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Making Money With PPC
Posted by Scott on 7th November, 2007 | 10 commentsI’m the first to admit that PPC campaigns have not been my thing. I’ve dabbled with them over the years, mainly with Google, and I’ve used them to launch new websites with short term promotions, but over the long run I just haven’t found them to yield a positive ROI for the stuff that I’m promoting.
Yesterday I decided to try it out again, and setup a test campaign on Google to promote one of my sites in preparation for the holiday shopping season. I set it up as a site targeted CPM based campaign. Lo and behold, the campaign is performing great right out of the gate. I’m seeing an average CPM of $0.75, an average CPC of just $0.09, and several thousand clicks on day one. I can definitely work with a cost per user of $0.09 - that’s something I can monetize, and I haven’t even tweaked the ad or the sites that it’s shown on yet. In the past, I was seeing CPC’s of $0.20 or more, and that was definitely breaking the bank.
I think the trick here is running a CPM based site-targeted campaign and testing lots of different ads to yield a great CTR, so that your CPC ends up being lower than you’d pay via a CPC based campaign. I thought I had tried this before but for whatever reason it’s working much better this time around.
Tracking ROI is tough though, especially since a big part of the monetization is from contextual ads like Adsense, where I can’t track clicks down to the referrer or referring ad campaign. So while I will be able to measure overall performance of the campaign fairly well, by noting daily revenue generated by this one site after the campaign began as compared to before, I won’t be able to easily tweak the campaign by removing ads or targeted sites that send me junky traffic that doesn’t monetize well.
All in all though I’m pleased with the campaign so far and will definitely start spending more time playing with PPC.
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Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 3:54 am and is filed under Web Business. If you like this post why not subscribe to my full text RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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Keep posting PPC related as I’m trying to learn this. Thanks.
[…] Original post by Scott […]
Give it a few days and Google will work out you are getting a good deal and start increasing the CPC! I am cynical, but this is what happened to me on several campaigns, they get you on the low CPC and then raise it after a few days. Cat and Mouse game!
If you want to be able to accurately track those campaigns then you can do so.
Just create a carbon copy of the website and put it in a different domain/sub domain of the one you are using and then edit robots.txt so that it doesn’t get indexed.
CPM advertising is more fun than CPC, more things to tweak and more money to be made :).
I’ve been running $6k in ads on google for a couple month now and here’s a couple quick things I learned:
1) Get specific on your keywords; the more generic, the more traffic you get, the more you spend, the less you convert. Also, use exclusion terms to avoid being on pages we don’t want to be on.
2) Use time targeting; if you think people are shopping for your stuff at 4am on Tuesday, well, leave your ads running 24/7, but we’ve increased conversions by targeting the times of the day where our ads are most effective. (This also allowed us to increase our bids as we werent targeting big windows)
3) Initial results are better than later - the first few days Google seems to give you a greater weight and so we’ve seen very different numbers after a week of running ads.
4) Run ad variations and tweak your wording - compare to others that appear on your results page to see what they are saying to see how you might attract someone’s attention.
5) Top of the page is not always the best converter; we’ve found a better conversion rate by sticking to middle of the column results and working on our ad wording.
Be prepared to spend time on this - it can be a fulltime job managing your ads depending on your expectations and tracking needs.
Goggle will suck up whatever you budget; tracking conversions is the only way to know just how effective your campaign is.
I just love the emails from Google suggesting that I raise my budgets to $3,000 per day - “You are doing great! Now up your budget to $3k per day to get maximum exposure!”. What a business. lol
PPC is always tricky in the beginning. Most people set a budget and before they know it, they have blown it all in the first day and made nothing in return.
I was one of those guys, lol. Basically wasted money with nothing to show for it.
However, once you get the hang of PPC you can duplicate your success across multiple campaigns.
It’s nice to see the other side of the coin.
As a blogger my main revenue source (so far) is CPC ads running on my sites.
It’s interesting to see how the advertisers are happy to see a .09 cpc average. That’s the kind of number I hate seeing on my end. But I guess it’s better than .00
Very helpful post and comments
“Give it a few days and Google will work out you are getting a good deal and start increasing the CPC”
Yeah I have seen this behavior in the past too, but so far so good with this new campaign.
“I won’t be able to easily tweak the campaign by removing ads or targeted sites that send me junky traffic that doesn’t monetize well.”
Its possible to track the referring websites for adsense.
can someone help me understand how cpc works? i would like to get involved with it but i dont know if it would be worth it for my site. help would be appreciated. keep up the good stuff scott.