[CASE STUDY] Running a Profitable Pay Per Call Campaign from Start to Finish - April 2016

[Pay Per Call Guru]

Hey guys, I wanted to do this case study/walk through of running a pay per call campaign offer which was started in March 2016 and optimized to the results shown in April 2016 (and currently still running). I strongly believe Pay per call is the future of affiliate marketing – it has given me a new channel of income. Let's Get On With This!

THE BACKGROUND
I get a lot of questions of how long it takes to be successful with pay per call (for some reason people think it’s a get rich quick scheme – ITS NOT!) So instead of me preaching the same message over and over again – I figured a walk-through of one of my new offers I am running showing the processes I took to make it successful - persistence and patience has its long term rewards. I did set this up as a newbie (not as a experience pay per call marketer - to show you the difference) So many people give up when they are so close - not only in pay per call, but in many things in life I find.

THE FACTS:

• Date range of this case study/walk through: Last week of March 2016 to end of April 2016
• Marketing Type: Pay Per Call
• Offer: Appliance Repair
• Geo: USA – Select 39 States only. Not USA Wide (I wish).
• Conversion Time (how long they need to be on the call to count as a conversion): 60 seconds
• Payout: $7.50
• Hours open: Mon-Fri 8am-11pm, Sat-Sun 9am-8pm

MY ASSETS:

• Landing Page – Wordpress landing page
• Ads – Google Call Only Ads ( I show results from BING as well if your interested, just the calls/profit though just cause I am too lazy to do all the screen grabs etc.)
• Call Tracking – Invoca

THE STORY
Ok I am going to try to keep this to the point, and not too wordy. Also remember I set this up like a newbie would. Just to show you the impact it makes not starting the right way.

I setup 2 landing pages in wordpress for which to drive the BING and Google ads too (one source to each page – I just duplicated the page). I did this to ensure I have clean tracking to conversion by where I am spending money. Since I displayed different 1-800 # on each page. I did all the optimizations etc which I show in my course (pay per call exposed)
I then did market research and came up with a keyword list of approx. 225 keywords and 5 basic negative keywords. All based on broad match modified setup (+keyword +keyword). Every time I launch a new campaign, I set my personal expectation to lose money in the first week or so. Because I am paying for DATA not results just yet. I need to know WHAT PEOPLE are actually looking for – WHAT IS THAT CUSTOMERS INTENT? This will allow me to find niche keywords people are not bidding on. For example everyone is bidding on +emergency +plumber (super pricey), what about +Emergency +plumber +near +me (believe it or not, this is used a lot!) remember people talk to google like its human – so think this way in your search strategy.

WEEK 1 – March 25 2016 – March 31 2016 (last week of March)
*Sorry about the big watermarks. I had a few people stealing my images*

Ok here are the results of 225 keywords and neg list. Remember the first week or 2 is made up so I can learn more about what people are searching for.

THE RESULTS: (all $ is in Canadian)

• Daily budget: $30
• Impressions: 3263 impressions
• Clicks: 17 clicks
• Conversions: 2 ($15 in sales)
• Cost per conversion: $88 (ouch!)
• CTR: 0.52%
• CPC: $10.38
• Avg CPC: $10.38
• Ad Cost: $176.47

THE LEARNINGS:

• Need to up the daily budget to get more impressions – not enough data. I was losing impression share due to budget. (many people make this mistake – making the daily budget too small makes you lose the impression share war. Doesn’t matter how good your ads/keywords are – no one will see it.)
• Increase CTR – build more ads, remove some Keywords (btw my quality score is 6/10 – needs to improve)
• Reduce CPC – Good lord $10, removed high priced keywords, added many of the search terms found in the search terms report from those high CPC keywords along with others.
• Also increase negative keywords list.

Overall need to optimize the keywords more to get more eyeballs and relevant clicks. I took the next couple of weeks to optimize weekly into April.

