Testing A Niche in PPC
This question comes from a forum thread on 4 Hour Work Week:
How much time & money should I spend testing an affiliate offer with PPC?
Many successful PPC marketers will spend $200-$500 or even $1000 on testing an affiliate offer before breaking even.
There’s a few things to understand:
1) Your budget - Let’s say you have a $500 budget. It’s better to buy 1000 clicks @ 0.50 cents, rather than 500 clicks @ $1.00.
This seems obvious, but A LOT of newbies get it wrong. For example, if you set your daily budget low, and your bid price high, Google will not always show your ad throughout the day.
For this reason, make sure you set your daily budget to $500 on your campaign, and set your bid price to 0.50 (or whatever you feel comfortable with, anywhere between $0.20-$0.40 is common for very low competition niches, $0.40-$.80 for medium, and $0.80-$2.50 for highly competitive niches.
2) Amount of Time - For some PPC marketers, there’s a limited search volume for their niche, so they would rather bid higher to capture more traffic, rather then bidding low (to position #3-#8) and having to wait a month for data to come in.
3) Your Niche/Product - If you are an affiliate and promoting someone else’s product, you might want to ‘call it quits’ after you’ve spent 2x the commission for a particular keyword. Some may even (unwisely?) terminate an entire campaign after 200-300 clicks without a sale.
Of course, the idea is to make money, not lose money. So if you’re losing money, pause your campaign and then re-examine your landing pages. (You do, of course, have at least 5 very targeted landing pages that relate to your keywords, right?)
Look at other affiliates in your niche who are consistently in the top bidding position. Try to figure out what it is they are doing differently on their landing page and change your landing pages to fit their model.
Make sure you install Google Analytics. Are people leaving your site immediately? Are they browsing many pages of your site? If you see a huge bounce rate or a short period of time the average visitor stays on your site, you may be targeting the wrong audience, or the product may not fill a real need/want/desire.
FINALLY..
MAKE SURE YOU ARE TESTING!!!
This is extremely important. You need to be testing 2 versions of your PPC ad copy, 2 versions of your landing page, 2 versions of your order page, etc. I recommended using Google’s Website Optimizer.
When you first launch a PPC campaign, your objective is to Break-Even! If you can break even, then with split-testing you can continually improve your website and eventually turn a break-even campaign into a $100-$500+/day money-maker.
