PPC Rockstar Status: Still Learning the Strings

The results of my PPC campaign Aero Garden for week of January 26th to February 1st. So this week was horrible I spent money for nothing. I was kind of pissed and I actually did a lot of work with this specific campaign. The payout for this is 36.00 per lead, meaning at the landing page if a user ends up entering their information and hitting submit I get paid. Too bad no one did that.

There were several things that I did which is basically research and split testing ads. I tested 3 ads with 3 different headings and with the same context. But first, I emailed Mark saying how he has done so far on Saturday, when I announced I will be doing PPC Pockstar along side with him. We exchange keyword/s and said good luck to each other.

Keyword Variations:

Mark and I had two totally different lists. His were really geared towards Aero Garden while I used the meta tags of FreeAeroGarden.com keywords and I expanded them. The next day I also added some aero garden keywords as well, to target aero garden buyers or users. Ofcourse there were some keywords that were very competitive which I did not use, thanks to excel I found some good ones and expanded on them.

During the week I tend to follow popular keywords, keywords that were generating clicks and I would expand on them. I also removed any keywords that were below an average rank of 5, I wanted to be rank high for specific keywords. When I was filtering out keywords clicks started to slowly digress away, could be a good or bad view. But I did not want a 23 rank keyword on my list, because I am spending money for nothing. I started with about 175 keywords and finally ended up with a total of 68 keywords. I have an average rank of 1 - 4.9, which I think is pretty good. Out of so many impressions I ended up with a little over 300 clicks. Imagine if 20% of those clicks converted - 60 converted * commission ($36 per lead) = $2160. I would have easily had a nice ROI. Too bad no one did, bah!

Split Testing Ads and Headers:

To the left I have 3 ads that were in rotation. The first ad did better than all the rest, the second did second best, and the third obviously did not get enough clicks.

I was kind of surprise because I thought the last 2 ads would do way better than the Risk Free one. I guess I was wrong and it proved me wrong. As you can see I as more concerned about the heading this time. I just switched the text as well as you can see.

These ads were rotated through out the day and it will even show you which one is doing better, you can also let the better one show more than the others. Felt sorry for the last one because I thought that would be the popular one.

Direct Linking vs Landing Page:

Mark said he would just direct link to the landing page, so I did - I rather do direct linking, so far I found it to be better than landing pages. The problem with this specific campaign there were errors on the landing page which I did not like at all. First and foremost, like any crap landing page there is no information - the damn video link didn't even work.

I went to FreeAeroGarden.com and checked to see if it really was broken, nope it worked. I click on the order now link and same landing order page with the video link working! Also the PepperJam Network landing page removed and cut off all the internal links to the website, so how is someone suppose to figure out what an Aero Garden is? Take a look below:

The Direct Landing Page:

The Actual dot com Front and Order Page:

See the difference! This landing page only had the fill out form to capture your name, email, and mailing address. I hate those types of landing pages because you do not want to force a customer to just enter something without learning about it. So I did something different...

What I did was created a double load page or delayed page load, to FreeAeroGarden.com. I used my affiliate link and loaded it before FreeAeroGarden.com within a same window, having the affiliate link hidden from the end user. PepperJam Network automatically installs a cookie on the end user and I love PJN for this because the cookie on the end user for 45 days! Which is why this tactic I use would work, same website right?

The problem with that is Google suspended my account after a day of testing and trying it out. Bah, I had less clicks but longer duration on the site (I installed analytics on my delayed page). So Google told me I had to change my link and destination, I did an updated and within 10 minutes my ads are rotating. I wanted to see how it would have done the rest of the week since I started the change mid-week.

Tracking, Where is Traffic Coming From:

I started the campaign after I made the video about PPC Rockstar. Once I created my first campaigns within my 2 PPC networks I immediately started seeing some traffic.

The image to the left can show you where my traffic was coming from, overall from Google and Clickriver. It even grabs the IP and tells me their location and what browser users are using. I need to know what the end users are doing, this better helps me decided what tactic to use next.

Google was giving me a lot of clicks, as I stated but none were converting, this tells me users are click happy. Looking at the graph I was getting clicks but it does not mean its good clicks.
Overall:

I personally did not like this campaign because of so many issues, I would not have chosen to work with this specific campaign. As stated above there were a lot of flaw to the landing page, this would have been good for my own separate landing page and then direct users to the order page. Hot linking to Aero Garden proved not to be so healthy after all.

Isn't that beautiful!

Well that is my wrap up of my week with no earnings. Total spend was 82.03 on Google Adwords. Here is a video of a wrap up of what I basically said above. Also, take a look at this ugly graph with no earnings and high spending. ...CRIES... I am wondering what Mark will be promoting this week; I hope it is something geared towards Valentine's....

Read Mark's Results at 45n5.com