It has been a wild ride. In the last 4 weeks I’ve invested around $3000 in my first PPC campaign. Up until this week I had lost about 1/2 of that in advertising costs (spent $3000 and made $1500).
I almost gave up and quit but stuck with it after a friend on a message board said “Most ppc campaigns don’t fail because of the product, they fail because of the affiliate…” Hearing that pissed me off enough to stick with it, and now, I’m glad I did.
I decided to take a close look at my stats and figure out what to do to get this thing profitable. I’m using Prosper202 to track the campaign and when I looked at the traffic vs. the conversions I almost fell over. I saw that ONE adgroup with a single keyword in it was costing me 70% of my $100 daily spending limit (so $70 a day) and had provided ZERO sales.
I paused that adgroup and several others that weren’t converting and things started running better. I actually made money that first day. Since then I’ve tweaked the campaign into a lean, mean converting machine and am getting about a 300-400% ROI on my daily spend now. So basically if I spend $10, I make $30-$40, or if I spend $50 I make back $150 - $200.
I also decided to go after some organic search results for the ppc keyphrases that were converting like crazy (they are VERY long tail with little competition). I launched two wordpress sites yesterday and today they rank in the top 10 for my targeted phrases and have brought in a total of $90 in sales.
I’m hoping to at least make back the $1500 that I lost with the campaign, if I can do that than this will truly be a successful learning experience. As soon as this one is moving along smoothly I’ll move on to a new campaign (I already have one in mind) but before I go dropping more cash into another ppc campaign I’d like to get myself back to even.
PPC is definitely fun stuff and combined with a good SEO effort I think I can do some damage.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
How much would you recommend one start with for a PPC campaign for one niche? $3000 is out for me right now.
Hey Tracey,
From my experience and reading it looks like an average amount for testing is about $100. you’d run a $20 daily budget on adwords for 5 days. If you are going to start doing ppc, PLEASE talk to me first and I can provide some pointers - it’s a real rabbit trail… but is fun and it works (if you can afford to learn).
I went WAY overboard and was spending / losing $100-$300 a day while I was testing… but you don’t have to do that (and i never will again)
I wound up losing $1000 in September (I profited $240 on the last 2 days of the month when I finally “got it” and got my losses down a little bit) and now I’m making about $300-$500 a week with it, still just on my first campaign though, haven’t tested any other offers.
So I’m not getting rich but I should be able to make back my losses and get this campaign profitable.
Creating successful PPC campaigns is kinda like picking stocks. You can do all the research in the world, and go in with as much information and skill as possible, and still lose your shirt. Even the pros can’t pick a winner 100% of the time. The trick is to throw up 10 well planned and well researched campaigns, track your conversions, see what’s working, and cut your losses. Probably 7/10 campaigns will tank, but its those 3 that don’t that can make you smile!
thanks wes - i’ll keep that in mind. this is my first real ppc campaign, i’ve done about 4 others in the past but i think i had $5 daily limits and was terrified of the whole thing… lol, so those don’t count.
by the way, the campaign is making $200+ a day now.
musignr,
I am impressed with your success. I am working on my first site and have been following Jeremy in BI2.
I do have a question, if you feel it’s too intrusive,
feel free not to answer. Are promoting a pay per lead advertiser or is it something else? Do you think that pay-per-lead advertisers are a good place to start or are they too competitive?
Keep up the good work. You are inspiring me to get out of the business I hate so that I can provide a better lifestyle for my family.
jreaves
i think pay per lead offers are a great place for a new person to start. the truth is that there are no offers that are too competitive, i am in an extremely competitive market.
the key is jumping in and testing and then tweaking and refining your campaign to get it profitable. if you can do this, you can make money in any market that there is.
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