Earning a living from CPA marketing
- Thread starter Rvfamily
- Start date
Nope only landing pages can be used.
I never used banners on Mobicow. Its a mobile CPV network
Rvfamily
Well-Known Member
@azgold and @lrs1995,
Thank you both for always being so quick to help in my journey. I appreciate the feedback both of you provide. I am looking at offers and will be starting a campaign on G2M first (although I have been considering doing a small test on FB). I'll post here, as always, in the hopes that I might help others and that others might help provide me with direction.
Thank you again. You have both been a big help over the last several months. I am ready, ready, ready for the next step along the way.
As always,
Here's to your success!
Thank you both for always being so quick to help in my journey. I appreciate the feedback both of you provide. I am looking at offers and will be starting a campaign on G2M first (although I have been considering doing a small test on FB). I'll post here, as always, in the hopes that I might help others and that others might help provide me with direction.
Thank you again. You have both been a big help over the last several months. I am ready, ready, ready for the next step along the way.
As always,
Here's to your success!
raynoldclare
Active Member
Cool RV. Very nice channel. Those videos are awesome too. I love personal development. Keep it up buddy. Subscribed!
Rvfamily
Well-Known Member
Sorry guys and gals. Had some other exciting things going on and just simply didn't have enough time to do everything I was trying to work on.
So, as far as CPA goes, my affiliate manager asked me if I would drive traffic to an offer, and I was trying to get things set up to get started.
The offer is for an anti-virus product. and I have been working to get my first Bing campaign set up. Of course like so many things you have read here, I am learning on the fly. I am pre-selling via a landing page and using P202 for tracking. I have had some difficulty in getting it all set up.
Like I have done in for other offers, I bought a super cheap domain for the listed URL in the ad (I'll reveal it when I have run some testing and have some results to report). I set the URL that the ad goes to as the landing page. I set the landing page to redirect to P202 and then redirect to the offer page for the company.
I spent most of a day doing keyword research and have my first ads created with bids entered and ready to go. I paused the campaign until I have finished all the linking (should be set to go tomorrow). This will be desktop traffic.
I do have an appt with my Mobicow rep Tuesday morning, to help me understand setting up interstitial ads that run on that platform.
I was debating on whether or not to mention, as it's not really related to the follow along, but part of the reason for the delay in the last week or so was because I had someone ask me to do an interview for their website (they had been reading some of the things I've written on FB among other places). Was trying to prepare, and do a great interview. They will be promoting my website, so I was also doing some work to get it looking better.
Sorry for leaving those of you who follow along hanging recently. I'll start the new campaign tomorrow and provide an update at the end of the day.
Thanks to everyone who takes the time to read, and to those who have offered much help over the last several months.
As always,
Here's to your success!
So, as far as CPA goes, my affiliate manager asked me if I would drive traffic to an offer, and I was trying to get things set up to get started.
The offer is for an anti-virus product. and I have been working to get my first Bing campaign set up. Of course like so many things you have read here, I am learning on the fly. I am pre-selling via a landing page and using P202 for tracking. I have had some difficulty in getting it all set up.
Like I have done in for other offers, I bought a super cheap domain for the listed URL in the ad (I'll reveal it when I have run some testing and have some results to report). I set the URL that the ad goes to as the landing page. I set the landing page to redirect to P202 and then redirect to the offer page for the company.
I spent most of a day doing keyword research and have my first ads created with bids entered and ready to go. I paused the campaign until I have finished all the linking (should be set to go tomorrow). This will be desktop traffic.
I do have an appt with my Mobicow rep Tuesday morning, to help me understand setting up interstitial ads that run on that platform.
I was debating on whether or not to mention, as it's not really related to the follow along, but part of the reason for the delay in the last week or so was because I had someone ask me to do an interview for their website (they had been reading some of the things I've written on FB among other places). Was trying to prepare, and do a great interview. They will be promoting my website, so I was also doing some work to get it looking better.
Sorry for leaving those of you who follow along hanging recently. I'll start the new campaign tomorrow and provide an update at the end of the day.
Thanks to everyone who takes the time to read, and to those who have offered much help over the last several months.
