Affiliate Marketing Through PPC Campaigns

Jeff from BuzzMyBlog asked me some very good questions about affiliate marketing through PPC campaigns on networks such as Google AdWords, when I left a comment on his blog with some tips on this form of affiliate marketing.

Jeff Asked,

“That is a great idea that I haven’t mentioned before - buy PPC ads directly to the affiliate site. I guess the trick there is to either:

1. Spend less on the click than a lead pays
2. Make sure the conversion rate is high enough on a sale to cover the cost of the ad.

I guess the real “art” is finding the profitable campaigns along with the affordable PPC campaigns, huh? I tried it a few times and ended up spending more on the PPC campaign than I earned with the affiliate program.”

You nailed it Jeff, that is exactly the art in more general terms. That is exactly what you need to do, but it’s a bit more of technical process.

Here are my tips for pure success with affiliate marketing and PPC campaigns…

When you look for a product to promote, look at the “pitch” or “landing” page. See how well optimized it is. You can do this with a website analyzer tool (with big brand name sites you won’t need to worry about this).

You can use a really good one for free here…

Website Analyzer

If you’re confused as to how to understand the stats, just scroll down the page till you see the green, yellow, and red highlighted sentences. This tool tells you what’s wrong, how and what you need to do to fix it. All green means the site is perfectly optimized; obviously we are promoting a site that’s not ours, so if it’s not up to par we will move on.

Why Does It Need To Be Well Optimized?

Well if the site you’re entering into your ad in your campaign isn’t a well optimized landing page, then even if you pay top dollar for the keyword, your ad will rank in a lower position because of a bad landing page. If the landing page is excellent, then you actually end up paying less for the very same keyword, and rank in a higher position all at the same time (based on Google AdWords).

When you find the ideal “landing” page you can check on how well the product itself does. There are two ways I do this…

a.) Contacting the affiliate managers directly, and explaining to them that you’re interested in seeing
their reports on the performance of the product and/or website you’re trying to promote. This
would include affiliate sales, conversion rates, bounce rate, and a couple other things.
I suggest asking for a full report.

b.) The only other way I could possibly get these reports to my knowledge is by belonging to
affiliate networks like AzoogleAds. The reason I say this is because you get your own
personal affiliate manager, and the affiliate manager provides you with a monthly report on all
the top programs for the month - including all the detailed stats you need.

You’re Just Getting Started

You’re yet to decide if your going to promote this program. After everything above is good to go 100 percent, now I begin to do a little keyword research. I start to narrow down the keywords that describe the product I’m promoting best.

Using the Google Keyword Tool, I enter my selected keywords to see how often they’re searched for, average etc, and most importantly how much competition the top searched for keywords have.

After I’ve found out whether or not the keywords are worthy of bringing plenty traffic, my next move is to find out what these keywords cost. If you have an AdWords account you can see exactly how much your keywords will cost you from the AdWords platform, they have a keyword estimator that is very helpful.

From the estimator I can find what a typical site will need to pay for a keyword to rank “OK”. You want to try and promote sites with excellent landing pages so you can bid well below what the estimator suggests, and still rank high on the first page of the sponsored listings - but remember it’s not just a great landing page, you must also find a program that has all of the qualities I’m describing in this post.

Now We Do A Little Bit of Simple Math

This is where what Jeff mentioned comes in. Now that we have the basic statistics for the affiliate product, its landing page, how popular the keywords are, their cost, and how much competition, we can now compare campaign cost to affiliate product conversion rates and revenue. If you can diagnose this properly you will be able to determine if you will get a return on your investment.

Here is what to look for…

a.) What % commission does the product being promoted pay out.
b.) What is the conversion rate for the product being promoted.
c.)How much per click will you actually have to pay. (cost of your keywords)
d.)How many clicks in total (cost of entire campaign) do you need so that according to the conversion rate, there is a decent return on investment.

All you should be keeping in mind is overall cost of campaign to overall potential revenue according to the sites statistics and conversion rates. Once you have these two very important numbers in your hand (assuming you did the math correctly), you simply subtract and see if the profit is worth it to you. If there is no profit, or not enough, then you should move on and continue your search for the right affiliate program.

Since Jeff asked me and I happen to like his blog so much, I am going to throw in a bonus that will surely double the current conversion rate of any affiliate program.

Demographics - This gorgeous 4 syllable word is like music to my ears. This is very simple guys and I’m going to make it quick… This site Quantcast is godly. All you do is type in the URL of the site in the search bar and it gives you very detailed stats about the traffic that comes to that site.

These are just a few things Quantcast enlightens you with.

• Gender
• Age
• Household Income
• Ethnicity
• Monthly, daily, traffic
• Geographic

And much more. A lot more.

What’s the point of all of this “demo” stuff?

Well if you’re using AdWords and a few other PPC networks with the demographic feature, you can analyze the product you are promoting, and find out who the majority of people that go there and convert are. Then you can go back to your AdWords account and plug all this in to the demographic section, and only display your ads to the people who are more likely to convert. Saving you a ton of clicks, and boosting your conversion rate even higher then it is because of the demographic variable.

Jeff, I hope this helps answer your question and gets you on your way to making some affiliate money through PPC campaigns.

I would love to hear everyone else’s experience with affiliate marketing through PPC campaigns, enlighten me in the comment section

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