My Life As A Fun Loving Internet Marketer…

A picture says a thousand words and thats exactly how I feel right now…in fact thats been how I’ve been feeling since I deleted my download movie campaign. Ok here’s a little run down on whats been happening with me.

December 06 -  1x campaign bringing in $2000 profit

January 07 till mid March 07 - 4x campaigns bringing in a total of $4000 profit

Mid March till today - Back to 1x campaign bringing in $2000 profit (the other 3 campaigns had to get canned due to copyright infringement by Google)

I’ve lost approximately 50% revenue. Although I started preparing for this sometime mid Feb by building new campaigns I just can’t seem to get any of my test campaigns going! Sure I make a few sales on these new campaigns but I’m struggling to make them profitable thanks to creeping ad costs.

I have this black cloud constantly hanging over my head in the fear that my one remaining campaign is going to kick the bucket. I’ve been struggling to get a couple of new campaigns up and running just to hedge against the risk of relying on just one miserable campaign. I have not succeeded…so….in all my frustration…yesterday I decided to start with a clean slate. I figured I just didn’t have a system to work with. Everything I did was at a whim and fancy and my metrics were all over the place. I didn’t have proper tracking and my adgroups and keywords were a MESS!

Last night I deleted all these test campaigns and left only the one profitable campaign up and running. I also took some time out to think about why I found it so hard to duplicate the success of my earlier campaigns (which were mostly download music/movie type campaigns). It was then that it hit me!

My landing pages were pretty good, CTR’s were not too bad..conversions were average. Why wasn’t I making money? I came up with two reasons :-

1) I was spending too much on non-converting keywords

2) My keywords weren’t targeted enough

The solution. Track individual keyword conversions meticulously and go deeper and more targeted on keywords. Thats what I’ve spent my whole day on..

To track keywords I’ve used Xtreme Conversions. Read more about it in my earlier post. I purchased the software a while back but just never bothered to use it. The merchant didn’t respond to my request of inserting my conversion code so I was basically relying on tagging each ad group with a Clickbank TID. Today I got rid of all of that and used the software to track each keyword conversion.

The other thing that I focused on today was digging deeper. I previously relied on free keyword tools from Overture and Google. There’d been a lot of hype about Keyword Elite so I figured maybe I could mine even more targeted keywords with Keyword Elite. Keyword Elite did list out loads of keywords in the thousands but I found them to be more lateral type keywords. It was difficult using the filtering tool to filter out keywords for a specific ad group. For example, when I typed in a search for say make money online for common keywords to put into my ‘make money online’ ad group I’d get a lot of other keywords that although related did not contain the common keyword ‘make money online’. I’d get stuff like work from home etc. Good for looking for alternative ad groups but doesn’t work too well when you’re looking for keywords for a specific ad group.

I then decided to try out WordTracker. A lot of PPC marketers swear by it but I’ve never quite realized its value till now.  WordTracker does a good job of providing you with keywords that all contain your root keyword. To use the same ‘make money online’ example, all the keywords that WordTracker came up with had the common keyword ‘make money online’. It made things really easy for me as I could just do a quick glance for any glaringly unrelated keywords and copy the rest of then straight to my ad group.  With Keyword Elite that would have taken me ages.

Since this post is getting a little too long…I’ll talk about WordTracker a little more in the next post.

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