I finally got around to review all my PPC Adwords campaigns I had running. For the last few days I have been tweaking and testing campaigns. I retired quite a few Adwords Campaigns and I created a few new ones. I seem to have quite a few that work very well and for every ~$4.00 in expense I make ~$16.00 in return from affiliate commission. That’s not a bad ROI in my opinion. Of course not every day works out the same, but it seems per campaign that every 5 days I have at least two (2) conversions, in some cases 3 or 4 conversions.

Now I just have to find enough products that work the same way. The number of these good converting campaigns for me is slowly growing. I just have not had enough time to setup more campaigns and one new campaign per is not enough for me. Anyway – one thing I noticed and that might be of interest for you. The more specific the product, the better the conversion. What does this mean? If a product is a very popular item you get many lurkers even if your Google Adwords campaigns are very targeted towards the buyer. In my case I include the words “buy” and the actual product price in campaigns to filter out as many lurkers as possible. This works well with less popular products, but on the popular products it is not enough.

Example: I picked an item in the $40.00 price range for promotion. I used a very narrow set of keywords. Still my CTR was pushed down to 0.65% on average. I got between 20- and 40 clicks per day, but only 3-4 sales resulting in a ~6.5% commission per item sold. Let’s assume I made $2.65 commission per sale. 40 clicks at ~$0.20 = $8.00. 3 sales x $2.65 = $7.95. On some days I got less clicks and more sales on others I had 40 clicks but only 2 sales. Now that the month is almost over it is easier to pull the numbers and it just shows that I am losing about 10% on this campaign. For now I paused the campaign. 10% is not a lot and I think there is some potential, but the campaign needs some better tuning.

Another example with the same result. Another very popular item resulted actually in a great 3% CTR, but the actual conversions just sucked. With all these specific campaigns I am directly linking to Amazon.com. With all these popular items it seems like the conversion rates just suck. Pick a less popular item and you find the people who are already looking for this specific product. They are much easier to convert. The ones for the popular products might see the product name and the price and find it attractive, but they are not fully ready yet to make the purchase. If I can create something similar in the $80.00 range and can create the same traffic pattern this should actually work out well. Just be warned – if you go into smaller niches with these tactics – this did not work out. If the product is too specific, you get ad impressions, but no click-thru’s.

For me it seems like the month of March will end with a small profit or at least I will break even. That is good. I am learning. I just need more time to experiment with this stuff.