great post. i just signed up for full campaign setup service on your site.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.
Yes i setup seperate landing pages to ensure accurate tracking...but as for Call only - i have seen with my own eyes landing page STILL makes a BIG difference in QS for Call only ads. yes the user never sees it, but google still makes sure its relevant. Along with the CTR, and ad position as factors as well..
Hi, i have a few students using Hypertarget with good success...they have some good offers on there. But I always reccomend you join many networks, as many run the same offer, so you may find another with higher payout.
I hate blackhat stuff.. that is not a long term strategy for real business - and thats what i love about pay per call..google call only was "MADE" for it.. they are totally fine with promoting pay per call offers. You only need one good account. No banning because you are running pay per call offers. Just dont make false claims and be honest
