Burning Money On PPCs Effectively

The Frustrated Affiliate Marketer Part VIII

(Continuing from Understanding Analytics:The Frustrated Affiliate Marketer Part VII)

You have now implemented your statistics and tracking software on your website and it is now two weeks later. You decided to accept the loss of earnings for more data, so you increased your bid prices to about $0.35 per click. This close to doubles your traffic, but costs you three times as much. Still, over the last two weeks, you have made three sales on about 800 visitors. This cost you about $200. The sales do excite you, but the thought of losing close to $150 gnaws at you a little bit.

But something else excites you in the background. First of all, two of those three sales came from the same keyword. Secondly, you begin noticing some trends in your Pay-Per-Click campaigns:

• A handful of keywords are dominating your expenditures
• Of those dominating keywords, you notice that half of them have very good CTR’s while the other half have low CTR’s
• You realize that visitors of high CTR keywords are spending more time on your website (and are “bouncing” less - “bouncing” refers to a visitor that arrives to your website and immediately leaves)

The funny thing is that the keywords that are bringing the best results are not the keywords you would have expected. They are usually not the keywords with the most impressions, but rather the keywords that are the most detailed and unique. You decide that this is an excellent time to start pruning your Adwords account and start thinking about expansion.

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To some degree, internet marketing will always be pushing you. Realize that there is usually always a better keyword, a better product, a better conversion and a better traffic source out there. Just because you are making a profit does not mean that you have reached its limit. Too many people simply create website and PPC campaigns with the hope that they will instantly make money with no further maintenance. You CAN do this, but you are probably missing out on more money and higher profit margins. Wasting money on keywords that do not perform is like throwing money away. Statistics will tell us this, too. Once we get one website up and going, we are all very eager to build another one just like it. But understand that to take a website that is making $1000/month to a website that makes $2000/month is a LOT easier than building another website from scratch that makes $1000/month. Why don’t more people spend more time improving what they already have?

1) They are lazy

2) They are bored with it a ready for something new

3) If it is not broken, why fix it

I have been guilty of all three of these at one point or another. And realize that the research we are doing right now is going to leverage us into the next big hurdle of online marketing: Search Engine Optimization (SEO).