You’ve got to lose money to make money.

I’ve started almost a dozen adwords campaigns over the last month and the successful ones all have something in common: They weren’t successful at first. You can use all the research tools you want, in the end, the best way to learn what works and what doesn’t is through trial by fire.

On a new campaign yesterday, I was delighted to see that I Almost broke even.

Today, I made some adjustments and barely made a profit. Tomorrow, I expect enough profit to eat lunch. And that’s how it’ll go.

So if you’ve just started an adwords campaign and you’re losing your ass, congratulations. You’ve just completed step one. Now ask yourself why. Use those stats to learn from, and you’ll see you didn’t lose money at all - you invested it in the knowledge that will help you make money.

Web Analytics, Affiliate marketing, Adwords analytics | 3 Comments »

Continuing on my Adwords insights kick, here’s a thought related to the last post about negative keywords:

If you’re on a daily budget of, say, $10 per day and you’re maxing out every day, then your clicks that don’t convert are costing you more than you think.

There’s the obvious cost of the click, but you have to also take into account the wasted opportunity. On a daily budget, you will only get so many clicks. Every click that doesn’t convert is a missed opportunity for a click that did convert.

There are many ways to find out which clicks aren’t converting:

• Using AWStats, look at your keyword traffic and find irrelevant clicks
• Track your keywords using separate subid stats, so you know which ones are converting. Kill the ones with lower conversion rates, so your budget will be spent on the higher-converting keywords.
• You can also use Google Analytics to see the keywords people are clicking in.

Root out those wasted clicks, the cost is higher than you think!

Web Analytics, Affiliate marketing, Adwords analytics | No Comments »

From my to-do list: Most of the stats from my adwords campaign and affiliate program tags provide me a good level of information. But, on a whim, I decided to crack open AWStats to see if I could gain any insights from there.

Sure enough, I found dozens of visits from keywords that were not relevant to the affiliate, and therefore wasted clicks.

These visits/wastes of money came from using broad-match keywords in the Adwords campaign. So, I copied the list of all keyword visits from AWStats, pasted them in a spreadsheet, and marked the ones that were not relevant. Now, all I have to do is add them as negative keywords in Adwords and my ROI should increase nicely!

I’ll log the changes and see if any relevant numbers come out of this, although it may not be a huge difference but rather one that adds up over time.

Web Analytics, AWstats Analytics, Adwords analytics | No Comments »