Direct Linking PPC : Let's give a try

[MindMaster]

Hi

In the general idea of mastering the Top Best Practices of Marketing to make a lot of money, I'm beginning by setting up the more simple channels :
Adword PPC "Direct Linking" to Affiliate Products Sales Page.
I'll post my actions and learnings here, and will avoid as much as I can to talk about paying products and sources I use.

If you know less than me or practice differently, maybe you'll learn things. If you know more than me or practice differently, maybe I'll learn things !)

Day 0 (and the weeks before)
I've set up the PPC on Yahoo, as Google has become out of order for Direct Linking (so as some famous marketer would say, "Screw Google"...).
For the Affiliate Products, I've chosen a niche which is :
1 - getting quite a lot of advertising (which means there is a lot of money in it),
2 - having heavy emotional significance to target people (desperate, personal, painful...) so that they are about to spend money on it.

Then I go for a product (to begin) :
1 - Sufficient Gravity on Clickbank to ensure other marketers bother selling it
2 - Suficient Earning per Sale to ensure that with a 1-5% selling on a .10 to .75 per Click I'll generally pay for ($30-$75)
3 - Sales Copy that seems to match efficiency check-list (emotional, bonding, and heaps of other factors...)
4 - Matching the "Avatar" of my lead when I put myself in its place
5 - Establishing Credibility, Overcoming the reader's objection and Ensuring a Full Guarantee
If I was On Google, I would have a look at how their Site would be Quality Score compliant, because it can have a LOT of impact on your campaign cost.. hence it's profit.
I begin by 1 product, then I'll go to three and tune to the best-earning one.

I organize One Campaign.
- I Get HopLink (the page to which I'll direct the clicks)
- I set for US market (US people have money and pay for value, which is not a general rule for my own country, I'll extend to other english-speaking markets after).

Then I search for keywords :
- Google Keyword Suggestion Tool on the SEO Competition (sounds great, uh ? I typed the main keywords on Google to get 20 domain urls) and the Sales Page analysis ;
- PPC Competition Analysis (who do bid on it for long enough)
My goal is to set a first burst of the main Keywords of the Niche.
** There are strange keywords those guy bid on ?? Not related to the market ?? Let's try too, that may not be a mistake on their part.
That's about 445 Keywords. No way to do a 12 000 keywords list if its most targeted/meaing 445 Keywords don't bring money at first.

Then I set up 30 or so tightly (semantically) focused goups of Keywords, so that the Ad would match one Avatar sub mindset/stride of search.
On a Google Campaign, I would have gone for a 1 or 2 keywords per Group basis, because it has great impact on cost and display rate.

I then set some tracking system.
I did not found a fully free one I could get API or Databse access to, yet it wil repay itself soon by cutting my losses on non profit-bringing Keywords and bidding higher on money-making ones.

Then I go for the Ad writing.
I look at the PPC competition there is.
Ads here for a long time get my attention even more. Those Ads match what I expected to find on a heavy competition niche :
- keyword relevance / repetiton
- "Avatar" matching (how would my client think/feel/react)
- interrupting mental patterns
- low on heavy/dirty/bad overmarketing stuff
- heavy duty on emotional appeal (that cool old Roman Recipe... Blood, Intrigue, Scandal, Sex and Games...)
- invisible influence techniques
I familiarize the best ones, make some model mixes. Then I add some more, some NLP, Influence and Advertising tricks.
I try for my 30 groups some variations on half a dozen models. I intend to soon rotate ad models on groups, so that a "bad performing" group won't be penalized by an underperforming Ad copy.

This is tiring, so I'm happy I programmed for myself an Application to handle the fast copywriting and the url linking to my Tracking web server and the sendings to Yahoo (erh, the most difficult was to wait for 1 month to get an API key, I don't understand how these guys can take so much time for this).

