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If you’ve been following Part I & Part II at this point you should have :

1. A Keyword list broken into different categories or themes
2. 2 Ads (just the body copy) for each category of keywords
3. Your Google Conversion Tracking code on the thank you page of the affiliate offer

The next step is to use EfficientPPC to quickly setup your campaign.

Before I talk about the how, I want to talk about the why - which is just as important.

As I mentioned before, here how your campaign structure will look like once we’re done building your campaign with EfficientPPC :

1. One Unique Keyword per Adgroup - broad, phrase, and exact match types of one keyword
2. One Campaign per Keyword Category - with a different landing page for each category
3. 2 Ads per Adgroup - with the keyword in the headline

So why do I structure my campaigns this way? There’s a bunch of reasons :

1. Adwords highly rewards you for relevancy, and by structuring your campaign to have one keyoword PER adgroup and the keyword in the headline, you’re super relevant right off the bat. Just by structuring your campaign this way your quality score will immediately go up vs the alternative of throwing 20-50 keywords per adgroup.
2. By having a seperate landing page for each keyword category you are, again, giving your quality score a big boost. Google’s algo checks to see how relevant your keywords are to the theme of the content on your landing page.
3. Building a seperate campaign for each keyword category allows you to quickly glance at your campaign stats and immediately see which keyword categories are producing the most sales and conversions - so you know where to focus your efforts. This is the 20/80 principle in action. Don’t ignore this step, it’s VERY important.
4. 2 Ads per Adgroup - This will set you up so you can immediately start split testing your ads for maximum CTR. Once you start finding winner, replace the losing ads with another ad and continue to test. NEVER stop testing, this is the KEY to long term success!

BUILDING YOUR CAMPAIGN WITH EFFICIENT PPC

We’re going to use dog training for this example.

The first step is to setup a keyword token list for each keyword category, be sure to appropriately label each list :

As you make and save each keyword list (one for each category) you should see them appear on the sidebar :

Just as a simple example I’ve setup two keyword categories for our example : Dog - General and House Training

The second step is to setup your adgroup structure and bid prices :

Don’t worry about the destination url on this part, that’s only if your want to specify a unique destination url for each keyword.

Also, notice how I set the broad match bid 33% lower than the phrase and exact match bid. I always set my broad match bid 25%-33% lower, since it usually doesn’t convert as well as phrase or exact match.

Third step is to write your ads :

To put your keyword in the headline use : {Result: Default Headline} where ‘Default Headline’ is the headline to use if your keyword is above 25 characters. The capital R in Result will capitalize the first letter of each word in your headline.

I only wrote one ad for this example, be sure to ALWAYS write two!

Next Step is to duplicate this first campaign and just change the name and the keyword list to create the campaign for the second keyword segment, House Training.

The next step is to edit the ads for your second campaign so they correspond to the two unique body copies you made for the second keyword segment (remember? I talked about writing 2 unique body copies for each keyword segment).

The last step is to create your campaign and upload it into Adwords editor!

Yes, it’s REALLY that easy.

Few last points:

1. Set your campaign daily budget to something within your risk tolerance, which could be anywhere between $25-$200. I set my daily budget at $200 when I first launch a campaign. After I let it run a day and am confident that 1) it converts and 2) I won’t get a flood of targeted traffic, I increase the daily budget to $1000 or higher.
2. Turn off the content network, if you want to test the content network make a duplicate campaign using EfficientPPC and add -Content to the campaign name. Set this campaign for content network traffic only. I also recommend lowering the bid on the content campaign by at least 25%.
3. Countries : For offers that work worldwide DO NOT turn on all countries. Outside of the US I would add the following countries ONLY : Canada, UK, New Zealand, and Australia.

By properly setting up your Adwords campaign, you’ve laid a SOLID foundation - which in my opinion is the MOST IMPORTANT PART. You’ve now dramatically increased your chances of success, now all you have to do if find an affiliate offer that consistently converts and optimize it for profitability.

Okay, last time we talked a lot about keywords, that is, how to clean up your list and segment it.

This time I’m going to walk you through how to write your ads, and setup conversion tracking. In the last post I’ll show you how to put it all together and build a killer Adwords campaign with EfficientPPC.

