The $10,000.00 experiment with ppc Part 1

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This is the featured advertiser on ShoeMoney. Put your company here!


The background:

I have been working on this post off and on for a long time. It was really hard to write. I want to talk about my experience but at the same time I want to be in compliance with all TOS so please consider all numbers I mention not as fact. Also please do not consider or act on any niches or keywords I mention without doing your own research first. (also dont drive up my bids!).

Ok so in mid Jan I noticed my CPC INCOME from contextual revenue rose to about 3$ a click. At first I figured it was some company blowing there budget or some newb. But it did not go down. Day after day it even went up and down 3-5$ range. Just for grins we will say this website is in the “ringtone” industry. Now after almost a full month I started wondering how in the world someone is actually making money off of paying me that much per click. Especially considering they are budgeting 15-20% for clickfraud and then whatever for marketflux then that means they are actually spending perhaps as much as 6-10$ respectively per click.

The Training:

My friend Todd Malicoat has this cool Adwords Professional logo on his website and I always thought it would be cool if I had one of those. Also perhaps it would teach me about how this cpc industry could be so profitable. I enrolled in the Adwords Professional Certification program and learned very quickly there was much more to this industry then just writing a ad. After 2-3 days I had finished all the tutorials and was doing ok with the practice quiz’s on Googles site. Now I needed to spend 1,000$ (or manage) on Adwords so I could meet the requirements of the Adwords Professional Program.

I already had a relationship with cj.com and Azoogleads and CJ.com for ringtone affiliates so I made landing pages for those much like this site. I then created my ads on Adwords and put a budget of 100$ a day. The first day I only made 25$ and spent the full 100$. OUPS…. Well back to those Adwords tutorials! So after a few hours of research a few things were very apparent in the ringtone industry.

  1. Nextel users cant use any of these “No Charge Ringtone Offers”
  2. International users cant use an of these offers.

Lucky for me these were 2 things I could immediately correct. I now targeted only the united states and used Nextel as a negative keyword. This means that if I had broad match for “ringtones” it would match for Sprint ringtones, Cingular ringtones, Tmobile ringtones but it would not match for Nextel ringtones.

After editing my campaign I now was ready to rock again! The 2nd day I spent 100$ and made 85$ uggggg closer…. I guess….. Man there is a lot to this! Now it was time to re-evaluate my bids. For those who do not know you bid on keyword terms. The price of the bid is determined by what others are paying mixed with the “quality score” of your ad. Now I was spending almost 2$ per click and was close to breaking even… if I could just get that own a bit I might even make a profit on my quest to become a Adwords Certified Professional! I started doing some research on these phones and figured out which ones actually could accept ringtones. For instance there are MANY PHONES that can’t accept ringtones and there for those people are a waste to show these ads to. So I hit up various cellular phone forums and tried to figure out what phones were popular and could accept ringtones. I assembled a list pretty fast and then wrote ads and picked keywords to target these specific phones. One of these phones is a “Razr”. Checking inventory.overture.com we can see what terms are popular for the razr phone. Now keep in mind you are not supposed to bid on any trademark terms… allegedly… however I was able to get most of my bids approved that were for copyrighted and trademarked terms.

For instance “black motorola razr v3″ is a pretty searched for term. So now I created a ad like this:

example Adwords ad

Now my quality score was super high cause it was targeted with the keyword section I was after. With a bid of .35 for this I was in first place… WOW. I then devoted about 8 hours to doing nothing but writing custom ads for each keyword set. Sometimes even writing multiple ads for keywords. The next day I spent $45 and grossed $65!! WAHOOOO now we are on to something. I made a profit without even hitting my $100/day budget. The next few weeks I let this roll and see what happened. I spent $1400 and made almost $2000. There must be something to this after all….

Guess what? I have successfully managed my account for 90 days and spent over $1000 so now I was eligible to take the Adwords professional test!

Did I pass ? Of course!

What was learned ?

Was there money in this ringtone affiliate stuff ? Absolutely…

Now What

So did I want to make a real run with ppc ? I had talked to my friend Jenstar and other people and they thought I should give it a ago! Ok So now what?

Better payout – Now on the affiliate side I switched from cj to Azoogle and was able to get a higher payout for each ringtone offer almost across the board. Generally it was 25% better. This should be better roi.. It was the same offers but now with better payout. The downside with azoogle was there reporting is a little weak. Its really hard to track your individual ads. The upsides is the payouts are much better and the reporting was totally realtime. Plus Azoogle does wire transfers with pretty fast payouts… ok so that is settled.

More Search terms – Even at my peak I wasnt reaching my budget. I needed to research and right more ads. I found that writing ads and using search terms for specific artists was working really well. Like eminem ringtones and etc….

Other PPC engines – I am going to try Adwords, MSN Adcenter, Yahoo Search Marketing and AdBrite. Based on the data from Adwords I figured $10,000 apiece would be a good amount to spend to test.

Here goes nothing (to be continued)

149 thoughts on “The $10,000.00 experiment with ppc Part 1”

  2. Bulbboy

    TO BE CONTINUED!!
    Come on Shoe, you;ve been taking tips from LOST again haven’t you.
    I have to wait for the next series AND the next part of this test.
    I guess patience is a virtue.

