Search Marketing Test Campaign 1 - Online Advertising and UK Affiliate Marketing

Small 'niche' topic sites or product pages are generally well suited to displaying affiliate ads. It really can add a unique, useful and enjoyable experience for the internet user if well considered. Like anything, of course, it can be done poorly or unethically but poorly can be improved whereas unethically has no place in an industry that is largely peer policed. Correct choice of topic and products, good page design and the prospect of worthwhile commission make these projects ideal for learning the ropes with PPC providing you read and understand any restrictions within your chosen merchant's terms.

An effective budget for such a 'learning campaign' would be £25 per day for a single search engine for two days or longer to provide figures that could then be analysed by Number and Cost of Visitors to your site, % of Visitors going to a Merchant, % Conversion into Sales and Commission received. A minimum of 100 visitors to merchant would be a reasonable sample to begin with.

If your campaign is already working well and creating a good profit or breaking even then you can start exploring ways of improving the AM Revenue from your pages with on page changes and PPC Keyword, Bidding and Advert changes.

If you are falling woefully short of the breakeven point then it's probably best to have a complete rethink from all angles. If your PPC ads are working and bringing you a good number of visitors, for little expense, but they aren't going passing to any of your ads then you need to look at your page. If you're not getting anyone via your PPC ads you need to look into what's going wrong there. Are you bidding enough? Is no one seeing your ads? If they are seeing them are they just not clicking on them? Just some of the questions to ask in identifying problems you can try to correct.

If you're passing traffic through to the merchant but it's just not converting then you should check for problems that can only be remedied by improvements from them. Look at changing the advertisers you show on your landing page. Their sites should be user friendly and competitively priced for the traffic you pass them.

If you've got traffic going to a merchant and it's converting well but it's still costing you far more than the revenue it generates then it's time to think of a)significantly dropping the cost of the traffic you generate through PPC or finding a merchant who will convert just as well but with significantly better commission rates. Not always an easy task.

With some results you may well decide that PPC just isn't suited to it at all. Some single niche topics or products may just not be worth promoting in this manner and far better suited to focus on long term placement in organic search results.

Affiliate PPC Search Marketing and Promotion

Pay per Click Test Campaign 1