WRITING YOUR ADS

First I want to give you some basic quick and dirty guidelines for writing an effective ad :

1. Put the keywords in the ad at least once, I almost always put it in the headline. This is the biggest psychological trigger you can put in your ad, when people see exactly what they typed in Google in your ad, they immediately see it as highly relevant.
2. Include the BIGGEST benefit of your offer in the ad. Example : Discover 5 Simple Steps to Stop Dog Biting!
3. Have a strong call to action. Examples : Start Now! Begin Here! Start Your Search Here! Etc…

For a full list of tips and tricks check out Googlelady’s 31 Killer Adwords Ads Tips.

Let’s get down to business…

Now remember how I talked about breaking your keywords into different categories based on theme?

Once you’ve done that it’s time to write 2 ads for each keyword.

It’s not as bad as it sounds! LOL

Here’s how to do it:

1. Write 2 unique body copies (description line 1 & 2) for each keyword category
2. Using EfficientPPC we will dynamically insert the keyword in the headline, making 2 ads for each keywords

Ultimately, here’s how your affiliate campaign structure will look like : a different Adwords campaign for each keyword category, one keywords per adgroups with 2 ads per keyword.
CONVERSION TRACKING

Do NOT launch a campaign unless you’re tracking which keywords are producing sales for you. Here’s the bottom line, if you’re biding on 1000 keywords, you’re going to find only a tiny fraction of those keywords will produce consistent sales for you.

You probably find around 20 keywords out of the 1000 produce consistent sales over the course of a month. If you don’t have conversion tracking in place, you’re dead in the water. How will you know which 20 keywords are producing consistent sales?

A hard reality of affiliate marketing is that most successful campaigns will not be profitable right off the bat, you’ll likely lose money for a while (weeks!) before you’re in the black. Tracking which keywords convert is what’s going to allow you to cut out the non performing keywords and achieve profitability.

So DON’T be stupid, make sure to have tracking in place, whether it’s Google Conversion Tracking, Xtreme Conversions, or another tracking tool that will tell you which keywords are converting to sales.

Getting your code on the thank you page…

I highly recommend Google Conversion Tracking over anything else.

Why?

Simple, first off the conversion data is seamlessly integrated into your Google Account. Plus you can download all the data into Adwords Editor which makes optimizing your campaigns REALLY easy.

There’s only one problem : you’ve got to convince your affiliate manager to place the conversion code on the thank you page for you.

Most savvy affiliate managers either have a backend system in place where you can input your conversion id or add it to the end of your affiliate link (i.e. ?glid=XXXXXXXX) .

In most other cases you can just email your affiliate manager and they’ll put the code on the thank you page for you. For these cases, here’s a scripted email I recommend :

“Hi Joe,

First off, I’d like to say that I’m really impressed with (name of offer). In fact I’ve put a great deal of time and effort into setting up a large Adwords campaign for your offer.

My campaign is ready to upload in Adwords. However, before I do that I would greatly appreciate if you may add my Google Conversion tracking code (that I’ve pasted below) on your thank you page. This code will allow me to track my conversion to the keyword level so I can optimize my campaign and increase my sales and profits.

Here’s my Google Conversion Code :

(paste your code here)

I look forward to working with you.”

Here’s the trick : Don’t actually setup your campaign UNTIL you get a confirmation that your code is on the thank you page.

If they don’t reply, email them again in a couple days, if you still get no response, move on.

You want to start off by picking 5-10 offers that you want to promote and send the affiliate manager of each offer the above email.

Once you get a confirmation from the affiliate manager that your code is on the thank you page, start setting up your campaign for that offer.

Do NOT start setting up a campaign for an affiliate offer or launch an offer until you get confirmation that your Google Conversion code is in place.

Hard part’s done! The last step is setting up your campaign with EfficientPPC. Trust me, that’s easy. I’ll talk about it next time.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about this lately and I wanted to clear up a lot of confusion that people have about setting up their Adwords campaigns.

Your first job is to build an effective keyword list, I’m not going to go into the details about that in this post. For starters, I highly recommend Google Keywords Tool, they just recently improved it, it will give you an amazing keyword list and best of all it’s free!

Also check out this post I did about keyword research.