Here are the results from all of April.
*Sorry about the big watermarks. I had a few people stealing my images*

THE RESULTS - Very happy with the results so far. So what happened over the weeks:

• Reduced keywords from 225+ down to 65 core keywords, again mainly only 12 of them are bringing in the major conversions, so I can still optimize this. But its too soon yet.
• Increase budget to $86/day (you see chart below - the spike on the 4th, that was that. I should have done it sooner – oh well.)
• Increased impressions slightly to 11,771 (since I reduced the keywords, it did reduce impressions.) But if you compare the drastic drop in keywords vs the increase in impressions – it’s a lot from less keywords.
• I got 832 clicks
• CPC is down to $1.23 (from $10 –because I got rid of the high cpc words)
• CTR is up to 7% (expected with Call Only on a urgent service like appliance repair – so this is good, not amazing)
• Cost per conversion down to $3.17
• Conversions: 321 according to Google (actual was 315 – which is why I don’t really use the google data on this part – I check the call tracking of Invoca)

SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!

Here is the image of the call tracking platform. Showing ACTUAL conversions (sometimes the google conversion tracking is not accurate with pay per call, the invoca tracking is.)

LEGEND:

• Blue line is conversions rate %
• Green bars are Google Calls
• Yellow bars are Bing Calls.

THE OVERALL RESULTS
Overall you see both Google ads and Bing Ads convert almost the same, the BING is slightly more profitable due to cheaper CPCs and my killer landing page. (I am only mentioning BING cause its in the image, just to show you BING also works for Pay per Call)

ONLY GOOGLE PERFORMANCE:

• Google Call Only Ad Spend total: $1,021 Canadian
• Revenue Total: $2047 USD = $2625.30 CDN.
• Profit Total: $1604.30 CDN

BING + GOOGLE PERFORMANCE:

• Ad Spend total: Google $1,021 + BING $950 = $1971 CDN
• Revenue Total: $3334.50 USD = $4275.50 CDN
• Profit Total: $2304.50 CDN

FINAL THOUGHTS
I think one more month of optimizing and I can let this run on its own with no more optimization. Then move onto the next campaign offer. My whole goal is to make money, but have more free time as well.

Ok so this wasn’t as short as I thought LOL… But I hope this inspires those that are struggling with pay per call right now – to know with hard work it’s a goldmine! Just be smart and strategic in your thinking. Also I hope this will inspire those "debating" about trying to run pay per call offers. Post below if you have questions. Thanks guys!

PS: As you may know PAY PER CALL EXPOSED is my site. Everything I walked you through is the based off the learnings I show/teach in my pay per call course, as well in the Full Campaign Setup service.

 

[internalsoul]

Wow man. That's really very impressive Raj. Very nice case study and great results. Though I am not into pay per call right now, but considering to get into it in near future. I've one question, is the landing page your own wordpress blog with your domain or is it normal free wordpress blog?

 

[The Mad French]

Impressive results, you deserve your name hehe !

I'm doing some pay per call for a french psychic offer but barely break even.
I must say that the conversion point is quite hard to reach (10min).

I'm seriously considering dive into PPC and your course really interests me but I'm on a very low budget and can't afford it.
I'll definitely go into it as soon as I can.

Just 3 questions if you don't mind :
1) Since your conversion time is 1 min, how do you setup AdWords to consider it ?
2) What type of offers would you recommend to start with a (very) low budget and some decent experience (Google AdWords certified) ?
3) Could you name some good and reliable networks ? (I'm approved on Exact Match Media and still in approval with Ring Partner)

Thanks a lot for the inspiration and your hard work.

 

[Pay Per Call Guru]

Wow man. That's really very impressive Raj. Very nice case study and great results. Though I am not into pay per call right now, but considering to get into it in near future. I've one question, is the landing page your own wordpress blog with your domain or is it normal free wordpress blog?

Thanks @internalsoul - I use my own wordpress hosting on my own domain. Its so cheap - and better branding opportunity.

 

[Pay Per Call Guru]

Impressive results, you deserve your name hehe !

I'm doing some pay per call for a french psychic offer but barely break even.
I must say that the conversion point is quite hard to reach (10min).

I'm seriously considering dive into PPC and your course really interests me but I'm on a very low budget and can't afford it.
I'll definitely go into it as soon as I can.

Just 3 questions if you don't mind :
1) Since your conversion time is 1 min, how do you setup AdWords to consider it ?
2) What type of offers would you recommend to start with a (very) low budget and some decent experience (Google AdWords certified) ?
3) Could you name some good and reliable networks ? (I'm approved on Exact Match Media and still in approval with Ring Partner)

Thanks a lot for the inspiration and your hard work.

hi @The Mad French thank you for the kind words. I ran Psychic a while ago (looking to get back into it) but it was sale based, if they pay for a 10min psychic reading - you get paid. Not based on time durations. It was the ASKNOW affiliate offer. You should look into it. I believe its international as well.

