| dulakian |
09-20-2006 06:01 PM |
A noob with some questions
I joined this site last year on a friend's recommendation. I thought it would be a good spot to market my unix skills. Got a couple paying gigs out of it, and some thread love from the guys that paid me. Then I got another fulltime job, working for someone else, and got ground back into the dust again.
I recently started an adwords account, and tried out 5 different campaigns. Apparently I'm pretty good at writing ads, because I'm getting almost 6% CTR or better on almost everything I'm running. The programs that I've tried, porn or not, don't seem to be converting. I spent more on the ads than I made back on the commissions, though sales are close to ad costs. I did some things with my keywords, and tried to hit the less searched terms that would be cheaper. I got my CPC down, but I'm still not converting enough to make it worth my time. Porn or not, I can't seem to find a program that converts at anything like a profitable rate. Right now I'm running about 1:300 conversions, which seems ridiculously low to me, especially considering my CTR and ad targetting. That's across all the programs I tried, some did worse and a couple did a little better than that. Still not enough for me to leverage a profit, though rebilling is gonna add up over time. I'm not in the hole, but I will be soon enough. My ads keep climbing in rank, I'm averaging over the 3rd rank on most of them, while keeping my bids at the minimum, or just above it.
You folks have any words of wisdom for a noob? I am not even sure if 6% CTR is that good or not, but from what all I've read, anything over 3% is considered excellent. Also the fact that my ads keep climbing in average rank even though I am not bidding them up is encouraging to me. Somebody wanna enlighten me? If I am getting a higher CTR than average on my ads, would it be worthwhile to try writing good CTR ads and selling them? I'm getting discouraged and google is methodically plowing through my ad budget. It's not a high budget, but at this rate I will be in the hole in under 30 days, since sales are not making up for ad costs, much less showing a profit.
I know you all mainly do traffic trades and tgp stuff but I've seen some posts referencing adwords. I am trying to start out with a low budget and work it up from there, and I'm glad I did, or my ad budget would be gone and I'd have nothing left by now because of the conversion problem. I am trying to start out without using my own server, so no custom landing pages, I am kinda forced to bucket into whatever the affiliate program has, which seems pretty crappy so far. I target my ads very well I think, but the landing pages leave a lot to be desired in that respect, very generic. I think conversions would improve quite a bit if the landing page was as targetted as my ad. Is there anybody with good targetted landing pages for affiliate use? Somebody I haven't heard of yet? I'm looking for specific targetting, not just category targetting (gay, fetish, etc), as that is what I have now and it's not working so well.
Are there certain programs I should be promoting on a PPC basis over others? I'm trying like mad to figure this stuff out, I don't want to go back to working for someone else again. I have dabbled with marketing in the past, and understand how to prequal in the ad, I even put the price in the ad to discourage looky-lous. The campaigns debuted at over 5%, and they have been climbing slowly but surely since.
Sorry for the long post, any advice, feedback, flames?
Michael
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