As always,
Here's to your success!
Rvfamily
Well-Known Member
I promised I would provide an update for the day, so here goes.
I started a campaign today with an offer from MaxBounty. The offer is for an anti-virus product. My AM asked me if I could help her direct traffic to this offer. She said that it was converting pretty well and thought it might be something that would work for me (I try to oblige where I can on this as I think it helps build the trust and relationship with them). I decided that the offer would probably be better suited to desktop traffic, so that is the direction I went with it.
I have moved away from 7S and created my first campaign on the BingAds platform. It took me a few days to get everything right (well, almost everything- but I'll get to that in a minute) with the links this time.
Between using a new traffic source and using landing pages for only the second time I was having a little difficulty getting it all set up. As I indicated before, I bought a super cheap domain for redirect for the offer.
Maybe it's just me, but I just think it looks better if you have PlayMadden16Now.com (for example) as a listed url as opposed to http://www.tracking202.lindseymarketinggroup.com/kw={Keyword}, etc., etc., etc. I have done this on most of the offers I have promoted, but as time has gone by, I have tried to make the purchases a little more generic, or vertical specific rather than offer specific so that I can reuse them for future offers (hey, I have a whole year to use them).
I pointed the ad at the domain and then redirected to a landing page I created on my marketing website. It's a pretty crude landing page, but we'll see how it performs. I will be looking to set up maybe one or two more landing pages to split test in the next day or two.
I created the first ad on Bing and other than the UET (Universal Event Tracking) tags, I was successful at getting all my links set up right.
I did a test, clicking through the ad to the landing page and then clicking on the button on the landing page to see if it all worked. For some reason when I used the landing page setup in P202, it was creating a link that went from my lp call to action button back to the page itself. I corrected this by simply listing it as a direct link and eliminating the landing page from that portion of the setup. Once I did that everything went where it was supposed to go.
I need to figure out how to set up the UET, because you use this for retargeting and this can have a pretty significant effect on overall conversions. So that is on the horizon (and something I will create a guide for if someone else hasn't already done it).
I am using a set of 43 keywords (these are tagged by Bing as "Low traffic kw". They all still had decent search amounts, but were significantly less than the main, top of mind kw associated with search traffic for this type of offer.
I did find it quite easy to set up additional ads to run in the same ad group on Bing, and quickly set up four more ads with very different angles (this was something I really had a hard time with on the 7S platform).
I am targeting five tier one countries (all English speaking- provided a little later) with the offer as it has a built in geo redirect for whichever country your traffic comes from.
Here are my stats at the end of the day (about 10 hours from the first placement).
I think tomorrow I will expand my keyword set, and see if that doesn't increase traffic. If not, then I will move into some of the more competitive kw with a smaller daily budget to test out my ads and landing page.
I'll provide more information as I have more data to report. At that time, I will provide information on how the appt with my MobiCow rep went.
As always,
Here's to your success!
I started a campaign today with an offer from MaxBounty. The offer is for an anti-virus product. My AM asked me if I could help her direct traffic to this offer. She said that it was converting pretty well and thought it might be something that would work for me (I try to oblige where I can on this as I think it helps build the trust and relationship with them). I decided that the offer would probably be better suited to desktop traffic, so that is the direction I went with it.
I have moved away from 7S and created my first campaign on the BingAds platform. It took me a few days to get everything right (well, almost everything- but I'll get to that in a minute) with the links this time.
Between using a new traffic source and using landing pages for only the second time I was having a little difficulty getting it all set up. As I indicated before, I bought a super cheap domain for redirect for the offer.
Maybe it's just me, but I just think it looks better if you have PlayMadden16Now.com (for example) as a listed url as opposed to http://www.tracking202.lindseymarketinggroup.com/kw={Keyword}, etc., etc., etc. I have done this on most of the offers I have promoted, but as time has gone by, I have tried to make the purchases a little more generic, or vertical specific rather than offer specific so that I can reuse them for future offers (hey, I have a whole year to use them
). I pointed the ad at the domain and then redirected to a landing page I created on my marketing website. It's a pretty crude landing page, but we'll see how it performs. I will be looking to set up maybe one or two more landing pages to split test in the next day or two.
