Dec
Recap of the campaign
If you have read my previous post about my first ever PPC campaign, you know that I went out on a limb and chose a completely random niche to promote (Christmas outfits for dogs) through commission junction and started up an AdWords campaign for it. The affiliate advertiser I chose was www.JakesDogHouse.com, and I wanted to promote their Christmas outfits for puppies.
I setup the campaign (as described in the post) and let it run for a day or two. The results that came back were interesting. I noticed that I was getting a decent click through rate (0.15 - 0.20%, remember this is on the content network only, no search) for two of five ad copies, and the rest were doing very poor (0.01%). I also noticed that of all the clicks I had received, I had no indication of conversions. I have a feeling this was due to the fact that www.JakesDogHouse.com did not offer any affiliate links that linked directly to specific products, only their homepage.
I knew I was having a decent amount of success with the Ad Copy, so I wanted to try and improve my conversions by changing the affiliate company I was using. After doing a Google search for companies who offered Christmas outfits for dogs, I came up empty handed. None of the companies had affiliate programs! I then remembered I had an Ebay.com affiliate account from a while back, and that ebay has just about everything. It doesn’t hurt that they are one of the most trusted names in online shopping eiher. I did an Ebay search for “Christmas Dog Clothes”, which turned up a bunch of great results that I could point my AdWords ad too.
Results of the changes
The combination of pausing my other under performing ad copies and changing the affiliate link to ebay.com has yeilded the following results (click to enlarge):
My click through rate has shot up from 0.13% to 0.25%, almost double! Unfortunately the good news stops there. I still have no conversions as of yet, but thanks to an email from Ebay.com, there is still hope.
As you can see from the screenshot I have spent $10.32 on 107 clicks. My average cost per click (CPC) is around $0.10.
One thing I am a little worried about with using Ebay is that even though their commission payout is somewhere around 40%, I can’t imagine Ebay would make that much on products selling for less than $20. I’m expecting only a couple of cents per conversion. So I don’t know how much longer this campaign will last, but we’ll see how it goes.
Upcoming Plans
My plan from here is to let the campaign run for another day or two and see how things go. If I still don’t have any conversions (or not enough conversions) I’m going to setup a landing page for this niche and see how that works out. I think with a little more targeted persuasion i can convert some of these dog lovers to open their wallets!
Keywords
There was one thing I wanted to add to my original post about this campaign, and that was a keyword list. The point of this blog is to show everything, so check out the keywords for this adgroup here. (I apologize if the file looks funny in Windows notepad. I do not own a windows computer so all my text files have UNIX line breaks. To view the file, simply open it in Windows wordpad instead).
Tomorrow
Tomorrow I will be blogging about a new campaign I’m starting and have setup a landing page for. Be sure to check it out!
