My first campaign

I just completed setting up my first campaign… and I feel fucking great. So here goes some of the details, I will try my best to explain everything.

I decided to ask my affiliate manager Brittany (affiliate.com) what are some good offers to run on search. She named a few but none of them clicked for me, main reason none clicked was the simple fact they all were pretty competitive. She then named one for car quotes with an epc (earnings per click) of 0.70. I checked out the landing page it seemed pretty straight to the point.

With me deciding on the niche, I then did the Google trends research which showed me that it really doesn’t have much USA traffic, but has tons in UK searching for the term. I still proceeded to set it up for USA.

Did some Google searches for different variables of the keyword to see what competitors are doing and honestly, I could not find any other affiliate marketers unless they are all whitelabel (working directly with the company) or direct linking. I saw no real great looking LP’s (Landing Page) probably only one that had a page with every make of vehicles and a picture of at least one of the models. This is where I decided to actually run the campaign with YSM (yahoo search marketing) I made this decision because you can direct link with yahoo for now. The reason for direct linking is all my competitors have the field to fill in on the first page the customer comes to. If I was to setup a campaign with Google I would be forced to make a LP that I know won’t help me convert.

Once I decided on my search engine and my method of pushing users to the offer, I only need to do the most painstaking part keywords. I have not used any paid tools and don’t plan to till I start to see a good ROI (return on investment). I first opened up Google Keyword Tool and typed in the base keyword ‘Car Quote’. The results I got back helped me find out I need to use a few negative keywords. Two of the major negative keywords ‘Insurance’ and ‘Loan’. I am not looking for anybody that needs a loan or insurance quotes. There wasn’t much thinking outside of the box for this offer, it was more of me deciding to actually tack on keywords that I know would help convert. ‘free car quote’, ‘new car quote’, ‘new vehicle quote’, ‘free vehicle quote’ and the list goes on. As you can see I am stressing new and free. Try to use the synonym of your base keywords car=vehicle=automobile. Also I used the word ‘lease’.

Once all keywords have been completed I moved on to the next step forming ad groups. This process should not be complicated just time consuming best advice I can give is open up a spreadsheet and create a bunch of tabs. Name each tab the name of the ad group simple as that. I also recommend not using any tools for your first time get use to building a campaign from scratch. I will just give one example of an ad group:

Ad Group: Lease new car

• Lease new car
• Lease new vehicle
• Lease new automobile

As simple as that just try to tightly group all your keywords for a better QS (quality score)

I then make up the text ads I looked at the competitors ads and made variations of them. Not much advice I can give there because I am not great at call to action words yet. Also the text ads I created are first put into prosper202. Everything is pretty much done all I do from here is open up YSM’s horrible web interface and manually add everything. I only used search and standard. The reason I am not using content is because I don’t know how to exactly control that traffic and advanced is like broad match from Google. The goal here is to find the keywords that convert so I need to see exactly what people are looking for. I think that is pretty much everything.

All this takes is time, dedication, and some money.

Also I did get one lead 7.50$ but I spent 10$ to get it. My first major mistake was having ‘used car’ keywords which had no chance of converting since the offer is for new cars.

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