FILTERING OUT LONG TAIL KEYWORD

If you do keyword research like I do, you’ll probably end up with anywhere from several thousand to ten of thousands of keywords for your niche.

Now I know a lot of you will go out and immediately try to upload ALL those keywords into your Adwords account.

That’s a BAD idea.

Here’s why it’s a bad idea :

1. If you’re a newbie ppc marketer you’re going to hit your account (50k keywords) and/or campaign (10k keywords) limits REALLY fast. And you’d better have some substantial history and adspend on Google before you try to get those limits removed.
2. The first 2 weeks of launching a new campaign is when Google pretty much determines your campaign quality score. If you have a TON of low search volume long tail keywords in your new campaign right off the bat then Google will penalize you with a lower campaign quality score (these low volume search terms put a load on their system, that’s why they penalize you).

When you first launch a campaign on Google you only want to bid on mid to high volume keywords FIRST. Once you’ve build your campaign history and quality score up over a period of 2 weeks then you can add in all the long tail keywords.

Here’s what also cool about this approach : it allows you to test & optimize your campaign on a small scale before you ramp it up with 1000s of keywords. In the next post I’ll show you exactly how to do this.

Now you may be thinking : “Amit, this sounds great, but how do I filter out all the high to med volume keywords from my huge freakin’ keywords list?”

Simple, use Ad Sage, it’s a nifty little toolbar addon to Excel that gives you the search volume of each keyword on your keyword list (on MSN search) in the past 6 month. For your initial campaign launch, bid on only the keywords that have had at least 1 search in the last 6 months.

In the next section we’re going to segment that keyword list…

SEGMENTING YOUR KEYWORDS

In most markets it makes sense to break up your keyword list into seperate categories.

Let me give you an example: let’s say your promoting a site about bedroom accessories, you probably want to break up the keyword list into these categories like these :

lamps

sheets

pillows

furniture

brand name (if you can bid on that)

competitor brands

etc

Once your done breaking up your keyword list into categories, put each category of keywords into a separate Excel worksheet. Make a miscellaneous category for whatever keywords don’t fit into any other category.

Here’s an important key to getting a good conversion rate and high quality score:

Build a separate landing page for EACH and EVERY category that specifically targets that category. Don’t just dynamically insert variables onto the page, make sure each page has unique and highly relevant content. Your landing page about pillows, better be about pillows and nothing else!

If you’re direct linking, see if you can deep link each category to a relevant page about that category. If you’re bidding on specific product names, deep link each product to its sales page.

Next Time I’ll show you how to setup your ads, choose appropriate domain names, setup conversion tracking, and build your campaign using Efficient PPC.

You know, there’s a lot of affiliate out there telling people that direct linking no longer works, and that they shouldn’t waste their time with it.

I was one of these affiliate.

But in the paste several months I’ve come full circle.

Here’s some success stories :

1. I meet two guys at Yanik’s Underground. One guy is NETTING $50k/month with all direct linking campaigns. Another guy is making $100k in revenues a month with direct linking (with HIGH ROI).
2. One of my students is netting $1000-$1300/day profit from just 3 direct linking campaigns he launched. He used the strategies I taught him combined with some genius insight into what markets to promote.
3. Another one of my students is netting $500/day profit - her first big success, following the EXACT strategies I laid out in my coaching program and in this post.

Also, I’ve just recently launched a direct linking campaign, it’s already profitable, and continues to quickly grow as I split test my ads and add more keywords.

The biggest advantage of direct linking is that it allows you to quickly test a market without a huge invest of your time. No matter how much market research you do, quickly testing lots of affiliate offers is really the best way to find the big winners.

So if you’re struggling to make landing pages, I recommend that you FIRST do direct linking and get 10-20 campaigns going.

You can easily launch 5-10 campaigns a week if you’re focus and disciplined.

Once you find a big winner, reinvest your profits into hiring a decent web designer and writer to build you a site. Once you have a real site up, your traffic will go WAAAY UP!

And so will your profits!

The biggest drawback to direct linking is that you’ll only get about 20% impression share (in most cases), however, this problem is easily solved with your own site.

Many of you have been asking for case studies, I’ll be doing several case studies in the beginning of May showing some concrete examples, so stay tuned!

