Pay Per Click

[doovde]

I've never really done any pay per click but it's something I've always been interested in. If anyone knows any decent newbie guides or anything then I'd love to read them.

I have a few questions though:

How many visitors do you need to channel through a landing page before you know whether it is converting well or not. Basically what kind of sample size do you need?

I notice that you can buy clicks from the serps but also from adsense banners as well. Is there a big difference between the two? Is one better than the other? Is it all situational?

[Mike]

I don't consider myself a pro but I have run a few successful ppc campaigns. IMO, it varies from campaign to campaign but I think 100 clicks is a good starting number. I know some guys who do acai berry stuff and they'll swear by 300-400 clicks before giving up and moving on.

[ak]

A good PPC program for publishers and Webmasters is Infolinks - The Best PPC In Text Advertising Solution

They still except some gambling PPC.

[Unknown Webmaster]

I stared doing PPC a little while ago, so I'm by no means an expert.

You may want to have a look at this stuff.
T202 Tutorial Videos
Subids.com - How Subid Tracking Works.

[Strider1973]

Here's another article I found this week linked to on SEO book about Adwords PPC for beginners: Google AdWords Affiliate Marketing Secrets: Niche PPC Affiliate Tips for CPA Programs ~ PPC Blog

[TheDonk]

PPC is one of the few things I consider myself 'good' at...except on G since I haven't used them yet. But here are some things I've learned about being successful with PPC that will apply at any PPC site:

1/ Don't always be looking for the #1 - 3 ranking. You'll often find that the top 2-4 spots are ridiculously high with guys fighting over a term out of ego rather than ROI. Instead, build several landing pages on multiple sites (or even one site if that's all you have) and go after several of the spots from 4-10. For example; if #1-3 cost $1+, but #4 is $.27 and #10 is $.08, look to dominate this area with multiple listings. You'll typically get as many or more hits as you would if you ranked #1 anyway, but your cpc will be much less. Another benefit by doing this is:

You can test cta's, bulleted lists, banners, etc by marketing multiple landing pages from one site. Note 'from one site'. If you're trying to test & compare cta's on different sites, your numbers will be skewed based on site design ie sidebar, navbar and header distractions. So, if you want to test things, do them on the same sites where 'everything else' is the same. PPC is perfect for this as it's easy to track. Be sure to use different trackers for each landing page though.

Yet another benefit of doing this is that it allows you to test ad titles and descriptions. Want to learn more about developing titles that convert to clicks? This is a great way to do it.

2/ Learn to think outside the box when choosing your keywords. Every affiliate thinks of Full Tilt Bonus Code. But, they don't all think about Full Tilt Deposit Bonus, Full Tilt Signup Bonus, or Deposit Bonus at Full Tilt Poker. Less competition = lower CPC. If you're really diligent about this, you can easily double or triple your clicks, and often times pull your CPC wayyy down in the process. This is how you improve your ROI big time. This is so critical to a successful PPC campaign I cannot really put it into words. Look in your analytics stats for good keyword ideas, then mix things up as much as possible.

3/ Do NOT target 'free' terms (if you're doing it in the gambling market). The conversions to rmp's for these keywords are so low that it isn't worth your money. Save that money for better converting keywords.

4/ PPC campaigns can suck you in and take massive amounts of time managing if you let them. While it may become an important part of your business, keep yourself in check and don't allow yourself to spend half your day fighting for rankings. You have more important things to do than waste several hours a day managing this. Early on it's easy to get too wound up in the competitive side of PPC. This is another benefit of multiple listings. Even if you lose a bit of rankings on some keywords, you'll still have multiple listings on them. So, if one or two gets knocked off the top page, so be it.

5/ This should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway. Be sure to keep a list of your keywords on your computer. Add a section called 'new keywords' and any time they pop into your head, put them there. The next time you log into your PPC account, add them to the keyword list. If you have 2000 keywords already, it's prob not efficient use of time to go in just to add one keyword. But, once that list gets to 10-15 new keywords, then it is.

There are lots of little things to learn, but if you follow these ideas and your market is good, you'll be successful with nothing more than whats listed above.

[absentx]

Me and a business partner dove head into google PPC earlier in 2009 and it was a lot of fun but ultimately for us, a losing venture.

What we did was joined PPC Coach, which, if I was smart, that would be an affiliate link because they do have an affiliate program...but its not, I am just telling you what we did.

Anyways, with PPC coach you pay $50 a month and they take you on a month by month journey where each month you have a new PPC goal to accomplish. It is rather coding intense and you need some programming knowledge or at least the will and drive to learn your way through it.

The first month when we were in it was all about "polling" which is basically just these stupid little polls like "do you think Brittney Spears is Fat" yes or no type things and then they get presented with an email submit or zip submit offer as a "prize" for taking the survey. Believe it or not, we actually had a Brett Favre poll that was making us about $25 a day! That was very exciting especially for just starting out. But soon we ran into problems where the CPA networks would shut off our successful deals or Google would "slap" us and we would lose our ppc rankings and what not.

Anyways...we were real noobies at it (and still are) and never got much beyond the stupid polling stuff (which I think ultimately is stupid and is not at all a truly great way to make money via PPC with) But one of these days I will get back into PPC and I will find a way to make good money with it!

If there is anything I learned from the PPC coach website it was that it is possible...Just like on this forum, on PPC coach there were guys literally making zillions of dollars and they all started at the bottom. So to me it is a very promising and interesting industry, just not something I have been anywhere near successful at yet...

Round two will be coming soon...