  4. shandyking

    This really is a great post Jeremy. I look forward to reading the continuation. Google Adwords Professional offers great tutorials. I am surprised not many people talk about it.

  5. av1

    you should add an adwords referer button at the end of this article.. to compensate the losses from razr ringones keyword everybody is going to bid on ;)

  6. GoingRank

    Thanks, look forward your next post with the results of the experiment. I want cool graphs and pie charts and stuff!… No, just post man we have been waiting to hear about this from you for ages!

  8. TheHoff

    Great post, shoe. I’ve always depended on natural search and IBLs, so seeing someone in the same position go through the learning curve with PPC will be amazingly educational and money-saving.

  9. Mark1

    I just wander why I’m drooling like a dog over a juicy bone, reading your post… ;-P
    Man ,a couple more of posts like this one and you are going to win the “freaking best blog of the year” award, I can tell you!

    It was just about time to show the various “gurus” selling their patethic e-books, what people really want to read.

    You are giving away a lot of knowledge for free, but rest assured the return will be well worth it.

  10. Cygnus

    Very nice Shoemoney — welcome to PPC profiteering.

    BTW, I’d be curious to see if you can break even on Adbrite…I sure didn’t.

  11. dillsmack

    Great info. I think you’re crazy for giving away what most people woud keep very close to the chest. I hope you don’t play poker.

  12. Aaron

    Sorry, I am newbie. How do you make money when you give ringtones for free? I must be missing something.

    Thanks,

  14. greg

    ya know what shoemoney, it’s not your skills that make this such an awesome blog … it’s your willingness to just tell the world your experiences … so few ever give out the level of details that you do. i always enjoy reading your comments as they are useful in an avenue of the web that is bloated with crap, lies, half truths and secrets.

  15. jawinn

    Another winner. Thanks for clearing up some of the questions I had from your SEO Rockstars interview. I can’t wait until the next season of the $40,000 experiment!

  19. Ken Savage

    There’s nothing else out there for free that can help with AW?
    Don’t make me chant your name to get some answers.
    SHOE! SHOE! SHOE! SHOE!

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  25. Pay Per Click Guy

    Yes, this was quite an interesting blog thread.
    I also do this for a living.
    Guys and girls, shoeMoney has big cohones and all power to him. But it is possible to do this on a 5 dollar a day budget. 100 is almost overkill, which is probably why he never reached it.

    To do this on a 5 dollar a day budget, let G**gle know that u will start with 20 dollars, then after a couple hours start tuning the budget down until u get to 5. Also, u will be looking for 10-20 cent bids in niche ringtone areas that include at least 4 maybe 5 words.

    These are bid on a whole lot less frequently and you should be able to maintain a number 7 or 8 position with a well written quality ad.

    Btw, ShoeMoney is quite brilliant. He came and blogged an outdated entry on one of my 20 sites – which is how i tracked him back to here.

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  31. Andrew Goodman

    Well Shoemoney, I have to hand it to you. You know how to make a profit on affiliate ads… *after* quality score made it harder?

    As you may know, my group works for clients and we really don’t do any affiliate stuff. I am particularly bad at it, though I’ve studied it.

    Check this out: I ran an experiment for three months and spent $10,000 and made $6,000 back. That’s right, I lost $4k! Hell, I wouldn’t want my company to be too profitable now would I? I did learn a lot of things about search behavior on a wide variety of product categories, so $4k worth of market research wasn’t wasted.

    It seems that you have studied all the key elements: in particular, zoning in on where the “payout” is favorable, but also testing ads & landing pages.

    I’d also wager that if you’re that good at this stuff, it would be a *lot* more profitable doing this for big-budget advertisers directly. The affiliate game is only going to get harder going forward, I would guess.

  32. Joe Hunkins

    Great stuff Shoemoney – thanks for the play by play. A few years ago I’d experimented wildly and non-scientifically in Travel sector and came to the conclusion that I could not get a positive ROI.

    However, based on talking to folks in Boston who seem to make it work I think your/their carefully crafted and targeted approach is the way to go. Not clear to me though that PPC time is better spent than generating new content.

    (I’m currently running an experiment with Enhance on a $1500 PPC spend – no info yet)

  33. John Gall

    Wow, that was the best affiliate post i’ve seen. I’ve done OK with PPC and Ford Direct but have not gotten into the details of why conversions might not happen. Perhaps its time I looked further into my other programs to see what limits there might be on my clickers and increase my ROI. Thanks much for the info.

  34. Todd

    Great job!!!

    I’ve been considering getting into buying some adwords for quite a while now. With this story, it looks like something I will be doing a lot sooner!

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  36. Chuck

    Dude, he’s right. Google has a TON of documentation that tells you what you need to know. It’s just a matter of reading it all. After that the process he describes is pretty basic. Make more money on your affiliates than you pay in ad cost. Even he didn’t get it right at first.

