“Hello, I have a newbie question about subdomains.

I would like to register a generic domain such as http://fromwales.com and run some niche sites on subdomains from it such as http://lavabread.fromwales.com or http://leeks.fromwales.com.

Does that make any sense from an affiliate marketing and SEO point of view?  Will Google always favour http://www.lavabreadfromwales.com over http://lavabread.fromwales.com, or do you think a bit of hard work and good content can make that strategy work?

Many thanks.

Neil”

Clarke

Personally, I would go for a main domain name for each niche site.  It’s better in the long run as it will allow you more flexibility should you wish to sell the site on, change your hosting and any issues you may encounter with link strategy.  For example, if a particular linking strategy were to backfire and kill a site, only the one site would be affected.  If you use sub-domains from one main domain, you run the risk of killing everything in one go.

However, if you have a domain and a lot of “on-topic” mini-sites, then I see no reason why sub-domains would not work.  I have done this on sites in the past, but it was to host different content and prices, based on the country the person was from, and in that case I hosted the sub-domain in an IP range of the country the sub-domain was targeted towards.  Google favours good content; your IP plays a part, but if Google can’t work out what country a site is targeted towards, you will only get ranked based on getting links in and having decent on-page optimisation.

Elaine

I don’t use subdomains on Allkids, but I do have different sections with several pages attached, and I have found that the main page is usually indexed in Google quite high for relevant terms, many at the coveted No 1 position.

For example:

Kids Beds – Single Storage Beds
                   Bunk Beds
                   Cabin, Mid Beds
                   High Sleeper Bed
                   Etc.

The main page, i.e. Kids Beds, is usually the indexed page for most of the ‘kids beds’ related terms, but quite often I get both pages listed, which is a bonus.  Google does take an overview of the whole site, so a large site with a dedicated theme, should win over several smaller sites all interlinked, especially if you take care with the internal linking structure and urls.

“Hi Docs.

I’m pretty new to affiliate marketing and am building a site for, say, red widgets.  I have both redwidgets.co.uk and redwidgets.info and am wondering which to use?

The site will have a one page review for each type of red widget with a price comparison block in the right hand column.  I am thinking of using the .info domain and swapping the price comparison affilate links for adsense ads (or even USA affilate links – is this possible?) for non-British traffic.

Or would I be better off just sticking to the .co.uk domain and, if so, why?

Really great site, by the way.  Filled with very useful advice – thanks.

Mike”

Here’s what the docs had to say:

Kier

Hi Mike.

The downside to using the .info rather than the .co.uk is twofold.  Firstly .info isn’t a TLD that’s generally associated with good quality sites.  Secondly, by passing up on the .co.uk you’ll be missing out on the high ranking Google will give to it for UK based searches.  As such, at a very minimum you should use the .co.uk for a UK focused site.  You could develop the .info into one aimed at the US, but be sure to not use duplicate content; you might want to consider using a .com for this.  Also bear in mind that affiliate marketing is even bigger in the USA than it is in the UK, so there’s no reason to be using adsense instead as it’s likely you’ll be able to find US affiliate programs to promote that stock your product.  Good networks to check out in the states for retail include CJ, Google Affiliate Network, Linkshare, Shareasale and of course Webgains.

Lammo

Hi Mike.

Purely my own opinion, but I don’t like .info domains, and would never use one.  Stick with the .co.uk, and just geotarget (Google “geotargeting” to see how to do this) to change the content based on the non-British traffic, or dig deep and buy the .com for the US traffic.

Price comparison for USA affiliate links is totally possible – just grab the feeds from the US networks as you would with the UK.  If you’re not tech-savvy to build your own price comparison, then Easy Content Units will have a US version very shortly (or it may even be live by the time you read this!) which will do that for you.

Clarke

If you are doing the “same” site targeted to different countries, then I would use both and host the UK on a UK server and the US site on a US server.  I would also make sure that the content is significantly different for each country version, and that you use American English e.g. Center and not Centre etc..  You will need to build different links in to each site, so you are in effect taking on double the work if you’re doing it right.  However, most people are a bit lazy and do the same thing when the sites cover the same subject, but this can ultimately lead to Google thinking you have just duplicated your site content when clearly you have a purpose for having two totally separate sites covering the same subject area.

If you’re new, I would get one site up and running 1st to make sure it works and you can rank before you do the 2nd, but that will depend on how much time you have and whether you will be upset if they don’t work out or not.

Kirsty

I would recommend that you make use of the .co.uk domain.  For the UK market it’ll be more brandable and SEO friendly.  I’ve found people are far more likely to click on domains with the .co.uk extension.  .info domains are often seen as having an association with spammy websites.  In the past MSN have blocked access to that extension on their service and Google have made ominous maneuvers regarding sites on such domains (a couple of years ago now).