I created the first ad on Bing and other than the UET (Universal Event Tracking) tags, I was successful at getting all my links set up right.
I did a test, clicking through the ad to the landing page and then clicking on the button on the landing page to see if it all worked. For some reason when I used the landing page setup in P202, it was creating a link that went from my lp call to action button back to the page itself. I corrected this by simply listing it as a direct link and eliminating the landing page from that portion of the setup. Once I did that everything went where it was supposed to go.
I need to figure out how to set up the UET, because you use this for retargeting and this can have a pretty significant effect on overall conversions. So that is on the horizon (and something I will create a guide for if someone else hasn't already done it).
I am using a set of 43 keywords (these are tagged by Bing as "Low traffic kw". They all still had decent search amounts, but were significantly less than the main, top of mind kw associated with search traffic for this type of offer.
I did find it quite easy to set up additional ads to run in the same ad group on Bing, and quickly set up four more ads with very different angles (this was something I really had a hard time with on the 7S platform).
I am targeting five tier one countries (all English speaking- provided a little later) with the offer as it has a built in geo redirect for whichever country your traffic comes from.
Here are my stats at the end of the day (about 10 hours from the first placement).
I'll provide more information as I have more data to report. At that time, I will provide information on how the appt with my MobiCow rep went.
As always,
Here's to your success!
Rvfamily
Well-Known Member
OK, so right away, I believe I might have a problem with my landing page. I have registered 15 clicks on the ad (about 4 are mine from testing) but have click loss of 7 clicks out of 11. My impressions and clicks look like this:
Going to go after a few higher targeted keywords and monitor closely to see if I get click throughs to the offer.
I'll let you know how that goes later today.
As always,
Here's to your success!
Going to go after a few higher targeted keywords and monitor closely to see if I get click throughs to the offer.
I'll let you know how that goes later today.
As always,
Here's to your success!
Rvfamily
Well-Known Member
Hello fellow AF'ers!
I know I've been very inconsistent lately. I said it above, and I'll say it again. I will be better at posting regularly so that you can see how things are going, what's working, not working etc.
In the interest of brevity in the next few posts, I'll break this up into multiple posts. I have several ad campaigns on Bing that I will share and I don't want things to get too long.
To begin, let me say, I took a course in Bing ads (was really looking for something that dealt with PPC generally but this was insightful), although I have stated that I would focus on mobile. I know I said I would focus on mobile, but I was trying to run some offers my AM suggested and it just seemed they were better suited to desktop. I do have money on deposit with two mobile ad companies, so it's there ready to go.
My first campaign with Bing was for McAfee Virus protection, and I have to say, it was a mess. I'm not completely sure if I got the links wrong or what happened. I have been working some nights to the point of exhaustion, where I fall asleep in my chair, so it's possible I screwed up the links one of those times. All I know is that even when I went back and cleaned it up, I was still sending clicks to a Booking.com offer (with antivirus ad copy). As you can imagine, I shut it down after a while. It was strange because I was sending traffic to both offers at the same time.
Because I have had trouble with everything in P202, I have been looking at the possibility of moving my tracking to Voluum, Thrive, Adsbridge or some other. Cost is really the big factor. Adbridge did have a setup where until you crossed a certain click threshold per month, it was free. I noticed almost immediately after setup that they sent me a notice of change to TOS, which included a new monthly billing feature for any traffic. So, I'm still looking at new tracking options going forward.
Before I detail the campaign and click information, I want to start by saying that I really like the Bing Ads platform. It just seems more intuitive than the 7S platform did. In addition, creating ads and implementing them seems quite a bit easier as well. I do like that, at least for now, you can direct link offers to test them on the Bing platform, as this is not allowed (as I understand it) on Adwords.
Next, I will walk you through step by step how I set up a campaign and ads in Bing and conclude this post with the data from the first campaign.
I started out by researching keywords in Google's keyword planner. as you can see here:
So we have a good amount of searches (#1), and lots of relevant associated keyword groups (#2). My goal is to have hundreds of keywords (long and short tail) that I have an opportunity to bid on. Don't worry about cost, we'll approach that in a second. Finally, when we feel like we have the best keyword groups (targeted to the offer), we download them all and copy them into Bing (#3).
