10k ppc experiment part2
This is a second and final post to my experiment with pay per click engines. This is mostly based on my theories and social engineering. Please make sure you do your own research before jumping into PPC. For a smarter approach to ppc check out graywolfs excellent series called Adsense Arbitrage:
Final Target Acquisition:
So I feel somewhat comfortable with Adwords but I still felt that I could get more bang for my buck… well more buck for my buck to be technical. So I started doing some research more research. What is it that we are selling? Well in order for a Ringtones ad to “convertâ€? a user has to put in there phone number then they are text messaged a pin code they must enter into a site. This I a very nice 2 step process for a payout unlike some other things. Who is most likely to freely give out there phone number? Ya… your kids.
So we know we can already eliminate Nextel because they cant use any of the Ringtones offers were are doing. Now lets look at some further demographics of our targets. After doing a quick Google search we see that the average age of cellular phone users is 21. Also you can see that Verizon Wireless customers are very choosy and like to shop around. I attribute this to the fact the have the oldest userbase in the industry with an average user age of 25. In my mind this makes them not such a good target. The next highest age on average is Sprint with an average age of its users being 23. Sprint also has the 2nd most corporate clients behind Nextel which makes them (in my opinion) less likely to submit there phone number to a website for some “No Charge� Ringtones.
So I am going to target Cingular and T-mobile users. Cingular in my opinion is the best demographic to target. They have an average age of 19 years old. T-Mobile is VERY close with an average age of 19.5.
Now I check this data with the data from my previous conversions:
Cingular: 38%
Tmobile: 34%
Sprint: 25%
Verizon 18%
This is just going off of my previous Adwords data this means that for every 10 Cingular people that are clicking on my ad I am converting 1.8 For Tmobile 1.7 and you can guess the rest.
So if the offer pays 15$ and I have an 18% conversion that means I am Grossing 2.70 cents per click. For 38% I am grossing 5.70 cents per click.
So now we have some numbers to work with. Lets move on before my head explodes.
Adwords: I run all offers on only the Google network. I do not run on any content network (ask.com earthlink. etc) I just find that I get a bad return on those. I am sure they work fine for other niches but for me its not doing it. For the most part with Adwords I set my bids and had a max budget of 300$/day. Fire and forget. I stayed strong on my Adwords bids. I have data that shows what I need to spend to convert so there really is no guesswork involved. If the bid goes up then I am not showing ads. If it comes down then my ads are in full effect.
CPM Targeting for the win… Here is a dirty secret. CPM target sites where the only good content is the AdSense ad. Here is the deal… with AdSense lets say it costs you 6$ to be #1 for Verizon Ringtones for search results… but ohh wait, what is this??Why it’s the #1 ORGANIC Google result for the phrase “Verizon Ringtones� and it only costs me 10$ CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions or roughly 1 cent per impression). Since this ad is really the only relevant content it converts REALLY WELL.
In general site targeting these sites is a really good investment. These guys only build these sites for 1 reason… to get AdSense clicks and the other dirty secret about them is they convert really well because the user gets exactly what they were searching for. The key to finding them is just searching on various search engines. Google for the most part does not feel these sites should get good organic listing but that does not mean that they are not making money off of MSN and Yahoo ranking these sites high. Make sure you search them also for these kinds of sites.
Yahoo Search Marketing:
Yahoo Search Marketing was quite a bit more fire and forget then Adwords. I did not have to write 80 million ads to get my quality score up and this was really pretty simple. I scraped about 15,000 terms up using overture inventory, Google suggest and some other tools around the net for anything related to “Ringtones�. I went ahead and approved any bid that it said cause I was going to edit them later…. MISTAKE!!! I had stayed up all until 5am to get all these terms in and it said it would take up to 3-5 days to approve them… well crap. I am going to bed. Then I wake up and they were approved and I burned through about 1800$ DOH. Some clicks were as high as 8$!!! I did get some return on my investment but my first day of yahoo was a bummer due to my lack of foresight. I now have set my daily budget to 300$ and also adjusted all my approved bids to 13 cents. Amazingly enough I got a decent amount of traffic from this that was converting. I really like yahoos placement targeting where you can specify where you want to be placed. I choose to be in position 3 and while that made my average cost go up about 600% I also got a TON more exposure.
Over all I was surprised at the lack of features with Yahoo Search Marketing. I mean these guys have been doing this the longest right? (Formally known as overture) That’s what I thought anyway… I hate having to wait DAYS to see if my listings get approved… and also I found the editing of listings to really suck. If I wanted to change something even if it was the website address it almost always got denied… They defiantly have some improving to do.