If you want to try and target the US market in the same niche you’d be better to try and source a .com – it seems like a much safer bet!

With that said, they planned to promote the service via the affiliate channel and wanted to pick the docs brains as to where the best place would be to advertise the scheme.  Commission was set at £30 for each sale, paid directly into a PayPal account, with monthly affiliate prizes of £3,000 to the affiliate generating the most sales.

Unfortunately, when when the docs came to review the site, it was down, and only one doc got review the live site; it hasn’t appeared since.  Although the site is no longer, I thought it would still be of benefit to publish the docs reviews on how they would go about promoting a new affiliate scheme.

Here’s what the docs had to say:

Kier

Hi David.

The least time intensive method to get affiliates is to join a network.  Going the in-house route can work well too, but you’ll need plenty of time to devote to recruiting the affiliates and keeping them paid and happy.  The quickest way to find relevant affiliates is just to head to Google and try some searches for terms you’d like to appear on and see where you can find affiliate sites and then contact them.  For instance I’d try stuff like ‘hosting reviews’, ‘cheap wordpress hosting’ etc..  As things stand though, I think you may struggle to find productive affiliates, the market for hosting is very tough and there are a lot of good affiliate programs for hosting out there, I’m not sure your offering is particularly competitive.

Mark

Hi David.

Thanks for submitting your enquiry to the Doctors, and I hope the following will help you understand what you need to do to promote your affiliate campaign.

If you want to promote your affiliate campaign on your own platform, then I would suggest that you spend time targeting relevant people to promote your campaign, and contact people directly to inform them of your campaign.

You could also use some of the affiliate marketing forums to communicate information about your campaign, but please be careful when submitting things onto forums about your campaign and ensure that you submit them in the relevant place – don’t spam.

You could also consider using an affiliate network to track the sales and have the benefit of the reach that an affiliate network will have to relevant affiliates already.  You would need to pay for this, but as a rule of thumb you would pay a set-up fee, a monthly fee and an override on the commission you pay to affiliates, so you are best to contact more than one affiliate network about your campaign offering.

I would also edge on the side of caution when trying to use affiliate marketing for Business to Business propositions as there are a limited number of affiliates that are strong in this space.  I would also make sure that you ask the network about that before working with them, and maybe consider asking a few affiliates on forums about their experience with these networks for your products.

I hope this is useful, if you have any questions please feel free to contact us.

Clarke

Hi David.

As I can’t see the website to read up on the services you’re offering I won’t be able to give you any feedback, so I will address the how to promote it via affiliates part of your question.  The best places to advertise affiliate opportunities is the A4U Forum, affiliate blogs, your own Twitter account and by contacting affiliates directly.

A4U Forum

You’re free to make a post but can speak to Matt’s team with regards to placement of an onsite advert and the Affiliate Solus email opportunities.

Affiliate Blogs

These are a fantastic place to advertise affiliate opportunities as they tend to have the more engaged affiliates reading, the ones that want to learn more and stay up to date with what affiliates in the know have to say.  Plus I dare say if you’re an onsite advertiser, you could probably approach them with your press release or even a free demo account and get a free write up, but be warned, you can’t pay affiliates to write good things about you, so you will need to accept that if they review your service, they will say what they like as well as what they don’t like about it.

Twitter, is a great marketing tool that’s still being overlooked.  Granted, there are a lot more people on Twitter these days, but you will be surprised how it’s brushed off by people who are not feeling the Twitter love.  Get an account, get following the Twitter lists of the affiliates in the UK, start interacting and most of all, post information about what you do and why affiliates should check it out etc..

Contacting Affiliates Directly

This is hard work with a small percentage success rate of affiliates actually replying to emails out of the blue.  First, I would take a look at the types of affiliates you’re after, then make a list and contact them and use whatever means you can, be it email, phone, letter, Twitter etc., but please don’t spam them all.  By this I mean really look in to each one and don’t just grab the first email you can find and send a generic ‘send to all’ message; that’s got very little chance of working.

Apologies for the lack of updates recently, however, we are now back in the driving seat and on track to deliver some more answers to those burning questions and headaches you’ve been having.  To softly kick those booze drained brain cells back into gear for the New Year, Brenda wrote in having completed an online course and setting up her first blog.  Unbeknownst to Brenda, she found herself doing something that started to trigger emails from an Affiliate Network about “Brand Bidding”:

“I’m a newbie to affiliate marketing, but I’ve done a 6-hour course on the net (hopefully legit) and I did a first blog.  Not good, but I thought I’d just put the theory into practice a bit early on in the course.

