PAYING TOO MUCH FOR PPC ADS
Many affiliate EMS marketers use pay-per-click traffic from sites like Google AdWords to send traffic to their affiliate links. It’s a great idea if you have the money to spend, but it’s not easy.
PPC is actually pretty difficult to use if you don’t know what you’re doing. There are dozens of different ways to screw up a PPC campaign, and if you’re not careful, you could end up spending far more than you make. Another worry with PPC traffic is the fact that your affiliate checks will take a while to come. You may not get paid before your PPC account comes due. If this happens, you’re on the line personally for the bill. If you can’t pay it, you could lose your account!
There are several ways to make sure you pay as little as possible for your clicks:
- Choose long-tail keywords that are very closely related to the product you’re promoting.
- Bid for EMS product names rather than just keywords.
- Be careful to avoid unprofitable keywords like “free”.
- Group keywords into related groups.
- Make sure your landing page is very high quality.
- Make sure your landing page is easy to navigate.
- Don’t send traffic directly to affiliate links.
- Try to get visitors to opt-in to an email list before you send them to your affiliate link so you can market to them over and over.
- Watch campaigns closely and weed out unprofitable keywords.
- Monitor sales and eliminate products that don’t convert.
- Make sure your ads get a high CTR on AdWords. The higher your click-through ratio, the cheaper your clicks will be.
You have to be sure that everything you do on PPC is tracked and monitored carefully. Since you are spending money for every click, you must make sure those clicks are as profitable as possible. If you can set up named campaigns or use tracking codes in the affiliate programs, you should do so. This will help you see exactly how much traffic you’ve sent via PPC (as opposed to other traffic sources) so you can test various ads and keywords.