Next we go to Bing and create a campaign. As you can see here, we need to give it a name and select some geo targeting information.
Then we set up our first ad:
Here you can see what your ads will look like. Remember, display url is just for show, while destination is where you are directing the traffic. So for me, I have surfsafely.pw as my display url, and we are sending our traffic through our tracker (P202), so we have to get our links from there.
Next we insert the keywords we got from google keyword planner here (see arrow) by pasting them from our CSV file they were saved in:
and then make the adjustments we need to our type, e.g., Broad, Phrase or Match (I'll share some data I've looked at on this in the next post). Click save and we are ready to go.
Next, we want to quickly change the bids on all of our keywords. I would start with .05 to .08 as a starting bid for all keywords until you get some information that prompts you to make changes. Let's look at the image below to do that:
If you click on the box at #1 it checks all keywords on the page. Then click the "Select all rows on all pages (1062) at #2 to select all keywords for this ad group. We then enter what we want our bid to be for all keywords. I have started with .05 to .08 depending on the campaign. I would like to note here that you are going to have to play around with this a little bit. I created an ad group for on campaign that got quite a bit of clicks at the .05-.08 range, while in another I received virtually no clicks until I raised the bids several times over.
Once I began to get clicks and could isolate keywords, I could then see if it was worth it to pursue the keywords that were driving the clicks. I.E., were these keywords that showed high intent (which would make them worthy of higher bids).
OK, so that's the setup for Bing. I guess I could've done a guide on it, but thought maybe you'd find more value in it here. Since this post got a little long, I'll go into the details of my first campaign in the next post (tonight after the day job!)
I have run 3 campaigns so far, with varied results. So, as I said, I'll hit the first campaign in the next post and then cover the next in of the two subsequent posts.
Hope you've found value.
As always,
Here's to your success!
Casey
aka The Nomadic Marketer
I know I've been very inconsistent lately. I said it above, and I'll say it again. I will be better at posting regularly so that you can see how things are going, what's working, not working etc.
In the interest of brevity in the next few posts, I'll break this up into multiple posts. I have several ad campaigns on Bing that I will share and I don't want things to get too long.
To begin, let me say, I took a course in Bing ads (was really looking for something that dealt with PPC generally but this was insightful), although I have stated that I would focus on mobile. I know I said I would focus on mobile, but I was trying to run some offers my AM suggested and it just seemed they were better suited to desktop. I do have money on deposit with two mobile ad companies, so it's there ready to go.
My first campaign with Bing was for McAfee Virus protection, and I have to say, it was a mess. I'm not completely sure if I got the links wrong or what happened. I have been working some nights to the point of exhaustion, where I fall asleep in my chair, so it's possible I screwed up the links one of those times. All I know is that even when I went back and cleaned it up, I was still sending clicks to a Booking.com offer (with antivirus ad copy). As you can imagine, I shut it down after a while. It was strange because I was sending traffic to both offers at the same time.
Because I have had trouble with everything in P202, I have been looking at the possibility of moving my tracking to Voluum, Thrive, Adsbridge or some other. Cost is really the big factor. Adbridge did have a setup where until you crossed a certain click threshold per month, it was free. I noticed almost immediately after setup that they sent me a notice of change to TOS, which included a new monthly billing feature for any traffic. So, I'm still looking at new tracking options going forward.
Before I detail the campaign and click information, I want to start by saying that I really like the Bing Ads platform. It just seems more intuitive than the 7S platform did. In addition, creating ads and implementing them seems quite a bit easier as well. I do like that, at least for now, you can direct link offers to test them on the Bing platform, as this is not allowed (as I understand it) on Adwords.
Next, I will walk you through step by step how I set up a campaign and ads in Bing and conclude this post with the data from the first campaign.
I started out by researching keywords in Google's keyword planner. as you can see here:
So we have a good amount of searches (#1), and lots of relevant associated keyword groups (#2). My goal is to have hundreds of keywords (long and short tail) that I have an opportunity to bid on. Don't worry about cost, we'll approach that in a second. Finally, when we feel like we have the best keyword groups (targeted to the offer), we download them all and copy them into Bing (#3).