It was for a car insurance company.  I did put the name of the car insurance company and the group name in the text of the blog.  Also, I put in a banner for them.

I’ve now had an email from the company I’m being paid by saying that there will be a zero tolerance policy for anyone caught brand bidding.  What does this mean?  Also, they say members of their programme are not permitted to bid on (name of co.), insurance brand keywords, phrases or brand mispellings.

It then said please ‘negatively’ match on (name of company) and all variations.  Also, it said using their display URL is banned.

I don’t know what all this means in relation to a blog.

Please help.”

Here’s what the docs had to say …

Kier

Hi Brenda

‘Brand bidding’ is a bit of affiliate jargon and it refers to when an affiliate purchases clicks from a search engine like Google for keywords based around the site/company’s name.  The reason that this is frowned upon is that a lot of users perform searches on Google as a ‘navigational search’, that is to say rather than bookmarking or remembering the URL they simply type it into Google and click the first result.  As such users which have already been successfully marketed to by other mediums (newsletters, display, offline etc.) can then be cookied by an affiliate’s paid ad and they then get a commission for doing very little.

This can add considerably to a merchant’s bottom line costs and also tends to negatively affect the performance of other affiliates on their program, and so it’s banned on a lot of programs.  Some merchants also ask affiliates to add a ‘negative match’ for their brand keywords to their paid search campaigns.  This simply means that you can list the merchant’s brand term in your account and no queries with it in will have your ads shown.  This is done as there are various matching types for keywords in paid search, some show up just for a very specific query, but some will be broader and so can show up on keywords that you haven’t explicitly bidded on and thus could contain the merchant’s brand term.

If you are only using a blog for natural traffic and not buying paid traffic (which seems to be the case from your question) then you have nothing to worry about!  If in doubt speak to the network and they can help you out.

Mark

Hi Brenda.

Thanks for submitting your enquiry to the Doctors, and I hope the following will help you understand what the communication you have received from the merchant means.

Firstly I will explain what the merchant means from the email you have got:

This email means that they don’t want people to place Pay Per Click (PPC) ads on the name of their company on any of the search engines through paid search.  When they said any variations of the brand name, they mean you can’t bid on any terms that relate to their company name.

As an example, I will use the car insurance company Norwich Union or Aviva as it is now known:

You can’t bid on any terms that include the name Norwich Union or Aviva in any way, so if you were to bid on these terms your sales would be rejected.  So you couldn’t also bid on terms like “Norwich Union Car Insurance” as this would still be a variation, or “Norich Union” as this would be classed as a miss spell.

‘Negatively’ match on (name of company)

This means that you would have to add the name of that company as a negative match on any PPC activity.  So if you were bidding on car insurance, you would need to negative match the name of the company, so for the example you would need to add both “Norwich union” and “Aviva” as negative matches.

Using their display URL is banned

This means that if you are doing a PPC campaign you must not use the merchant URL on any PPC adverts you place in search engines, so you would have to use your own URL and landing page to direct your traffic to, and then the customer would come to your site and then go onto the merchant site.  So again, using “Norwich Union” and “Aviva” as an example, you would not be able to use http://www.aviva.co.uk/ as your display URL on your PPC ad.

From reading your question, I don’t think to be honest that any of the above affects you as you are talking about your own blog on which you are simply advertising the merchant and are not directing traffic via PPC to the company in question, so these terms don’t relate to you as you are not using PPC to generate traffic to your site.

I hope this is useful, if you have any questions please feel free to contact us.

Shane

Brand bidding is a term used in regard to pay per click (PPC) marketing such as Google adwords, Yahoo or MSN paid search.  It has nothing to do with organic search listings, so unless you are buying traffic from any search engines you have nothing to worry about.

If you do start paying for traffic, all it means is that you cannot bid for your adverts to appear on the terms the merchant says they don’t want you to or they will not pay you commission earned and may kick you off their program entirely.

Today it’s the turn of Kier and Kirsty to give us their advice on how to cut those Adwords bills…

Kick us off then Kier..

Your best bet is to work on improving your CTR.

Ensure that your ad groups are all tightly focused for the keywords and that your site/landing page has been properly built out to be as ‘valuable’ to the end user as possible (there’s plenty of advice on this out there, check out Kieron Donoghue’s blog post on Google Adwords landing pages for some starting points). Also, constantly try new variations on ad copy and kill those that perform worse. The higher your CTR the better your quality score and the less you’ll actually pay per click.