A number of my readers have asked me to blog about the recent Google Slap.

For a lot of affiliates it was more like a Google Knockout Punch. A few of my friends had their campaigns, their life and blood, wiped out overnight.

I was unscathed, and I’m still trying to fully understand why.

Based on talking to some reliable sources here’s what I can glean:

1. A lot of affiliates doing dynamic keyword insertion, direct linking, or sending all their traffic to one page got slapped.
2. A number of affiliate lost nearly all of their content network traffic. It seems as if Google is looking for increased relevancy between the keyword theme (of your content adgroup), your ad, and your landing page.
3. Google is tightening the noose on what it considers a “quality” affiliate site.

One of my very small niches (where I was spending $90 bucks a day) got hit hard, my other niches were overall unaffected - some keywords got deactivated but my overall traffic levels are unchanged.

My slapped site was just a few landing pages with 20 or so articles thrown in to make Google happy, while my sites that were unaffected by the Google Slap were REAL sites.

What do I mean by real sites?

My unaffected sites share the following qualities :

1. The sites were structured as real sites. They didn’t look like sites that was designed for ppc with a bunch of articles thrown in to make Google happy.
2. The sites all have unique content added to them on a regular basis (in some cases an actively updated blog).
3. The sites are actively being promoted in ways other than ppc…through article & direction submissions, press releases, etc, etc.

In other words, my sites that were unaffected do NOT resemble thin affiliate ppc sites who’s only purpose is to redirect the visitor (from Adwords) to the merchant site. I suspect Google can now smell out if you’re just adding articles to your site to make them happy.

Final Thoughts :

Focus on making real sites that add substantial value, rather than making an affiliate site that’s just crammed with content for the sole purpose of getting a good landing page quality score.

Forget automated programs that make bogus promises of protecting you against Google Slaps.

Just take the time to do it right, it will save you a lot of time, money, and stress in the long run.

PS Also check out these related posts by Adwords Experts (and Good Friends) Josh and Geordie.

My wife and I are flying to Paris tomorrow for a well deserved vacation! So you can imagine that I’m super busy today - I’m keeping this post short and sweet.

Here’s the dilemma…

When you’re split testing two ads on Adwords you can either test for CTR or Conversion Rate.

Not only can making a small change in your ad change your CTR significantly, it can also impact the conversion rate of your ad - sometimes significantly.

But here’s the problem, you can’t optimize for both CTR and Conversion rate simultaneously. Having an ad with a higher CTR does NOT mean it has a higher conversion rate.

For example, you can put your product price in your ad and it will most certainly lower your CTR, BUT your conversion rate will almost always go UP.

So what should you optimize your ad for : highest possible CTR or highest possible Conversion Rate?

The advantage of having a higher conversion rate is obvious - you make more sales.

The advantages of having a higher CTR are significant as well :

1. With a higher CTR you get more traffic
2. Google rewards you with a better quality score, which means your ad either moves up while you pay the same CPC or Google lowers your CPC + your min bids can drop as well.

Think about it, if you double your CTR and your ad jumps up several spots you can potentially increase your traffic by 4X, 2X from doubling your CTR and another 2X from your ad moving up. If your quality score gets high enough and you move into the sponsored link section, than you can expect a jump in Conversion Rate as well!

Here’s the bottom line : OPTIMIZE YOUR AD FOR MAX CTR

Why?

There’s several reasons :

1. There’s a 2-fold benefit to improving your CTR : more traffic + a higher quality score. Getting a high quality score is a BIG DEAL.
2. Optimizing for CTR is fast since it’s based on clicks. Optimizing for Conversion Rate takes a LONG TIME, in most cases you need at least 20-30 conversions on each ad to make a statistically valid decision, compared to 20-30 clicks on each ad to make a decision as to which one has a higher CTR. After a month of split testing you can make HUGE gains in CTR, however, if you’re optimizing for Conversion Rate, chances are after a month you won’t have enough data to even make ONE change.
3. By optimizing for Conversion Rate of your Ad you’re neglecting the CTR, and if your CTR suffers it will hurt your quality score at the keyword, campaign, and even the account level - potentially raising your min bids and your CPC costs account wide.