Day 1
Mmmm.... Costed me $5, no sale
40 Clicks. Ok that's not a lot, but it's for a first look to the market and with a small budget (Bids are .10).
- CTR (how many out of 100 people seeing my ad click on it) seems low : .29%. Sure, there is a lot of competition.
- Two Groups make it for the bulk of the Ad Printing : the groups I got from the two main products pages for the niche, myne and the other. Competitor has 3000 prints but CTR .62%, and my product keywords 10 000 prints with .19% CTR.
That's logical these groups bring a lot of views, those guys know their market. I think I'll concentrate my efforts on the main competitors even more next time.
- It took me a lot of time to set up the 28 other groups to get 30 prints, yet I guess on the long run they will prove very well targeted and transforming well even if small in audience. From now I'll keep this targeting for "Phase 3" (Phase 1 is "Try The Market", Phase 2 will be "Tune the Campaign").
- I just guess that Competitor Keywords List is well targeted, or that the Ad was more efficient.
So now I look in depth in the two groups... First my product's site words :
- I see that most prints come from one .19% CTR word, that does not appear (IMO) to me very well targeted.
- Some other words got 2.08% CTR on average 8th position, I'm proud (all the more so : they are in-Avatar).
- I see 6 words that go beyond 140 prints and got no click. They are hardly matching Avatar, and most people seeing them are not avatars. Those are ill-qualified prints. Sometimes those can bring some money, but on Google they would probably kill my campaign quality score. I'll wait for 200-300 prints, won't change the ad cause it seem to perform well on qualified people, and if they don't get clicks I'll pause those.
- I'm eager to see some Avatar-qualified keywords go beyond 4 or 10 prints to see if I'll get Clicks for them.
When I go for my second heavy duty group, the one got from the competitor website :
- With 3 times less impressions, this group brought more clicks. I like this ;D
- I see a 190 prints word that is out of place :"business to business" (on a personal life product) with 0 click. Ok, I put it off : no click, no relevance, no avatar matching, and on an ad that seems to perfom correctly.
- On a non-Avatar (broad situation, and out of mindset) Keyword, I get 1.65% CTR ?? Talking about weird things. It may happen that the clickers end up not being mere tourists. I re-read my ad, it really tells about the product, so it's no mistake if the visitors clicked on it. When I'll have 100 or 200 Clicks, I'll see if they buy and bring me money.
- Other CTR are generally .25% to .55%. Far from the 3% click rates I used to get on well perfected campaigns, but it's a beginning on a new market, and I'll be happy with it if in the end those clicks don't cost me more than they bring (it's about maximizing profit after all...).

Ok. What I have got from this first day :
- I have seen some strange opportunity (1.65% CTR !) that I could have dismissed if I had not tried. "Competition" spying has a lot to teach
- and this competition-study alone gives you what you have to know about Keywords to first try a market rather than hitting blindly some low-traffic words.
- Yet "Competition" is not right on every point. I had to get rid of some non profitable Keywords.
- Got rid of heavy printing words that don't get clicks. Not as important as on Google, but worth taking care of.
- successfully tested my Yahoo API Interface (made to get a lot of work and control in a little time)
- first contact with my ad model seems to confirm that good copywriting on qualified words get more clicks
Ok. 40 clicks, most of wich may not be in-Avatar, it's too early to know.
I must have my ads print more often. I set the bid to .40, this will bring my ad printing to explode quickly. Next step is to see if it transforms when it gets clicks.

We'll see tomorrow how it works on day 2 with more heavy printing.

Any constructive return is welcome !)

[Lucid]

> I've set up the PPC on Yahoo, as Google has become out of order for Direct Linking

Just want to comment on this. I don't know where this comes from but every problem I'm aware of (ie, banning of account), not one as far as I know was because of direct linking. Every ban was because of - and Google explicitly says this - a landing page which is what they call a bridge page. In other words, with affiliate links on the page.

If anyone here says they were banned using a direct linking method, I'd like to hear back from them.

> 1 - getting quite a lot of advertising (which means there is a lot of money in it)

Not necessarily. Lots of demand, maybe. Lots of advertisers definitely.

> 3 - Sales Copy that seems to match efficiency check-list (emotional, bonding, and heaps of other factors...)

Very wise.

> There are strange keywords those guy bid on ?? Not related to the market ?? Let's try too, that may not be a mistake on their part.

Probably is a mistake. Most uninformed advertisers make them.

> Matching the "Avatar" of my lead when I put myself in its place

You use the word avatar a lot. Yet, I have no idea what you are talking about. Explain.

What is the purpose of this experiment? I can only guess that you want to see if conversion rates will be higher by direct linking. If so, you need to test against your own bridge page. So my suggestion is to create a landing page and send some of the clicks to it instead of direct linking. Use the same ads, just different landing page. I bet that your conversions will be higher by direct linking.

Do you still have a valid Adwords account? Do the same direct linking test on that account as well. Compare the two.

Want to have a little competition? PM me the details and I'll create a few ads for you to try to beat your CTR and ROI.

[tommy_gun]

Originally Posted by Lucid

> I've set up the PPC on Yahoo, as Google has become out of order for Direct Linking

Just want to comment on this. I don't know where this comes from but every problem I'm aware of (ie, banning of account), not one as far as I know was because of direct linking. Every ban was because of - and Google explicitly says this - a landing page which is what they call a bridge page. In other words, with affiliate links on the page.

If anyone here says they were banned using a direct linking method, I'd like to hear back from them.

That's a very interesting point. I promoting a cpa offer with direct linking since a few weeks and i didnt got banned or slapped. so it would be really interesting if anybody got banned/slapped with direct linking

[TimScott]

You will get slapped big time, and eventually banned. You can't direct link on adwords, it's even in the policies. They only allow one person to advertise on a URL, and most likely that will be the product owner.

