Super Affiliate Bidding Strategies, Part II
October 21st, 2007 by 
Amit
So what happened to Joe’s campaign (if you haven’t, please read part I first)??
An astute reader of mine let the cat out of the bag, if you read the comments for the last post you’ll have discovered this:
- When Joe first started his campaign, he bid 0.20, and the ads for his top converting keywords were on the first page. This is where he got his 4 sales from.
- By bidding all of his keywords down to 0.10 he pushed his top converting keywords onto the second page. For the next 5000-1000 clicks he got barely any clicks from these high converting keywords, as a result he made ZERO sales!
Here’s a simple fact: High converting keywords have a higher cost per click, since they convert better there is more competition for these keywords.
In a previous post I suggested just bidding high to assure that your high converting keywords get a decent ad position, and thus a decent amount of traffic.
The only problem with this approach is that you have to be willing to loss some money, actually in most cases a lot of money, before you collect enough data to optimize your campaign.
When I launch a new affiliate offer, I’ll drop a $1k-$2k without blinking an eye. For one offer I launched a few months back I dropped over $5000 before it started making a consistent profit!?! When I mean drop I mean NET LOSS.
However, I’ve developed a more sophisticated way to assure that your high converting keywords get good traffic WITHOUT bleeding red for weeks.
Here’s the idea: start your bid at 0.20 (or whatever) across the boards in starting out your campaign, after a day or two look at your ad positions, you’ll notice some adgroups your ads show up in position one, and for other adgroups your ads are in position 12 or higher.
You want all your ads on the first page, right? Preferably between positions 3-8 (positions 1 and 2 tend to get too many ‘click happy’ browsers).
Here’s what you do next:
- Go into Adwords Editor, make sure you have campaign statistics showing.
- Go to ‘Ad Groups’ tab for your campaign
- Then Click on the ‘View’ drop down box above the tabs, select ‘Create or Set Custom View…”
- Filter your data by ‘Performance Statistics’, it’s at the very bottom.
- Set Avg Pos greater than 8
- Now you’ll see adgroups who’s ads are greater than position 8, Select all of these adgroups and increase the max cpc (in the box below) by 30% (more or less depending on the positions of your ads).
- Repeat the above steps expect this time set your filter to show all ads in positions less than 3, and then bid them down by 30%.
By adjusting your bids by ad position you’ll push all your ads into the sweat spot, positions 3-8. Now you can let your campaign run without losing your shirt, and rest assured your high converting keywords are getting good traffic. 
So you can have your cake AND eat it!
Don’t be suckered into thinking your campaign mysteriously fizzled out after making sales for 2 days. Chances are you did something seriously wrong to make that happen.
ad positions high converting keywords keyword bidding strategy
Posted in Google™ AdWords, PPC Marketing, Super Affiliate Mindset | 
I’m still stuck on the AdWords web interface, but with the multitude of tools available that export to CSV that can then be imported into the standalone editor - on top of your tips - I might just have to finally make the switch over.
As much as I enjoy your lifestyle posts, it’s good to see the bread-and-butter how-to’s as well, Amit. Thanks and keep up the good work!
Amit,
Question about ad Position.
I have used the ad positioning option. But I have noticed the my actual adverage position falls below the position I wanted by about 1-3 positions. Not to complain, but why have that option if it does not do it? For my effort the impressions and CTR are decent. Its not serious, but I just always find myself asking, why is it doing that.
Hi REC,
There’s a reason you see this. In countries outside of the US your ad is showing in a high position, while in the US where the ad space is more competitive your ad is showing in a lower position.
Google takes your average position over all countries! Take account this adjustment if you’re changing your bids by ad position.
Thanks Amit. Your amazing. I would have never
seen that, nor would I every find the correct answer
but from you.
Thanks Again:)
How would you decide what amount to start bidding at? Can you give an example for say an offer that pays $20?
Amit, i find that usually the top 3 position gets almost 30% clicks most of them time and position 4 to 8 gets like 5% the most.
This means the competitors is 25% more edge than me (competitors at top 3 and i at 4 to 8 )
This roughly means they have 25% less expensive keywords right? (just rought maths )
And a ton of more sales. ( i guess it depends on keywords, because one defitnitly wants to be no 1 for trademark keyword)
What do you think?
Amit,
Thanks for the tips and guidelines, they are very insightful!:)
Hi Ryan,
Once you know what keywords convert well you want to bid as high for them as possible so as to maximize your profit. At the beginning before you know what keywords convert, you want to shot for the bottom of the first page.
Once you’ve collected enough stats you can bid up and bid down the appropriate keywords.
hmm… Ive asked my questions about what to start bids at (couple comments up) several time on this blog but you always seem to manage not to answer it
that’s because it’s an impossible question to answer. I usually go to the google adwords estimator tool. Plug in a few keywords and your max CPC, and it’ll give you a rough estimate of what you can expect to pay.
I found that $ is a concern for me in the beginning. What I do is focus on exact/phrase matches only. It’ll give me a higher CTR, AND more bang for my buck.
After some fine tuning and eliminating a lot of bad keywords, THEN I’ll go broad to expand my list.
Good post. I’m going to start playing with Adwords editor a lot more to try and discover nifty tricks.
This is off topic but please advise when is your next presentation, Amit.? Thanks.Dolly
Yes, those are about the same techniques I have used. And unless the product is super hot and people are looking, I don’t see an actual ROI until day three or later, especially if I am bidding on content too.
In the early days, I would bid up content before day three, and then bam, day 3 eats me alive in charges.
Not any more.
That’s a great tip Amit! I had no idea you could do that with Adwords Editor.
Hey Amit,
When it comes to your losses, how long does it take you to “lose” that money? 1 week? 1 month. You mentioned you’ll net 1K in losses before the campaign turns around. I’m trying to gauge how patient you are with an offer timewise…
Amit,
I am a little dissapointed that it doesn’t work if you have bids on individual keywords
The default adgroup bid does not override the individual keyword bids.
How can I use this technique if I have my keywords each with a different bid? Is it possible?
Peter
UPDATE: I figured it out! In my case the individual keyword bids didn’t matter so I used AdWords Editor to remove individual keyword bids on my keywords in that campaign!
Yeee-haw!
Peter
When I Set Avg Pos greater than 8 and press “search” nothing shows up???
Amit,
You have the best blog available thats for damn sure!
That makes a lot of sense I have been over looking the position thing for the last week now I’m finally starting to get somewhere if it wasn’t for your blog I’d probably be dead in the grass, but your blog has aloud me to speed thing up or get things done more fastly with out going down the pit falls.
A similar scenario would be organic search generally position 1 is click happy, but position 3 is the best position and I’d have to probably say the same about adwords because people get a more “selective thinking” when they get down to position 3-8, but then again sometimes people have a really selective thinking when they get to page two.
Amit, those are some great tips. It’s always the little things that make a big difference.
I’m going to try and implement your bidding strategy next time I setup a new campaign.
thanks again!