Kirsty says…

There are two main things I tend to do when my PPC campaigns aren’t quite cutting it on the margins front, or if I want to give them due dilligence to make sure I’m not spending money I don’t have to:

Step 1

Once the campaign/adgroups have had a bit of time to “bed in” I will gradually reduce my CPCs and see how the campaign reacts. Sometimes I have managed to shave a fair whack off of my PPC spend doing this. I have one campaign running at the moment that I have reduced CPC on by 50% and I’m getting the same traffic levels I always did. I do suspect I’ve been able to do this because the campaign has been running for 2 years and performing well though.

However, that said I recently shaved 30% off the cost of an adgroup that was 8 weeks old overnight. If you are working in an area with very competitive CPCs this technique will often not work, but is always worth a try before throwing in the towel. If my attempts to reduce CPCs without affecting my traffic too dreadfully don’t work, I tend to just wholesale cut my bid levels back to where I will make a profit and take whatever traffic I can get. Sometimes traffic levels increase after a while. In either case I always follow up with STEP 2 …

Step 2

I look for cheaper, laser targeted longtails to add into my adgroups. These often have much less competition, cost less, convert better, and have the gratifying side effect of increasing the overall CTR on my adgroup which can assist with STEP 1!

Oh, and if you have any terms or adgroups that are pulling down the CTR of a campaign generally, move them to a campaign of their own. This will help your campaign perform at its best. Finally, the reverse engineering Shane talked about in the How Much Cash For PPC post is absolutely essential. However, you do need to follow that up by making damned sure that whatever you are sending traffic to is indeed converting and making you a profit. You need to analyse profit right down to keyword level by making sure you are at least using network keyword tracking and sending your traffic to highly targeted landing pages. That way, you will be able to weed out keywords that are just burning spend and concentrate on more lucrative areas. To take a “campaign wide” view of your affiliate profits can often lead to you missing out on a valuable niche product or strongly converting keyword that you can subsequently build good revenue on.

So in short, Step 3 (yes I know I said I did two things!) is making sure all your spend is working for you and you’re not carrying any rubbish performers in your campaign!

Editors Note: Thanks to all the doctors who took the time to give some fantastic advice over these last three posts – Advice that should make a huge difference to affiliates’ PPC efforts, and should see the end of unprofitable PPC campaigns forever!

Don’t forget if there’s a burning question about any aspect of Affiliate Marketing that you’d like to ask, then the Affiliate Doctors would love to hear from you! Happy New Year everybody!

So.. “Previously on Affiliate Doctors..” Mike wanted to know “How to bring down the CPC for maximum profit or getting sales” and wanted to know if “something can be done even if the “Reverse Engineering” doesn’t work, or where you spend more than you earn, even if you have high QS (Quality Score)”

Over to you Dan..

Hi Mike, how are you?

I don’t know whether you’re using landing pages, sending clicks straight to merchants, and even whether you’re able to see which of your keywords are converting on merchants’ sites, so I will keep things simple & offer 2 simple tactics & one process to hopefully help you out.

TACTIC ONE: BE AS NARROW AS POSSIBLE

A very easy way to cut costs is to target everything as closely as you possibly can.

Move away from broad & phrase match & use exact match wherever possible.  For example, instead of targeting ‘Oak Beds’ with an ad group, split that down to ‘oak single beds’, ‘oak double beds’, ‘oak king size beds’, ‘oak bunk beds’.  Once you’ve done that for all of your products, take it a step further, splitting those down into one set targeting the same phrases with the word ‘cheap’ & one without, e.g. this might be a small selection of keywords from one group:

- [cheap oak single beds]
- [buy cheap oak single beds]
- [buy cheap oak single beds uk]
- [buy cheap oak single beds online]
- [buy cheap oak single beds online uk]

You could split that down even further still, for example by region – either by city in the adwords tool, or by city in the search string:

- [cheap oak single beds London]
- [buy cheap oak single beds London]
- [etc.]

In that instance you might have a line in the creative along the lines of ‘Free 24-Hour Delivery in London’.  A nice thing about this is you may find something is profitable in London but not in Manchester (for example).  Turn off areas where the terms are unprofitable & you save money.

And again, you can keep splitting your groups down & down to a really granular level, avoiding costly broader terms & allowing you to tweak them at a very low level.

TACTIC TWO: USE TONS & TONS OF NEGATIVE KEYWORDS

If you are using broad or phrase match ads, you will always show for a load of things you hadn’t thought of.  It’s important to use as many negative keywords as possible to avoid this as it can both A) lower your CTR by receiving impressions you don’t want and more importantly B) increase your costs by receiving clicks you don’t want.