So start split testing your ads, continually and systematically, and blow your competitors out of the water!

Today at PPC Summit, we had another round of info packed sessions. This is REALLY great stuff.

I picked up some real gems regarding Google Adwords today :

There’s been a veil of secrecy on Google’s part as to what’s the deal with history?

ACCOUNT HISTORY

There’s been widespread claims in the SEM world that people who have had Google accounts for years have a significant advantage (in terms of lower click costs) over newbies who are just starting out.

Now, one of the presenters actually got some answer out of Google regarding account history, and Google claims is takes only 4 months to overcome the disadvantage of having a new account.

So presumably there’s no benefit between someone who’s had a Google account for 1 year vs 5 years, once you’ve had your account actively running for about 4 months you’re on a level playing field - according to Google.  

What sucks is when you first start a new account you could be paying 30%-60% more per click than you otherwise would, just for having a new account!

CAMPAIGN HISTORY

Now many of you have heard that when you first start a new campaign you’ll get high click cost and/or poor ad positions until you’ve build some history.

But how long do you have to build history on a new campaign anyway?

Again, according to Google, in the case of campaign history it takes approximately 2 weeks to build up your history.

So over the first two weeks of building up a campaign expect your traffic to increase and your CPC to drop as your history builds.

There’s keyword history and ad history as well. How fast your keyword history or ad history builds up depends on how much traffic you’re getting.

POSITION NORMALIZATION

Position Normalization? Yeah, sounds like some fancy mathematical term! LOL

Position Normalization was put in place by Google on August 2006, and yet most people have not heard of it.

So what does it mean? It means that Google no longer rewards you JUST for having a high CTR, it’s now ‘normalized for the position.’ So if you’re in position #1 on Google and your CTR is 5%, while most advertisers get 7% CTR in that position, you’ll be penalized, NOT rewarded.

Your CTR only helps as far as it compares to how other advertisers fare in the same ad position.

In the old days you could bid high when you launched your campaign and build up a super high CTR by being in the first position; as a result Google would give you a high quality score. Then you just cut your bid by 75% and your ad would STILL be on the first page thanks to your high quality score.

Guess what? With position normalization this doesn’t work anymore. Unfortunately a lot of people are still aggressively promoting this bogus strategy - totally not their fault, Google slipped position normalization in while no one was looking!
Don’t waste your money by bidding high when launching a campaign - only benefit of biding high now is to build up your ad and keyword history faster - but you don’t have to be in the first position to do this.

I recommend you determine your initial bid as followed:

Assume average conversion rate : 1%=0.01 (5%-10% for pay per lead)

Let’s say you have a commission payout of : $X

I would recommend that you start bidding 1% x $X = 0.01 x $X

Why? Because the Conversion rate times the Commission (affiliate payout) = EPC (earnings per click)

Now if you’re bid = EPC you can expect to break even at this point. Then you can just adjust your bids from there as you collect data.

Now this is just a rule of thumb, but it works well in most cases. It works best if you actually KNOW what your EPC or your conversion rate is for ppc traffic (ask your affiliate manager).

It was SOOO worth paying $1000 to go to the PPC Summit, just for these few tidbits I got on the second day!

If YOU want to be a super affiliate you have to be absolutely hungry for the knowledge.

I’ve been hungry since day one, and I’m still seeking to take my game to the next level.

Now I know I’ve been talking about a lot of advanced topics recently. I’ve had a number of readers ask : “Hey Amit, all this is great, but I’m just getting started. What you do recommend that I do?”

Now based on the amazing success that many of the students in my coaching program are having I recommend starting affiliate marketing with direct linking campaigns promoting clickbank products.

Why?

First off direct linking requires no website, that right, all you need to do is sign up for an affiliate id through clickbank and you’re good to go - it takes 2 minutes.

Building a website is probably the biggest hurdle many affiliates face when getting started in this business, that is, unless your a professional web designer! I know it was a HUGE hurdle for me, it took me weeks to learn enough html to make a simple webpage with tables that didn’t look like a 5 year old threw it together!

Needless to say, I don’t make my own sites anymore. I have people who actually know what they’re doing handle that!

Now what’s direct linking? If you don’t already know it’s where you simply put your affiliate link in the destination url of your Google Ad, taking the visitor right to the affiliate site.