MSN AdCenter:
Ok positives first… MSN is by far the cheapest place to buy clicks. You can get tons of good 5 cent clicks. Also the traffic seems to convert 3-4% better then any other PPC program I tested. Also with MSN I did not have to write assloads of ads. It was pretty much fire and forget.
The downsides to AdCenter:
* There is not much traffic… even for top phrases. I had set my budget on AdCenter to 300$/day and it never got close to that.
* Import/export really sucks… forget trying to mass import large-scale keyword lists. I ended up doing them about 100 at a time and that… sucked….
Adbrite:
Adbrite is really the true diamond in the ruff. You have to search for them a bit but you can find them pretty easy. I never paid more then 8 cents a click and got many clicks for around 2-3cents.
Adbrite is somewhat a different monster then the others. You pay on a time period based level for the most part so you want to encourage users to click on the ads as much as possible. Because it costs you the same. The goal for Adbrite is to get as many clicks as possible.
The Bottom Line:
Over all the 40k experiment turned out to be a really profitable experiment. I have tried not to focus too much on specific numbers because people always get so hung up on figures. In order to comply with the broad TOS seemed to be shared by most of these PPC engines I am not going to specifics. I will say that on the whole Adbrite performed by far the best bang for the buck. I will say that Adbrite performed the best profit wise and CPC wise. Also keep in mind that I only played in the Ringtones arena and my methodologies produce many different results then others.
In March using these 4 networks I budgeted $40,000.00 Of that $40,000.00 I was only able to spend $28,932.75 for a total gross return of $144,329.29 for the month of march from cj.com and azoogleads.com Ringtones affiliates. The last parting words I have is do your homework. Find out what you need to spend to make a profit then stand strong on your bids. I HIGHLY recommend not using any automated bidding software for PPC-> affiliate.
Good Luck!
Note: I was SUPER sick when trying to write this post and jacked up pretty good on cough meds. I will do follow up posts.
Thx shoe, nice post.
I disagree… but only out of spite.
Sheer poetry. A+++++++++.
Thanks for sharing this with us. Your risk is our reward!
BTW, glad to see you back in action. I was getting tired to seeing the “out sick :(” sign.
Great Info Shoe!!
True dat. Good post
thnx shoe,
ps. dont worry, its not the ringtone market 
i’ve been testing adwords since your last post and im already making money there
Great info Shoe! Thanks!
Wow, $29k into $144k, VERY nice. It just shows that with enough research anyone can make money with affiliate marketing.
Loved the post man.
Hey Jeremy,Hey Jeremy,
Thank you for posting this, this is a very refreshing blog because you share such valuable information that most people would guard fiercely.
Thank You for posting this, this is a very refreshing blog because you share such valuable information that most people would guard fiercley.
YSM (overture) is the worst. Having to wait 5 days for some ads to get approved is a bunch of bunk. I think its biased towards high bids anyways. If you set a max bid of $5, I guarantee your ads will be approved quicker than if you did 10 cents.
It almost makes sense to set an initial bid really high to push them thru the process, then lower them after the fact to what you really want. Otherwise, you will be like me, and wait 8 or 9 days on a bunch of keywords with a 12 cents/click.
Thank you so much for sharing! Great stuff. It’s probably the meds but “experiemnt”… Get well soon.
Thanks man!
Interestingly enough the ringtone market has gone up about 40% on the bids since my first post… I don’t think that was purely me! Possibly a ripple effect.
Nice job Shoe! MSN and AdBrite are still mysteries to me, so now I feel a little bit better about jumping into them.
I think these posts were great proof that you just need to try things out if you want to make money. There are so many people sitting around buying e-books and waiting for step by step instructions for making money. Screw the school mentalitiy, Get out there and start testing things out!
Wow shoe, thats some great profit there! great motivation.
Andrew - I FULLY agree!
Wow - I was thinking you were going to be making like a 15% - 20% profit - thats huge man.
Seriously Shoe, whats the reason you “Outed” this now instead of milking it for another 6 month or so?.
I see what you’re saying with Ad Brite… in the spirit of sharing secrets - i found a site with 70k daily pageviews selling ad space for 30 cents per day.. given the demographic… the site is crying for ringtone advertisers!
Whatspoppin.net on Adbrite
Maybe he’s going to pull a Graywolf.
You know, now that bids are starting to increase, push the lesser ringtone ads onto a more focused high CPC page loaded with Adsense and just milk the arbitrage instead.
