The response I got back from AdWords was interesting.  First, it was immediately rated at a QS of 7 (out of 10).  Interesting because that was the value applied immediately.  However, this morning I got up and found an email from Google AdWords saying that my ad had been disapproved.  Oh no, what is wrong with this ad and the keywords, they were very generic and I would have thought completely acceptable.

Based on that, I started looking through the ad and keywords to see if I could see some problem and then started reading the Terms and Conditions, Editorial Policy and all of the other governing documents (which are only of interest to lawyers because they don’t give you any useful information about this sort of situation).  The results were that I was completely stumped.

My last ditch effort was to see if maybe the link to the landing page was causing the problem.  Sure enough, when I clicked on the link from the ad, it goes to “Page Not Found”.  Now, I know why they disapproved it.  This is not really something that they want to support.  Why you ask?  Well, from what I understand, at least when you initially submit your ad (and any time you edit the ad or links for keywords), there is a check done that the domain is valid and that it goes to a valid landing page.  This is to eliminate situations where you insert an invalid or inappropriate landing page after the ad is accepted.

Anyway, fixed the link and sure enough, it was approved.  In fact, it only took about 20 minutes for the approval to come back.  This was a great lesson (another one) in making sure that everything is working correctly before submitting an ad, campaign, keyword, etc.  At the same time, it also pays to not freak out when you get a disapproval.  There could be something simple.  At least its not an account shutdown situation which has been happening a lot recently.  I am hoping to stay out of this scenario.

Take care.

One of the first thoughts would be that the Landing Pages weren’t working well and they were sending lots of poorly qualified traffic to the sales page.  However, when looking at some comparisons, they looked to be in good shape.  Plus, one of them was one that has provided good conversions previously.  So that was probably not the issue.

So, where do I go next?  I thought to myself, is there a potential that the impressions and clicks from outside the US were not providing the potential conversions that I was looking for.  From my stats, it was looking like about 60% of my traffic was outside the US and I didn’t really want to lose that traffic but if it wasn’t converting, then I didn’t want to be paying for it either.

So, I cut off everything except the United States and Canada.  Now, this is where things get a little strange.

After I made the change, my number of impressions per day has been dropping (down by 1/3 and continuing to drop) but more importantly, the CTR dropped from ~3.2% to 0.22%.  It has recovered a little bit today but still not up where it was.  So what caused such a drastic drop in CTR?

A little research has led me to a very interesting little bit of analysis.  What I have found is that I have a definite correlation between position and CTR.  Here are the results that I found over that few day period:

Graph of Average Position versus Click-Through-Rate

So, what this is telling me is that there is a strong correlation between “Average Position” and “Click-Through-Rate” but the sensitivity is a lot higher than I expected.  With a change in position from 4.4 to 5.9, the CTR has gone from 5% to 0.2%.  That’s huge but a very, very critical piece of information.  I am going to be adjusting the numbers so that I get my position higher and see where that takes me.

Good clicks to all!

First, I found out that my landing pages were still sitting in test mode which meant that when folks clicked through to go to the sales pages, they were getting a test feedback rather than getting there.  Doesn’t make for great sales that way.

After I got that fixed, everything was cruising along just fine with good CPC, CTRs and decent hops.  However, I wasn’t getting any sales.  Isn’t that the point of this whole thing?  So, I got in touch with my mentor and described the problem.  he looked in his ClickBank records and didn’t find any hops from me.  Surprise, surprise!!! Why is this.

Well, after going back and forth a couple of times, we figured out that my links were not pointing at the right place.  I was going to a sales page that has one of the lowest gravity factors in this niche.  Oh well, it only goes to show that you really need to test and be very careful about making sure that the details are correct.

Now that I have everything fixed up, my two Landing Pages (LPs) (DIYSolarPanels and MakeSolarPanels)  are working fine and its just a matter of time before we see what the real results should be.

I have re-written my landing page or provide more information and less sales “stuff” and I can see where that goes.  I started by turning on one Ad Group (DIYSolarPanels) and determining that the ads were still drawing impressions and clicks and they were.  However, I made a big booboo.  I have code in my landing page that tracks where the click came from and where they went.  In that code, I have a flag that sets the code to either production or test mode.  Unfortunately, I had a very sickening feeling yesterday when I found that the code was set to test mode.  I know that this flag was set since I turned things back on but I am wondering how long the flag had been set prior to turning it off.  This would definitely tell me why I wasn’t getting any hops to the sales page.  Oh well, it’s a mistake that would be easy to make and there isn’t anything that I can do about it.  Just have to move on but learn the lesson to check things before releasing them for operation.

One other note is that the process of testing things is really slow when you are only committing $10 per day to the operation.  At this rate, it takes about 4 days to tell whether or not there is a potential buyer out there.  Obviously, if the hop & conversion rates were higher, it wouldn’t be a problem.  However, I think I am running in the right area so its a matter of waiting around to see what happens.

One thing that I have learned is that Google plays games with their bids (CPC).  I am not sure how their algorithm works but it obviously changes the “Estimated First Page Bid” based on my performance.  I have been told before that you can get lower rates as you show performance (and that does work) but I wouldn’t ahve thought that the “Estimated First Page Bid” would change that quickly.  Oh well, part of the learning process.