How cool is that?

As long as your commission are greater than your click costs you’re making a profit.

This is by no means a long term business strategy, but it’s the FASTEST way to learn Adwords, and direct marketing, for that matter.

Here’s a few basic steps to take to get started :

1. First a relatively obscure niche in clickbank, a highly competitive niche will be difficult to break into with direct linking. Obscure little niches work great with direct linking though, as long as they has a decent sales page and a viable market.
2. Use a tool like Keycompete.com or Keywordspy.com to dig up a nice broad keyword list
3. Clean up junk keywords out of your keyword list
4. Use EfficientPPC to setup a ONE keyword per adgroups campaign, with two unique ads per adgroup
5. While you’re setting up your campaign with EfficientPPC, Setup clickbank tids for each keyword. There’s a number of ways of doing this, the easier way is to simply assign a number to each keyword and use that number as your tid (since clickbank severely limits of the tid to 8 characters you can’t use the keyword itself). This is critical to your success, you need to be able to track which keywords are actually making sales.
6. Launch your campaign on Adwords with a starting bid of 0.20. Closely monitor your campaign. (1) if you’re getting virtually zero traffic, up your bids. (2) If your getting lots of traffic ( > 500 clicks) and zero sales, you’ve probably got a dud, move on (3) If your getting traffic and consistent sales, you’ve got a winner, now you need to optimize and make it profitable!

I don’t have time to go into more detail in this post, but I’m planning a simple direct linking case study where I pick a clickbank niche and show you what I do, step by step, and how to make it profitable.

So stay tuned!

A little while back Linda Buquet of 5 star affiliate forum asked me to address the question of domain strategy.

A lot of affiliates are very confused about what domain to choose for their sites and fail to understand why the proper choice of a domain name is absolutely critical to affiliate success.

Here a few tips when choosing domains for your affiliate sites (Linda, this will answer your reader’s question) :

1. NEVER use a general domain like abcmarketing.com and use subdomains for different niches. You may as well shot yourself in the foot. You domain builds or destroys credibility with your visitor, instantly. They say never judge a book by it’s cover, well, people will judge your site by it’s domain, whether you agree with it or not.
2. You want your domain to be targeted as closely as possible to the niche and to convey what your site is all about. If your promoting an ebook about dog training, then you want a domain like : dog-training-tips.com. Your choice of domain will effect your CTR AND Your Conversion rate
3. When entering a new niche, buy MULTIPLE domains tightly related to the niche, setup the domains as aliases and test them to see which one generates the highest CTR. You’ll be amazed, a slightly different domain name can double, even triple your CTR.
4. If your domain name contains your main keyword it will boost your Google QS.

So when it comes to domains, choose wisely, and test.

Felix Leshno is not only a good friend but-without a question-one of the TOP super affiliates in the world. As a heavy hitting CJ Top performer, Felix, is always developing innovative ways to do affiliate marketing better and faster!

Check out this post I did based on a conversation I had with Felix.

Anyhow, I’m excited to announce that Felix has just released a new tool to build your PPC campaign at blazing speeds, called Efficient PPC, that puts Speed PPC to shame.

Plus it’s a fraction of the cost of Speed PPC!

Efficient PPC does everything Speed PPC does plus :

1. Allow Campaign Error checking
2. Ability to Add More Default Lists
3. Has 8 Build in Keyword Lists
4. Create Duplicate Campaigns Instantly - Useful if you want to separate Search & Content
5. Break Up Huge Campaigns into Smaller Ones - Instantly
6. Word List Editor

A huge complaint I’ve had about Adwords Editor, is the ridiculous amount of time it takes to load large campaigns when using the bulk add feature. Efficient PPC completely solves this headache.
With Efficient PPC the long wait times are gone, you can load a 50k keyword campaign in Adwords Editor in 1 sec instead of 15 to 30 minutes.

Try Efficient PPC now, it’s free for 14 days and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

PS You’re probably wondering why Felix didn’t do a big product launch? Simple first off he’s not an info marketer and honestly he makes so much money as an affiliate he doesn’t need to be. Secondly, He just wants to share this awesome tool with the affiliate community-at a fair price-so that everyone can benefit.