And just because you haven't personally experienced a slap/ban yet, doesn't mean it won't happen. Give it time and they'll eventually shut down your account., it's happened to thousands of affiliate marketers since the last slap.

[Lucid]

Originally Posted by TimScott

You can't direct link on adwords, it's even in the policies. They only allow one person to advertise on a URL, and most likely that will be the product owner.

Tim, you are the first person to say that it's in the policies. I would like a link to the policy that says that.

As for the rest, you are correct. There's been a one-ad-per-domain rule for many years. But that is not necessarily the owner of said product or domain.

[mojo13]

Originally Posted by TimScott

You will get slapped big time, and eventually banned. You can't direct link on adwords, it's even in the policies. They only allow one person to advertise on a URL, and most likely that will be the product owner.

And just because you haven't personally experienced a slap/ban yet, doesn't mean it won't happen. Give it time and they'll eventually shut down your account., it's happened to thousands of affiliate marketers since the last slap.

Not true. Google does not care if you are the product owner or not.

As long as your display URL matches your destination URL you are fine.

[TimScott]

Originally Posted by Lucid

Tim, you are the first person to say that it's in the policies. I would like a link to the policy that says that.

As for the rest, you are correct. There's been a one-ad-per-domain rule for many years. But that is not necessarily the owner of said product or domain.

What I meant by it's in the policies, is the one URL per advertiser rule. I never said it has to be the owner, I meant chances are the owner will already be advertising on that URL.

Originally Posted by mojo13

Not true. Google does not care if you are the product owner or not.

As long as your display URL matches your destination URL you are fine.

Thats not what I said. I said Google only allows one URL per advertiser. And chances are that URL will be in use by the owner them self advertising on adwords. So there for, if the owner (or an affiliate who beat them to the chase) is already using that URL, you can't use it.

[tryinhere]

Originally Posted by TimScott

What I meant by it's in the policies, is the one URL per advertiser rule. I never said it has to be the owner, I meant chances are the owner will already be advertising on that URL.

even that means nothing the person with the highest qs/bid will win the position and it has nothing to do with who owns the url.

In most cases if a owner per say wants the space for advertising for one of many reasons it will post as a rule that there is no direct linking by affiliates.

Thats not what I said. I said Google only allows one URL per advertiser. And chances are that URL will be in use by the owner them self advertising on adwords. So there for, if the owner (or an affiliate who beat them to the chase) is already using that URL, you can't use it.

[Lucid]

Yep, highest QS*bid gets to be shown, at least more often than others. Doesn't matter who it is. That's another thing MindMaster should look into as well in deciding what product to promote: who else is using PPC for the product and what kinds of ads are being use and can I create better ones.

[MindMaster]

Hi

Sorry for the interruption, I had to pause my experiment for a few days (and I did pause it in Yahoo Search Marketing) to spend my attention on other matters.

I'll reply to your comments first.

[MindMaster]

Originally Posted by Lucid

> I've set up the PPC on Yahoo, as Google has become out of order for Direct Linking

Just want to comment on this. I don't know where this comes from but every problem I'm aware of (ie, banning of account), not one as far as I know was because of direct linking. Every ban was because of - and Google explicitly says this - a landing page which is what they call a bridge page. In other words, with affiliate links on the page.

If anyone here says they were banned using a direct linking method, I'd like to hear back from them.

Google has began more and more impracticable for Affiliate Direct Linking since its most famous "slap" in 2006. I read a lot from it but did not experiment it directly, and I don't feel trying how it works for the moment.
Lilke You, I'm ok for precise feedbacks on it.

> 1 - getting quite a lot of advertising (which means there is a lot of money in it)

Not necessarily. Lots of demand, maybe. Lots of advertisers definitely.

My point is that most advertisers won't stay spending for long in a market where nobody is buying.
Some are newbies, some are stupid, some earn so much money that they won't tune their campaigns, but as a general rule, advertising is not spontaneously generated on markets people won't buy from (yet I know a market or two, but that's rare indeed).
So at least to me it's a good indicator that the market is worth a try.

[COLOR=Teal][COLOR=Black]There are strange keywords those guy bid on ?? Not related to the market ?? Let's try too, that may not be a mistake on their part.

Probably is a mistake. Most uninformed advertisers make them.

And some almost free SEO mistakes can cost a lot of PPC money...

It turned out to be a mistake, that will be in my day 2 conclusions.

Ok. Avatar is a name I took from a marketer's product about a smart concept I found quite a few times under various names in the heaps of books I have read.
The idea is to "put yourself" as the avatar, the impersonation of your typical best-worth customer. Think as they think, know where they come from. Give him a name, think about his recent situation, how he feels, know what he knows or does not know, what he will type in Google, what he craves for, etc.
This helps understanding what he NEEDS, but also what he WANTS, how to build Rapport and Identification, to make him know my product will match his current reality, etc.
This turns into a practical trick that allows to chose your keywords well and to write high-conversion copy.
I'll dabble more in the concept soon

What is the purpose of this experiment? I can only guess that you want to see if conversion rates will be higher by direct linking. If so, you need to test against your own bridge page. So my suggestion is to create a landing page and send some of the clicks to it instead of direct linking. Use the same ads, just different landing page. I bet that your conversions will be higher by direct linking.