Next we go to Bing and create a campaign. As you can see here, we need to give it a name and select some geo targeting information.
Then we set up our first ad:
Here you can see what your ads will look like. Remember, display url is just for show, while destination is where you are directing the traffic. So for me, I have surfsafely.pw as my display url, and we are sending our traffic through our tracker (P202), so we have to get our links from there.
Next we insert the keywords we got from google keyword planner here (see arrow) by pasting them from our CSV file they were saved in:
and then make the adjustments we need to our type, e.g., Broad, Phrase or Match (I'll share some data I've looked at on this in the next post). Click save and we are ready to go.
Next, we want to quickly change the bids on all of our keywords. I would start with .05 to .08 as a starting bid for all keywords until you get some information that prompts you to make changes. Let's look at the image below to do that:
If you click on the box at #1 it checks all keywords on the page. Then click the "Select all rows on all pages (1062) at #2 to select all keywords for this ad group. We then enter what we want our bid to be for all keywords. I have started with .05 to .08 depending on the campaign. I would like to note here that you are going to have to play around with this a little bit. I created an ad group for on campaign that got quite a bit of clicks at the .05-.08 range, while in another I received virtually no clicks until I raised the bids several times over.
Once I began to get clicks and could isolate keywords, I could then see if it was worth it to pursue the keywords that were driving the clicks. I.E., were these keywords that showed high intent (which would make them worthy of higher bids).
OK, so that's the setup for Bing. I guess I could've done a guide on it, but thought maybe you'd find more value in it here. Since this post got a little long, I'll go into the details of my first campaign in the next post (tonight after the day job!)
I have run 3 campaigns so far, with varied results. So, as I said, I'll hit the first campaign in the next post and then cover the next in of the two subsequent posts.
Hope you've found value.
As always,
Here's to your success!
Casey
aka The Nomadic Marketer
Is the offer for a different country? The link will redirect, if so. Edit: just read your post again, saw in the pic that you're targeting Canada and US.
Don't let yourself get to the point of burnout, Casey. Seriously.
Really? Fantastic, I didn't think they allowed that.
Why not Bing's kw search tool? Or the Ad Intelligence tool?
Rvfamily
Well-Known Member
@azgold,
I used the google keyword tool simply because it gives a better idea (in my thinking anyway) a better idea of global search for specific terms. I guess what would make sense is to use them both to compare. Thanks for pointing it out.
As always,
Here's to your success!
Rvfamily
Well-Known Member
Bing Campaign number 1 details:
I was encouraged by my AM at MaxBounty to promote an offer for McAfee virus protection. It was global offer with a geo redirect at the network level, so the traffic could be driven from anywhere and directed to the proper place. I really like this kind of offer because it allows you to target a much broader audience and if you get the campaign specifics right, you have a lot of opportunity to scale.
So I set up my details on Bing as follows:
Target: Tier 1 countries (English speaking so I don't have to have ads rewritten or converted)
Budget: $10 per day
Distribution: All search (Bing and all related) plus content networks.
Keyword Set: 1062 keywords in all
Keyword match type: all keywords were targeted as Broad match
Ads with campaign stats: 7 total as follows:
As you can see, the most successful ads here (from the standpoint of CTR%) was easily our {KeyWord} (dynamic text-this is where the keyword the person searches for appears in the ad) ads with CTR rates of 1.46% and 2.03% respectively. When you are using dynamic text ads, you will probably need to make some changes here and there to get the approved without review (this was my experience). I could not make rhyme or reason why some needed review and some did not, but small tweaks were necessary for me.
As you can also see, the total spent to test this campaign was $58.85. I was running this through Prosper202 for tracking and as stated in the post above, I had a lot of trouble. For some reason on the network side, I had some clicks going to the McAfee offer and some to a Booking.com geo redirect offer.