To do this, I’d use some keyword research tools (e.g., your own internal stats, google keyword suggestions).  A super-simple example to illustrate this might be ‘Acer Laptops’.  A very small handful of negatives might be:

- ‘review’ (I don’t want people who are just researching, I only want people who are ready to buy)
- ‘broken’ (I don’t want people who are just problem solving)
- ‘bag’ (I’m selling laptops, not accessories)
- ‘toshiba’ (this catches people who are searching for comparisons between laptops)
- ‘cheap’ (unless I am actually selling cheap ones)

etc.

The easiest way to do this is to:

1. Use the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool
2. Put in your search term (and a few other similar terms)
3. Add anything that doesn’t match what you’re selling as a negative.

TACTIC THREE: COME UP WITH YOUR IDEAL ‘COST PER SALE’

The easiest way to cut PPC costs is to remove bits that aren’t working.  BUT it’s often difficult to draw the line between “doing ok” and “not working”.

Coming up with your ideal ‘cost per sale’ is a nice guide for this and it allows you to both grow your campaigns & trim the garbage at the same time.

Here’s the basic process:

1. Decide on an ‘ideal cost per sale’ for a particular merchant

For example, your average sale through a merchant is £15.  You decide “I’m happy to make £5 profit per sale with them” therefore your ideal cost per sale is £10.

2. Once a week/once a day (depending on how much time you have & how much you’re spending!) pull a report of all of your ad groups for that particular merchant.

3. Go down the list and, for any ad groups where you are spending more than £10 per sale, decide whether to ‘delete’ or ‘tweak’ them.

4. A ‘tweak’ might be either:

- Remove specific keywords converting at too high a price
- Swap vague keywords for narrower keyphrases
- Split broad adgroups into more targeted adgroups
- Bump bids down
- Add a new ad creative

If you add all of these 3 tips together you can grow big campaigns, where you can turn off lots of tiny bits that you know are wasting money, rather than risking turning off bigger things & removing something profitable in the process.

Hopefully there’s something here to help you out!

Dan

Editors note: Thanks Dan!  That’s great advice that I think everyone can put into practice very easily regardless of their current PPC budget.

We’ll be back with the final instalment of this thrilling series next week, so all that remains for me to say on behalf of all the docs here at Affiliate Doctors is to wish all of our readers a very Merry Christmas, and of course a hugely profitable 2010!

“Posts about PPC on Limited Budget and How Much Cash for PPC are a fantastic resources for newbie “PPC Am’ers”, with a lot of good information to make sure that one shouldn’t burn their fingers.

But one of the important issues that isn’t really covered is, “How to bring down the CPC for maximum profit or getting sales”.

It would be really nice to see a post or answers from the Doctors covering this important bit.  Is there something that can be done even if the “Reverse Engineering” doesn’t work, or where you spend more than you earn, even if you have high QS (Quality Score).”

The responses we had from the doctors was nothing short of exceptional, and their take on this incredibly vital element of PPC which can help you cross the line between profit and loss was so detailed that we felt the only way we could do their responses justice was to split their answers into three parts, which we will post over the festive period.  So forget watching the Sound of Music or Mary Poppins for the umpteenth time this year – Grab yourself a glass of Egg Nog and settle in for a PPC Master Class!

First up to answer Mike’s question is Shane:

Excellent question Mike, this is like the nirvana of PPC … so just how do you bring down the Cost Per Click (CPC)?

A side note on positions before we get stuck in …

PPC Positions

In general, I see number 1 position as the “Idiot spot” in most (but not all) cases, that’s not to say it doesn’t work and shouldn’t be used, but we typically see that the best Volume and ROI combination is found between position 2-5.  So if you are in position 1, don’t be afraid to step out of it and test different positions, as people do click a few ads to compare, and you may actually even see a jump in sales by dropping to position 2 or even 3, especially if your offering is the same price or better quality as those who take position 1 or 2!

So firstly consider dropping a position to test the difference, as the CPC should drop and the conversion will probably rise resulting in a better ROI percentage.

Don’t Focus on the Cost Per Click Directly…

Okay, to answer the main part of the question; to reduce the CPC we don’t actually focus on the cost per click directly, we focus on getting other factors sorted which then directly affect the cost per click … it pays to always remember that Google rewards relevancy as they figure it leads to a better user experience and thus indirectly yields more cash for them in the long run when happy users keep coming back.

So it’s factors which affect the Quality Score (QS) that we focus on, as in general, the higher the QS, the lower your costs and the better your ad position, which in turn leads to a better Click Through Ratio (CTR), lower costs etc..

Focus on Relevancy!