I'm not into using my own copy for now.
I'll first get highly qualified traffic and test/refine my program and keyword/ad skills, get insights, and finally set up one then more sales channels to bring me money !)
When the traffic par of the channel(s) will be ok, probably I'll dabble into Sales Copy to test if I sell more than the guys (which might probably happen, as I see some errors on most clickbank copy, but as usual I'll first expect them to do it for good reasons and test).

I think that Direct Linking conversions may NOT turn out to be better than with introduction of a Landing Page in the channel, but it means a lot of skilled work.
Let's say that I have 100 clicks directing to a Sales page. Guys may have a 3 or 5 or maybe 7% conversion to my pocket. That will be 5 sales.
If I make some pre sell page (one that does not look like a crappy review from a crappy overmarketer but with good in-avatar relevant copy and free information establishing credibility and the other things in my to-do lists), then I might have some 40, 60 or even 80% of customer retention. Then my warming pre sell will make them want more to buy from the sales page, may be getting 10, 20 or even 40% sales.... And 20% of 60%, it's 12 sales, not 5.
I'll dabble in such experiments in the next weeks

Do you still have a valid Adwords account? Do the same direct linking test on that account as well. Compare the two.

Mmm.. I'd get to pay less from Adwords because of Ad relevance, yet I won't kill my main account to see if I get slapped ;D
I'll test in the future on some other account, just for the moment being it's out of scope.
Nice to see some marketers that are eager to do their testing in our complacent lot ;D

Want to have a little competition? PM me the details and I'll create a few ads for you to try to beat your CTR and ROI.

When I'll get full time living on this in a few weeks or months, why not !)

[MindMaster]

For the one-advertiser-per-url, you guys were right, nothing more to say

One big point :

Originally Posted by Lucid

Yep, highest QS*bid gets to be shown, at least more often than others. Doesn't matter who it is. That's another thing MindMaster should look into as well in deciding what product to promote: who else is using PPC for the product and what kinds of ads are being use and can I create better ones.

I know that I advertise "against" High QS*Bid guys.
I'd rather go skimming the niche first then go for more bidding guerilla/war if the market pays for itself.
Yet you add one point to my Market Evaluation : my efforts will be more effective on the "non-warrior" markets.
It's just that the who else that matters is about PPC direct linking on YSM, and Clickbank gravity is not enough to know this.
I'll either have to manually click on the links often or have some tool doing it (fortunately, I have some).

That means that I'll have to get a sub point in my 1st market selection point : not too many co advertisers.
Also I keep in mind that I have to think about competition impact on my campaigns. They impact costs, printing of ads, CTR, etc.
Thank you, Lucid !

[Lucid]

> Google has began more and more impracticable for Affiliate Direct Linking since its most famous "slap" in 2006.

Don't know what you are referring to. 2006 is ancient in the PPC world so I may know but have forgotten.

For the last time to all, there is NO problem direct linking.

> My point is that most advertisers won't stay spending for long in a market where nobody is buying.

Granted. But that doesn't mean they make a lot of profit from it. Profit yes or probably. How much is another question. In your original comment, you seem to assume that the ROI will be great. You just don't know that until you try yourself.

> It turned out to be a mistake, that will be in my day 2 conclusions.

Two days? How will you make that conclusion?

Avatar = putting yourself into the customer's shoes. Do that all the time. I think the word is used wrongly in this case but now I get the picture.

> I think that Direct Linking conversions may NOT turn out to be better

You are just throwing numbers around it seems to me. Maybe some merchant sales page will convert 5% (not if you use poor keywords however). But to say your own page can convert 20% by pre-selling the reader, that I doubt. Do you have practical experience that shows this? Maybe some affiliate marketers could comment on this. What are your conversion rates (percentage of sales for every visitor sent to the merchant AND percentage of visitors clicking on your affiliate links)? That second percentage is very important so I'd like to know typical numbers. Don't forget MindMaster, you have to use this second percentage because those are the visitors to your page you are paying to get.


> Mmm.. I'd get to pay less from Adwords because of Ad relevance, yet I won't kill my main account to see if I get slapped

Like I said, you won't get slapped. My guess is you will pay about the same as well. If your keywords and ads are relevant, what's the problem?

Your last post confused me especially this sentence:

> I'll either have to manually click on the links often or have some tool doing it

Are you saying you click on your own ads and/or those of others? Please tell me I'm misunderstanding.