Here is what my network page looked like:
I was running the offer to a landing page, which you can see here. I only ran the one lander this time. Split testing landers is the next skill to develop for me. As you can see, there is a pretty big discrepancy between the number of clicks I sent through the ad network and the number of clicks that showed up in the CPA network. A whopping 402 clicks did not make it to the offer. Pretty discouraging.
Takeaways from Bing Campaign 1:
1. You must test multiple landing pages simultaneously. I spent $59 to learn a lesson I already knew.
2. I need to look closely at tracking and as I have stated before, may begin to look for some more advanced options going forward.
3. Dynamic text ads can be very effective for driving a high CTR% (more on this in a later post, as they are not always better)
4. I need to be quicker to react to these kinds of nuance if I want to be successful. Hoping you'll get lucky and get a few clicks is not a winning strategy.
If you have any insight, or direction you can provide, I would appreciate it.
As always,
Here's to your success!
I was encouraged by my AM at MaxBounty to promote an offer for McAfee virus protection. It was global offer with a geo redirect at the network level, so the traffic could be driven from anywhere and directed to the proper place. I really like this kind of offer because it allows you to target a much broader audience and if you get the campaign specifics right, you have a lot of opportunity to scale.
So I set up my details on Bing as follows:
Target: Tier 1 countries (English speaking so I don't have to have ads rewritten or converted)
Budget: $10 per day
Distribution: All search (Bing and all related) plus content networks.
Keyword Set: 1062 keywords in all
Keyword match type: all keywords were targeted as Broad match
Ads with campaign stats: 7 total as follows:
As you can see, the most successful ads here (from the standpoint of CTR%) was easily our {KeyWord} (dynamic text-this is where the keyword the person searches for appears in the ad) ads with CTR rates of 1.46% and 2.03% respectively. When you are using dynamic text ads, you will probably need to make some changes here and there to get the approved without review (this was my experience). I could not make rhyme or reason why some needed review and some did not, but small tweaks were necessary for me.
As you can also see, the total spent to test this campaign was $58.85. I was running this through Prosper202 for tracking and as stated in the post above, I had a lot of trouble. For some reason on the network side, I had some clicks going to the McAfee offer and some to a Booking.com geo redirect offer.
Here is what my network page looked like:
I was running the offer to a landing page, which you can see here. I only ran the one lander this time. Split testing landers is the next skill to develop for me. As you can see, there is a pretty big discrepancy between the number of clicks I sent through the ad network and the number of clicks that showed up in the CPA network. A whopping 402 clicks did not make it to the offer. Pretty discouraging.
Takeaways from Bing Campaign 1:
1. You must test multiple landing pages simultaneously. I spent $59 to learn a lesson I already knew.
2. I need to look closely at tracking and as I have stated before, may begin to look for some more advanced options going forward.
3. Dynamic text ads can be very effective for driving a high CTR% (more on this in a later post, as they are not always better)
4. I need to be quicker to react to these kinds of nuance if I want to be successful. Hoping you'll get lucky and get a few clicks is not a winning strategy.
If you have any insight, or direction you can provide, I would appreciate it.
As always,
Here's to your success!
Glad to see you back @Rvfamily
I don't like the Booking.com thing and the huge click loss.
Probably you are not targeting somehow the right geo in Bing and you get clicks from countries that are not supported. You'll never convert anything to booking.com with an antivirus ad.
The click loss is too big, there are bots and stuff, but it should be max 50%, bing can't be that bad as a platform, they should filter better the bots. Unfortunately I have used Bing just a little bit a few years ago so I can't help you more.
I don't like the Booking.com thing and the huge click loss.
Probably you are not targeting somehow the right geo in Bing and you get clicks from countries that are not supported. You'll never convert anything to booking.com with an antivirus ad.
The click loss is too big, there are bots and stuff, but it should be max 50%, bing can't be that bad as a platform, they should filter better the bots. Unfortunately I have used Bing just a little bit a few years ago so I can't help you more.
Rvfamily
Well-Known Member
@crysper,
I was thinking it was just that I had a poorly designed lander. I am really liking the Bing platform, so I think I'll continue working on it, and try to get good at optimizing using this platform. I am still working on the 3rd campaign, so we'll see. Thank your for following along and commenting.
As always,
Here's to your success!
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