We focus on relevancy as the key point.  The first thing we do is look at the campaign structure, then adgroup structure, we may move adgroups into more suitable campaigns or create new ones, then we’ll look at the keywords and assess the relevancy of the keywords to the adcopy and landing page.  If the relevancy isn’t good enough, we will then split those keywords out into very targeted adgroups with 2-4 ads each.

… Then Focus on Click Through Ratio

We then focus on getting the Click Through Ratio of each keyword as high as possible.  We do this by use of exact matching as well as using phrase match, but the most important point is we spend as much, if not more time looking for negative keywords to cut down the number of wasted impressions.

Reducing your impressions by say 25% boosts your click through rate by that same amount, which in turn gives that element of the QS boost leading to benefits such as a CPC discount, better position etc..  This is also where smaller adgroups with targeted adcopy come into play; we try to get the main keyword into the advert headline, body and even url sometimes so that it bolds up when searched for, but this is hard if your adgroups aren’t tightly themed enough around one or two main keywords and their variations!

Review the Adcopy

Once we’ve done the above steps, we regularly review the adcopy in use, editing the lower performing ones so that over time, we find the best 1-2 ads to use that really do connect with the users that are searching the keywords we bid on.

We also make sure that the landing pages are highly relevant to cut down the bounce rate and maximise conversion, so we may create a specific page for each adgroup or even keyword! so that the user sees the keyword in the page that they have in mind etc..

Google is now offering a tool to some advertisers try to help them boost relevancy; very useful for targeting on broader/brand terms.  If your account is eligible, then their “sitelinks” feature may help boost your CTR and could also cut the index page bounce rate down dramatically for some advertisers – Google Sitelinks

Quality Score

You could say the overall benchmark for doing all this targeting work is Google’s QS – that’s their measure of how good they think things are running.  So if we fire up adwords editor (so much faster than using adwords site) and take a look, we generally see that the keywords that are rocking and making us/clients tons of cash are generally scored 7-10 (which is a by-product of us doing the work detailed above).  In addition, our CPC’s on those keywords will typically be tens of percent less than when we started.  If you bare all of these factors in mind, you will have the answer to the main part of your question on how do you reduce the CPC!

Quality Score is based on several factors … pay attention to the points in bold:

1. The historical click-through rate of the keyword and the matched ad on Google – (do good work from the start! Negatives, phrase and exact match, targeted ads)

2. Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account -  (don’t run slack accounts with just a few winning campaigns in there)

3. The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group – (don’t let bad history develop … start targeted well and then target harder over time etc.)

4. The quality of your landing page

5. The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group – (tightly themed adgroups)

6.The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query – (tightly themed adgroups use of negatives and good matching with targeted adcopy to keyword)

7. Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown.

8. Other relevance factors (it’s Google, so they reserve the right to sting you and not tell you why! Lol)

You can read more here:

https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?answer=49174

One thing to bear in mind though is just because someone else is active on a keyword, it doesn’t mean there’s money in it for you. They could be broad matching some other term, they may not be measuring their sales on a keyword basis (some lazy affiliates especially ), or they could have a better deal than you etc., so the CPC may never come down low enough even with a TQ of 10 for YOU to make money.

The second part of your question relating to if you have keywords with a 10 QS yet need the CPC to come down still further, this is possible but again it’s more to do with targeting harder in the long run.

The obvious thing is to drop a position, it should be cheaper for you, which may not be as bad a thing as you fear, especially if you are in position 1 or 2, although with lower positions come less traffic, but there is usually a higher conversion rate so the ROI is higher but with less volume overall.

If you would rather hold position, then you may find that the following helps

- Create an adgroup for each of the keywords on exact match
- Use that keyword on each line and work it into the adcopy that promotes any unique selling point

This may boost the CTR enough to bring the CPC down. Even on high volume traffic we’ve regularly hit high 20’s to 30%+ CTR’s this way, so even with a 10 QS if you increase the CTR your CPC should lower.

A Case in Point

Here’s an example of the CTR’s of 3 exact matched keywords spending almost £120k in tightly themed adgroups with laser targeted adcopy!:

The £91k spend keyword ran at 32.30% CTR, sales worked out at £2.21 in commission for every 96p inbound click, which equates to a profit of £1.25, just over 130% ROI.

Just lowering the bid amount itself means that over time your ad position will probably begin to fall, especially if it’s a volatile sector where competition is strong.  So if you want to maintain position, it would also be wise to focus on boosting the CTR and QS instead, but remember that buying the traffic is only one part of the equation!  Once you have users on site, you need to maximise your landing page conversions as it effectively makes your clicks cheaper.  When conversion increases, your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) comes down, so you can effectively pay more to get that traffic in the first place.  This is sometimes why sending direct to merchant isn’t ideal and you may do better as an affiliate by creating comparison pages.