  37. Peter

    All i can say, STAY AWAY from yahoo search marketing, first of all it`s a pain in the a** to get listings accepted, and today i had an really beautiful and nice support member, that acceptet my keyword “ringtones” but only after changing MY ad text to something totally stupid like “Links to download ringtones” with an stupid description.

    then he thought “ah i`m such a nice guy, i`ll turn his campaign live for him”

    So i ended up with an totally fucked up ad title and description, and an bid for the 4th position with about $0.8

    My only luck was that i looked approx. an half hour later in my account and saw this bullshit so i managed it to stop this campaign.

    I`m not sure how much this will be going to cost me, but i`m sure more than $60 just for some stupid supportmember.

    I mean how dumb and unprofessional someone has to be, to change an well written adtext of an customer and then turn his campaign live, without any permission?

    That was my story of the day and the only thing i can tell you guys, when you do ppc on yahoo, don`t add keywords to new categories that do not exist already, so you always can turn that campaign off, wait until all keywords are acceptet or not and then switch back online.

    Yahoo is the most worst and unprofessional company i ever worked with.

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  43. Roy

    Glad to hear you have figured out making $$ from Ringtones! If you are interested in making more, send me an email and we can chat.We can create your own brand and power it for you so you will own the subscriber and get recurring revenue each month. So you would do the same as now, but instead of a 1 off payment, you would get recurring monthly payments. roy.ferman@mobilemessenger.us

  44. mile

    Dude,

    I just found your site – u r awesome!
    Even for someone like me who manage the site with 2M hits a day for living, and run sites/blogs as a hobby (2-3,000$/mo recent months profit) – there are plenty of USABLE INFO!

    Thanks – Shoe – we speak your name

  45. Nick Desmedt

    Hi Shoemoney,

    Very interesting experiment. I think I’m gonna have a look a the ringtone market, it seems there is still a lot of money to be made there.

    Greetz Everybody

    Smetten

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  53. Andrew Metcalfe

    Very interesting article. We have just started our own ringtone website: http://www.justringring.com
    It seems that we need to get people working as affiliates for us. Our ringtones are limited to simple, business type ringers but I think that there is a market there as people can’t all have the loudest of the world’s divas starting off in a meeting or office environment!!!

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  62. Stephen Ralph

    Good stuff Jeremy. Maybe it’s time I got off my duff and got a cool badge to stick on my site! Much continued success to you in your business and personal endeavors.

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  73. -G-

    Good job, Shoe! I don’t understand how you got trademarked terms approved by search engines. Isn’t that not allowed per terms of most PPC engines and affiliates?

  74. G

    Good job Shoe! I don’t understand how you got trademarked terms approved by PPC Engines. Isn’t bidding on trademark terms not allowed per terms of PPC Engines and affiliate networks?

  75. Blogs for Money

    For instance “black motorola razr v3″ is a pretty searched for term. So now I created a ad like this:

    Google supports something called “Dynamic Keyword Insertion” that would allow you to have that text put into your ad dynamically. And if you bid on the same term with “red” instead, and someone searched, they’d see Red in the ad!

    I wrote an article on this a while ago:

    http://blogsformoney.com/post/Using-Dynamic-Keyword-Insertion-in-your-Google-Adwords-Ads.aspx

  77. Blogs for Money

    Google seems to allow some – I suspect either their database is very under-populated, or they only add trademarks when people complain about them – since some affiliate companies might not mind their affiliates bidding on thier name/terms

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  82. Affiliate Marketer

    This brings me back to the old days. I used to rely entirely on PPC for my income… I actually had a lot of success with it but… I really hated all of “up keep” it takes. The constant monitoring … I prefer SEO these days. But I know I should still be in the PPC game too.

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  89. G

    Support told me that advertisers are allowed to bid on trademark terms but can’t use the trademark terms in the ad, even with the dynamic keyword insertion it won’t work.

  92. Eric Lander

    Unbiased information like this is what makes blogs successful. Trying (and sometimes failing) is one thing… But telling the world your straight up experience is incredibly valuable. I’m a n00b with paid search, and this alone serves as a great resource for me.

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  107. Simlock verwijderen

    Nice to read about this. My income is only based on PPC campaigns. But I am too scared to spend $10,000 while I don’t know if I will get this back in revenue. Enfin, nice test man. I learned a lot from it. And I will do my Adwords test too and maybe I am then an Adwords Professional :P

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  120. PC Money Secrets

    Great stuff. I read a 300 page book and purchased various ebooks and have learned much more with less reading here. You’re incredible and a rare find on the net. Keep the information coming!

  121. PC Money Secrets

    I forgot to say that I learned everything here in much more detail <strong<for free.
    Everyone wants to sell he idea of how to make money but you’ve actually given examples and resources. Just wow.

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  129. Simba

    I am a newbe,civil engineer by profession but I am really catching up with the tide.Am on the second week of the affiliate study and its really fantastic.

    Thanks

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  133. Evelyn Sanchez

    My dream is to win the $10,000.00 money because i one to got my son and me my house, because we rent a house got a 1bedroom

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  147. SEO

    I’m trying to get in the habit of, you know, picking up a book and learning how to write my feelings down, not my feelings but my thoughts, about things, and hopefully I’ll moving toward the writing and directing thing soon.

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