See below for answers:

1) Since your conversion time is 1 min, how do you setup AdWords to consider it ?
- I setup conversions in adwords (its a feature there) and set the time to 60 second + 5 seconds (for the ivr) = 65 seconds. When that times passed - its counts as a conversion.

2) What type of offers would you recommend to start with a (very) low budget and some decent experience (Google AdWords certified) ?
- Home services/Urgent service are the best. As people are CLICK HAPPY because they dont have time for research - THEY NEED A PLUMBER NOW! know what i mean...

3) Could you name some good and reliable networks ? (I'm approved on Exact Match Media and still in approval with Ring Partner)
- RingPartner is great (i did a webinar with them you should take a look - its on their YT channel)
- Mundo media - is also great..

I list many more in my course.. but those are some of my favs. Exactmatch is also good.

Good luck.

 

[IndeXer]

I read your full post, I think I need to re read it once again, first of all, thank you for starting this journey, I really want to get into pay per call to increase my earnings, I will be keeping a close watch on this thread.

Please keep updating the thread and let us learn a thing or two from it.

Good luck with your journey.

Regards
IndeXer

 

[CPAEXPERT]

Take an advice, unless you own the company, you will be banned from adwords. They will let you run for sometime, just one fine morning you will see your adwords to be banned for violating their tons of policy. Any third party user like affiliate running adwords, can expect to get banned at any moment, unless you have the authority direct from the merchant. Pay Per Campaign like Dating, Tech Support, Insurance, Lawyers related campaign are strictly prohibited by adwords. Only direct owner are acceptable for long run campaign and it is quite stupid they will approve you ad first and will let you run and then Bang! I am not discouraging anyone out here, but it is an advice, So be alert when you run Pay Per Call Campaign specially with dating and tech support as both are rip off for users!

 

[fb2740]

Great post, @Pay Per Call Guru , I love it! And congrats on your success

I have a couple of quick questions, though;

1. Did you set your campaign budget to Standard or Accelerated? I read somewhere that for pay per call, accelerated is the way to go.. Does this make sense?
2. Is it worthy to compile and add a list of long tail keywords such as [KW + CITY] (e.g. Appliance Repair San Diego), or does running the KW "appliance repair" cover any single city (thus, no need to add the +city)? I hope I make sense of what I am trying to ask

Thank you!

 

[Pay Per Call Guru]

Great post, @Pay Per Call Guru , I love it! And congrats on your success

I have a couple of quick questions, though;

1. Did you set your campaign budget to Standard or Accelerated? I read somewhere that for pay per call, accelerated is the way to go.. Does this make sense?
2. Is it worthy to compile and add a list of long tail keywords such as [KW + CITY] (e.g. Appliance Repair San Diego), or does running the KW "appliance repair" cover any single city (thus, no need to add the +city)? I hope I make sense of what I am trying to ask

Thank you!

hi @fb2740 - thanks so much. See below for answers:

1. I have not see much difference to be honest. I always run Standard. Unless i know i am near the end of the cap, so to beat out competitors at the end i turn this on..works sometimes..

2. I would ALWAYS make it as specific as you can. Narrow the search, usually lower cpcs, and more relevant traffic. EX: i would set the city to SAN DEIGO, then kws like +appliance +repair +san +diego, or how about +INSERT ZIP CODE, or go narrow like +dishwasher +repair +san +deigo. see what i mean..

 

[The Mad French]

@fb2740 : I don't have the experience of Raj but I would like to share my opinion on this.

1. Standard mode will spend your budget throughout the day. For example, if this one allow you to have 24 clicks per day, your ads will show up each hour until they have 1 click. Like his name suggests, it's the standard configuration for the majority of cases.
Accelerated mode will show your ads continually until all of your budget is spent. It's recommended when you want to reach your customers during specific hours in order to be sure that all your budget is spent. With standard mode, there is a risk that a part of your budget is not used.