A friend of mine who sold his company for several millions of pounds last year said he didn’t worry too much about micromanaging the CPC (his account was very well managed), but he focussed on squeezing every single conversion out of their landing pages as possible.  This way, even though he was paying the same high CPC (finance sector is so ouch!!) as everyone else, he was converting that traffic around 30% better than the competition which in turn effectively lowered his CPA.  So dropping the CPC is only part of the solution!  You should be using Google’s free website optimizer tool (and other feedback/testing tools) to really hone your landing pages to maximise conversions!

PPC is quite easy .. well the fundamentals of it are, you just have to do the work … that’s the hard bit

There is no shortcut to relevancy!

Editors Note:  Wow!  Thanks Shane for a fantastic master class lesson in reducing CPC spend on PPC campaigns – Hopefully Mike and our other AD readers will have found it useful (I know I did!) … Don’t forget to check out Affiliate Doctors throughout the festive season for the other Doctors take on this question.

“How do you find out new offers with companies on affiliate programmes before anyone else? Where do you look for this?

Thanks

Fizz”

Here’s what Mark and Kirsty had to say:

Mark

Check emails from merchants, build up a relationship with networks, merchants, and agencies and check out the network and agency blogs as well as the affiliates4u forum.

Kirsty

Personally, I’m not sure I’ve ever found out about much in the way of new offers before anyone else.  I do keep a keen eye on TV programmes and newspapers to see what they are talking about and also try to encourage merchants I’m already working with to give me the nod about any new developments coming up that they think I could do something with.

In my own experience though, I don’t benefit from being first past the post with promotion – I benefit from making sure I do a darned good and thorough job, covering all possible angles someone might want to search from when looking for the offer or hot product I’ve identified.  More often than not, my competitors have taken the lazy way out and have chosen a very obvious way to target potential customers.  By thinking about things thoroughly I regularly find massive galloping big tracts of untapped search terms that bear revenue.  This means I get some lovely cheap PPC traffic, some easy organic traffic, and gain some margin to channel back into competing aggressively with the people doing the obvious.

“I was just wondering if any of you thought that one could make a living purely by doing PPC?  We have a few sites, but are looking into concentrating solely on direct to merchant PPC and wondered what all of your experiences have been like with this?

Have you found that it’s better to build your own sites and then PPC direct to your landing page so you have control and get the benefit of natural search?  Or have you found that direct to merchant PPC is faster, more profitable and has a quicker turn around time should you be penalised (e.g. if you were running a site that got a google penalty, you would be looking at trying to rectify it and this taking a few weeks min; with ppc direct to merchant obviously you can change this in a few hours).

Thanks a lot

Rach”

Here’s what the Docs had to say:

Shane

Yes, a very good living can be made purely by PPC and it’s possible via direct PPC or building your own sites, or a mixture of both.

Doing Direct PPC is hassle free and fast to get going, but your revenue dies the moment you turn the traffic off and the cookies run out.  You could also be competing with one or more affiliates for the right to use the display URL, so your bid may end up higher than it would be if you were sending users to your own site, as your ad would feature alongside the direct ad being used by other affiliates sending their traffic direct.

On the flip side, doing a site which you then PPC to has benefits in that you are creating something which will be bookmarked and referred by word of mouth to friends in many instances.  It could also be used to harvest email addresses and build up a loyal user base which are emailed regularly.  This type of site would grow in intrinsic value as its user base grew and could be sold off at some stage for a tidy sum depending on the sector.

Your own site could also get natural listings and thus free traffic.  However, on the adwords side of things, Google could flick the affiliate site switch and deem it unworthy if they saw fit.  In these situations, your quality scores would drop to 1 and you’d be asked for silly money per click, so it’s not wise to get too attached to sites lately.  Some people now concentrate on a core site for SEO/Brand building which they don’t PPC to, but they then use throwaway domains with the same database content etc. for PPC purposes.

I guess it depends how you want to play it personally as to which way to go.  Direct PPC is quick yet only works well whilst the ads are running – there’s no value being built and you are solely bouncing clicks through and taking a onetime kickback.  With your own site it’s much more work, but value gets added with each user who registers and there’s the chance to get SEO listings.

I personally made the mistake of doing far too much direct PPC in the early days whilst others were doing it to their own sites.  As an example, I was sending around half the volume direct as a friend of mine who was sending traffic via his site … he later sold the site for well over a million pounds!!!

