keywords? I hear there are some great tracking programs available that will tell you what site and keyword actually converted into a sale. but since my keyword lists are very short, and I use the content network, I don’t want to spend the money for one. I’m learning php now and will figure it out myself soon. Once I have a simple tracking program made, I might sell it for like $10, not the $150+ I see around the net (granted they seem much more powerful than what I’m thinking of doing).

I also looked at what days and the times that I got conversions. I ended up showing my ads only between 9:00am and 12:00am midnight california time. I also stopped showing ads on Saturday altogether. This saved me about $20 a day plus $100 each Saturday. I was getting clicks but no conversions in the wee hours of the morning and Saturdays were a complete bust as well. Strangely, Sundays do very well.???

GOLDEN TIP: Then I look at where the traffic is comming from using the adwords “Placement Performance” report. 

I excluded sites that were not targeted to my landing page like pogoaddiction.com and myspace.com. Why waste spending money on clicks from those sites. The odds of conversion are much lower, vs. a site like zillow.com.

Finally, I removed the adsense from my landing page this week. Results are promising, but not enough data yet.

REALITY CHECK: I setup my sister using almost identical ads, keywords, and landing page. The only major difference was that she did not get approved for lendintree (yet). So we went with lowermybills.com. In fact, I’m managing her adwords/adsense account directly and built the website.

Sadly, she is now $130 in the hole. The problem is that lowermybills.com is not converting anywhere near the rate of lendingtree. Also, they only pay $25/lead instead of $55. If they were paying $55, she’d be way ahead right now.

Good news is her epc is looking good on the cj network, so lendingtree may approve her later. We are going to build up her history so her numbers look good when she re-applies. We are going to try another affiliate this month, that I hope will convert better.

So yes, I’m doing extremely well, and no I could not duplicate the success with another affiliate for my sister. But I’m close and very confident I can get her account profitable this month.

I wish I had more time, right now I’m working on a contract that will take up most of my time until the end of august. It’s nice to know that at least this one campaign is running and making money all by itself now. All I’m doing now is updated my spreadsheets and posting the results in this forum.

July was a fabulous month, and I expect August to do even better with all the little tweaks I’ve done.

June Net Profit: $1514

July:

Adwords: $3250.17 (1,416 clicks)
Yahoo: $1025.63 (435 clicks)

Adsense: $199.13
Affiliate: $7360.00

July Net Profit: $3283.33

ROI: 3283.33/(3250.17+1025.63) = 77%

Conversions: 152/(1416+435) = 8% (about 1 in 12)

Well, I’m off now. Gonna walk the dogs, work on my tan by the pool, then go work on my contract.

I’ve also got a thread going for dc metro area members http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showt…98#post3919198. I’d like to get together this weekend for a social.

Okay gang, it’s almost midnight here and I just got home from another contract I picked up this month (I do a little consulting on the side from time to time to meet girls.)

If your just picking up on this topic, here are the previous related posts:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

Now on with “affiliate marketing with adwords” part 5.

I wanted to post this first thing this morning, but since I had to go, I didn’t have time.

I have to tell you, the first week of July pretty much rocked! But this week started off like crap. I lost $209 on Tuesday!!!! Monday only made $40 and Wednesday only made $127. So I was starting to worry. Is the honeymoon over?

What the heck was going on? As I mentioned in other posts, I paused all the other adgroups and stop running ads on Saturday.

Well, I had some time this morning to run a new report that adwords is offering. It’s called the “Placement Performance” report. OMG! That report rocks!!!

It answered all my questions. Why do Saturdays not convert? Why did my conversions take a landslide this week? Why aren’t the other adgroups converting even though they are virtually identical?

Here is the sample raw data from the report.

Notice the paused campaign? Look where I was getting a lot of the impressions from:

chessmaniac.com, myspace.com, myembar.com, etc…

Not even remotely related to mortgage refinancing. No fn wonder it wasn’t converting!

Then I took all that data and crunched it into a table using excel.

Look at pogoaddiction.com for Tuesday July 10. That was the day I lost $200. That site is a flash gaming site. Why on earth would my ads be showing on that site? So I went to the site exclusion feature and blocked that site.

Look at zillow.com on July 3. I grossed $300, net $155 that day. That is a site I might consider for sited targeted campaigns.

I also stopped advertising on saturdays because they weren’t converting. So there is no July data, but I guarantee that if I look at June numbers, the Saturdays will show that I was getting a ton of clicks from myspace or pogoaddiction or some other recreational site.

In fact, I wasted $125 on pogoaddiction this month alone.

I could go on all day with this data, but I think you can see the solid gold in this report.

Quick stats: After blocking those sites, My net profit today is over $200!!!!