Super Affiliate Bidding Strategies, Part II

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:

1. 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.
2. 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:

1. Go into Adwords Editor, make sure you have campaign statistics showing.
2. Go to ‘Ad Groups’ tab for your campaign
3. Then Click on the ‘View’ drop down box above the tabs, select ‘Create or Set Custom View…”
4. Filter your data by ‘Performance Statistics’, it’s at the very bottom.
5. Set Avg Pos greater than 8
6. 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).
7. 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.