Kieron

10 years ago it was very easy to make a living entirely from PPC, I should know, I made a great living from it.  Back in those days you could brand bid until your heart’s content, send traffic straight to merchant or via your very own crap landing pages.  All at 5p a click   However … Google put a stop to most of that, merchants and affiliate networks matured and terms and conditions went from being half a page long to the equivalent of War and Peace.

On saying that however, there are still opportunities to brand bid, send traffic direct to merchants etc., but you have to look a LOT harder to seek them out.  You are right when you say PPC is instant, but beware that Google can “slap” you at any time and put your 10p bids up to £10.  Just as equally a merchant can close their programme, change their terms or drop you.  Instantly.

My advice would be to have a healthy mix of PPC and sites that get traffic via natural methods.  That way you’re not reliant on 1 channel bringing in the cash.  Trust me, after years of spending millions on PPC, when you start to see natural traffic and sales coming to a site for “free”, it’s the best feeling ever.

Kier

Hi Rachel.

It’s certainly possible to live on PPC alone, but if you already have some successful sites why would you want to get rid of them?  I’d advise keep your sites, maybe work on them less if you want to develop the paid search side of your business but don’t rule out natural traffic altogether.

Landing page vs direct to merchant will depend a lot on the product you are selling and the merchant involved.  Direct has the advantage that you don’t need to spend time building a site but a well constructed landing page can presell effectively, increasing your conversions.  As such, a good method is to try a merchant/product with direct and if it works well, then consider building some landing pages for them to try and increase your profit.

Mark

Direct to merchant PPC will have a better conversion than to a landing page, but please make sure you check every merchants restrictions on the use of Brand Bidding, and also restrictions on use of display url.

If a merchant restricts use of url, then you can alwys build landing pages for products or services, and if these are targeted well, they can return a good conversion.

When building landing pages you don’t have to stick to one merchant, you could list 4 or 5 that offer that product or service, you could also consider using Easy Content Units to add some nice formatted content units from more than one merchant on your page.

“Wordpress seems to be the hot thing for non-techies to get a site up and running with ongoing content management.  However, for projects that only have a few products, Wordpress doesn’t always seem the most appropriate platform.

For example, for a site with limited products (~10) that are unlikely to change or have that much more added, the post format of Wordpress and the concept of continually updating it with new information/products doesn’t sound like the best solution.

Can you recommend any other simple to use platforms that would help a non-techie to put up a site with the same ease as Wordpress?  If not, is the only option to outsource the development?

Many thanks.”

Here’s what the docs had to say:

Kieron

I’ve been saying for years now, WordPress is THE only cms system you will ever need.  As I see it, your problem is that you want to build a site with limited products, less than 10.  I’m struggling to see what the problem is because no matter what cms/site building software you use, you will only ever have less than 10 products so always only a “thin” site.

My advice is to use WordPress, you will be very surprised at just how customizable it is, it can do pretty much anything in terms of layout and structure.  Then simply add fresh unique content to supplement your few products.  This will give the search engines more opportunities to latch onto content and send visitors your way.  Trust me, WordPress is every affiliate’s friend.

Kier

Hi Steve.

There are loads of products out there to help you get a site up, Joomla is a popular alternative to Wordpress.  As you’re looking at building a basic product review site with around ten items, my advice is to head over to a tutorials site such as http://www.webmonkey.com and just give it a go.

Basic HTML really isn’t hard at all and anyone can get the hang of it without any other ‘technical’ training.  An hour or so with notepad and you should be able to get something passable made that you can get online and then improve as you go.  For something like this it’s not really worth outsourcing.

Lammo

Hi Steve.

This probably isn’t the answer you’re looking for, but I don’t see what’s wrong with Wordpress – you can do as little (whack up ten pages and leave it) or as much (open up the bonnet and get customising) as you’re comfortable with.

As a non-techie myself, I love WP.  Of course I break things every now and then and it drives me mad, but I can create pretty much any type of site I want, quicker and easier than outsourcing it to anyone.  Ignore the fact that it’s blogging software and think of it as an SEO-Friendly CMS system that can be hacked away at if you want to.

Apologies if you really, really don’t want to use WP, but as far as I’m concerned, it really is the mutts nuts!

Editor

Hope that helps you out Steve.  Put simply, give Wordpress a go, you can find 1000’s of templates to use, both free and premium dependent on what you’re after.  This site uses Wordpress and was a custom design which is more expensive, but there are plenty of ready made solutions out there.  If you do pick a free theme, make sure it isn’t hiding any dubious links in places like the footer – see Kirsty’s post on removing encrypted footer links from Wordpress.

What CMS platforms are you using for your affiliate sites?