2. Beware : Keyword + city and Keyword only with targeting this same city in campaign configuration is not the same at all. It's 2 different keywords with their own volume of searches. I would recommend to add both and test, there is also a great chance that those 2 keywords are ROI positive. Moreover in most cases, the version Keyword with targeting will have an higher CPC.

Hope it makes sense.

 

[fb2740]

hi @fb2740 - thanks so much. See below for answers:

1. I have not see much difference to be honest. I always run Standard. Unless i know i am near the end of the cap, so to beat out competitors at the end i turn this on..works sometimes..

2. I would ALWAYS make it as specific as you can. Narrow the search, usually lower cpcs, and more relevant traffic. EX: i would set the city to SAN DEIGO, then kws like +appliance +repair +san +diego, or how about +INSERT ZIP CODE, or go narrow like +dishwasher +repair +san +deigo. see what i mean..

Thank you for taking the time to answer. I appreciate it.

I recently used the accelerated mode and spent over $30 in 5 clicks, even though I set my campaign bid very low. Not sure whether this has to do specifically with the Accelerated mode, though.

Grouping the KWs and making ads relevant to the ad group -I believe- is the correct thing to do in order to get the Qs up and consequently increase CT and lower the CPC overtime. However, if you get too specific (too long-tail) it may be hard to have relevant ads for that particular KW, am I wrong?

 

[fb2740]

@fb2740 :

2. Beware : Keyword + city and Keyword only with targeting this same city in campaign configuration is not the same at all. It's 2 different keywords with their own volume of searches. I would recommend to add both and test, there is also a great chance that those 2 keywords are ROI positive. Moreover in most cases, the version Keyword with targeting will have an higher CPC.

Hope it makes sense.

Thank you for clarifying the keyword/CPC subject, Mad French. That's good to know.

I've just found out about the Keyword modifiers (+keyword +keyword), though, so I will start using them right away.

So much to learn!

 

[The Mad French]

I recently used the accelerated mode and spent over $30 in 5 clicks, even though I set my campaign bid very low. Not sure whether this has to do specifically with the Accelerated mode, though.

AdWords can't bid more than 20%+ of the max CPC (regardless of the mode), so no it's not normal to spend $30 on 5 clicks.
There must be something else in the settings of your campaign, hard to tell without actually seing it.

Grouping the KWs and making ads relevant to the ad group -I believe- is the correct thing to do in order to get the Qs up and consequently increase CT and lower the CPC overtime. However, if you get too specific (too long-tail) it may be hard to have relevant ads for that particular KW, am I wrong?

Yep you're right.
A good campaign will have as many groups as needed, each targeting specific relevant keywords.
Don't be afraid to make many of them, the more targeted the better.

As you said, a perfect combination of the ads, keywords and landing page will increase your quality score and thus your ad rank.
Thereby your CTR will increase and your CPC decrease.
You will be able to rank higher for cheaper CPC than your competitors.

If for example you need to make 1 group per city, go for it !
More groups also mean a better control over your keywords and campaign costs.

 

[fb2740]

Is it worthy to use competitor spy tools for pay per call, such as ispionage or spyfu?

 

[Pay Per Call Guru]

Sure it is, i use SEMRUSH. You cant really spy on CALL ONLY ads, but you can still find ads/keywords.

 

[yomi]

Hi, well done for the great work. What should be the condition of your website for it to be accepted by these Ad network- will the site be content-rich or just a landing page? Thanks

 

[fb2740]

Ok so I am setting up a new campaign now, and I am adding Long-Tail KWs (Keyword + city) plus BMMs (+kw +kw).

Does it make sense to have them both types of KW match in the same ad group/campaign, or ideally in 2 separate ad groups to see how they perform?

 

[Pay Per Call Guru]

if you using call only you will get conversion data by keyword. otherwise if not, i would seperate.

 

[The Mad French]

Hey @fb2740,

I'm sorry, don't understand your question.
You're talking about only one type of match (bmm).

Otherwise, personnaly, I like to start campaigns with keywords in broad match to catch as many keywords as possible related to my niche.
If I catch too many poor keywords in terms of targeting or conversion, i will tighten up to expression match.
For the top keywords, i'm going for exact match to have full control of their cost and position.
Finally, all my keywords will be in the same group, related to the segment of customers they target.

Hope it answers your question.

Good luck buddy and keep us informed of your progress !

 

[Dr. Forum]

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