That’s it for now.  Going to keep plugging away.  I will be upping my budget tomorrow because I am starting a new Ad Group (MakeSolarPanels) and I want to see how that one does.  Will let you know.

What you have to understand is that the whole arena of Affiliate Marketing is (1) directed at the situation where the purchase of the product or service is a one-to-one transaction and (2) there are a large number of combinations of the different mechanisms to implement your marketing approach.

On the first point, the Affiliate Marketing concept does not work well when there are multiple people involved in the purchase.  This is why “Corporate Sales” are not typically handled through this mechanism.  The whole idea is that the person who is making the search (or finding your blog or whatever) is the person that will be making the purchasing decision.  This point is also why the Landing Page is most effective when it is based on personal reviews and/or testimonials because these sorts of purchases are typically going to have a significant emotional component.

In attempting to understand the world of Affiliate Marketing, it is important to understand that there are large number of approaches to Affiliate Marketing.  However, it can be distilled down to a four step process (when looked at from 50,000 feet).  (1) Find a niche and product that you want to market,  (2) generate traffic to your Landing Page (LP), (3) provide some information about the product that will provide more incentive for the potential customer to want to learn more about the product and finally (4) generate a sale.  The Affiliate Marketer is the one that does steps 1, 2 and 3 with the 4th step being the responsibility of the Merchant.

One other piece of advice that I learned and came up again during this Boot Camp was that when you are starting, you need to figure out which method of generating traffic (#2 above) you are going to use and stay focused on that approach.  If you choose to do SEO, then put all of your energy into getting your organic rankings up and thereby increasing your traffic.  Don’t worry about PPC or blogs or articles to start with.  Once you get good at whichever approach you want to use (and more importantly are making money) then you can branch out if that is really critical to you and your self-esteem.  You will hear lots of “mentors / coaches” telling you that you need to do articles, blogs, email lists and PPC.  However, all that this will do is to bury you in possibilities and you won’t be good at any of them.  Start simple and straight-forward and then expand in whatever direction you want to go.

Those are two little nuggets that you can keep in mind while considering your next move in Affiliate Marketing.  I know that the second point is one that I struggled with for

With all of this plus a low budget, lack of experience, and without the tools, I was struggling to get anywhere with the campaign.  At the same time, I have been working with Byron Walker (www.UltimateResultsNow.com) and he has a great new product in the solar energy niche which was of great interest to me.  I was also working on a method of tracking the clicks, where they came from, how they got there and where they went.  It’s not super difficult but works pretty well.

So, all of this together, I shut down the ArtJobs campaign and generated the newest EnergyAtHome.biz landing page.  My landing page is a lot better than the ArtJobs campaign landing pages.  At the same time, I am able to track how things are working.

One thing that I found, when I started this new EnergyAtHome.biz campaign, is that the cost for the keywords that I chose are quite a bit higher than what I was expecting.  When I started seeing this, I was a little concerned that it wasn’t going to be a profitable venture.  However, given the alignment with Byron and the fact that I will be attending his “Affiliate Marketing Boot Camp” through the DaVinci Institute, I decided that I wanted to work with the program and see where I come to.  We will just have to see how things go.

Finally, the other thing that I decided to do was to sign up with Microsoft Advertising Center.  I did this in order to get access to their keyword / pricing information.  In order to try out the service, I got signed up and created a campaign there.  There were some interesting insights there that I will talk about later.  But suffice it to say, I think there might be some opportunities here.  Again, we have to wait and see.

Now I am off to my next campaign.  This time I am going with a campaign that I got from subscribing to the Copy-N-Profit program.  Supposedly, all you have to do is copy their campaign and it will start making money.  I was hung up a little getting my domain names ready otherwise I would have probably put this one up first.  This campaign is in the “Jobs For Artists” niche. We will see how things go.

One of the things that I needed to do was to decide where I was going to focus (also know as market niche). Its important to do this, especially when getting started, to allow you to have a little better chance of making things work.

So, my first campaign is underway. I am using Google Adwords and have built my own landing pages. I am working through ClickBank (www.ClickBank.com) and am focusing on a single product (DIYPowerSystems). I am going to let that run for a few days and see what happens. I have another campaign ready to go in the Jobs for Artists as well that I am then going to turn on after that to see if that one works any differently.

One of the things that drove me down this road is that it is a completely different type of work than what I have been doing previously and I do believe that it has the opportunity to make money (the question being how much is possible).  At the same time, it can truly be done from anywhere.  This is something that I have done in the past with software development but there is always the question of how you find and work with your customers.  In the affiliate marketing world, it truly allows all portions of the transaction to be done online.  The other aspect of this was that I had a vision about where I might be headed.  I had an interview at a company downtown.  The parking in that area is not very good and very expensive.  As I was driving down there, I saw myself riding the bus to work and using a netbook to do my affiliate marketing work in the morning and evening ride.  I am also going to be interviewing at DIA which would be the same thing but longer.  Who knows, that might be my future.  We’ll see.