Nah.
That is True Man
I work with adwords when G. Start adwords and I make big money on them
But thanks for share that
Thanks for taking the time to write this up Jeremy - much appreciated.
“Adwords: I run all offers on only the Google network. I do not run on any content network (ask.com earthlink. etc) I just find that I get a bad return on those. I am sure they work fine for other niches but for me its not doing it.”
Just curious, do you never use the content network, or are you just referring to this project and/or ringtones in general?
[...] The $10,000.00 experiment with PPC Part 1 10k PPC experiment Part2 [...]
Shoe,
How do you bypass the copyrighted terms policy of G?
If he tells you, it will not remain a secret.
Excellent topic and you covered it nicely. Adsense is indeed a huge player in the online advertising world and I believe any tips and guides are appreciated. Of course, while millions of publishers are running Adsense, only a handful are making serious money off it. As far as I’m concerned, the best way to make money with Adsense is to develop a website or blog on a niche topic that should also be something you are interested in. Hobby-related sites have the best chances of keeping you, as their webmaster, happy and involved, and this will soon show in the number of visitors and the amounts of money you make.
Best regards,
Mihai
[...] Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, as the name suggests, enables you to receive visitors to your website and only pay for each visitor. Your ad is displayed as sponsored results on other webpages based on a similar theme or on the search engine result pages themselves. PPC gives you highly targeted traffic interested in your specific service and enables you to start and stop a steady stream of traffic as and when you require it. Because you can choose the amount you pay for every visitor that clicks your link, you are also in control of the amount you spend on advertising in this method. You can find one of the most successful PPC experiments here. [...]
Awesome strory…
May i ask how much keywords you had in one adcategory in adsense? Only a few or thousands, hundreds, whatever?
And how much different Ads you wrote?
Thanks for sharing your very profitable experience with us .. I’ve been taking notes
- BTW .. could you have “outed” the dailyegyptian site you highlighted as #1 on organic G for the ringtone phrase? -They’re no longer in the index .. funny how that is !
You got burned witn Yahoo on $1800 - almost exactly the same thing happened to me when I first started using it - not my greatest day
i find this hard to believe. is it not an attempt to increase what people pay per click for ringtones…all of which u advertise on your sites?
[...] Shoemoney posts an interesting PPC experiement, the result of which was: “In March using these 4 networks I budgeted $40,000.00 Of that $40,000.00 I was only able to spend $28,932.75 for a total gross return of $144,329.29 for the month of march” [...]
Cheers Shoe! It’s great posts like this that keep me inspired, nice experiment and research. Adbrite was a suprise, great info.
Thank you, Jeremy!
I have a question - did you send traffic directly to the merchant’s page or to your own landing pages that contained affiliate ads? Thanks again!
[...] 4. The Blogger who wins the readers makes many calculations about his headlines before the post is written. The Blogger who loses Readers makes but few calculations beforehand and speaks constantly of himself. Thus do many calculations lead to success, and few calculations to failure: how much more so for no calculation at all! It is by attention to this point that one can foresee who is likely to win or lose Readers. [...]
Shoe, you articles on PPC and ringtones have helped out my fledgling
internet business tremendously.
We have started to have some success, but find that we are not getting
the maximum amount of traffic for Google and yahoo - we have about
50,000 keywords loaded up, and are using dynamic insertion in the ads to
improve relevancy.
The only thing I can see is that we may be getting a low QR for our
page (example):
http://ringtones.25×8mafia.com/?kw=bollywood_ringtones
we are converting at 2%, so the simplicity of the pages works. How did
you max out your traffic with a simple sales page? thanks for any
guidance you can share - your blog is great!
[...] Originally Posted by tshugo Can you explain what you mean by that? Maybe Shoemoney can better explain that? __________________ 400 Sports Logos Pack for $10 only [...]
I think i might have a look at this whole ringtone experiment, it seems there is still a lot of money to be made…
There is, self learning is the best learning.
We’ve seen how every wrongly calculated move could kill your online big product launch, tarnish your reputation, before you even get started! I’m echoing John Bowyer… So yes how do you put together all the components, from research to rolling out a campaign, from driving massive traffic to raking in the moolah, from client and affiliate support to followups and backends. Most of all, how do you go about doing testing and tracking in an organized, profitable way?
Next, how to have all these in place, ready to run in full efficiency, before you even begin? AND how to evolve this interlocked-system, in anticipation and preparation for the expected constant blur-speed market changes? THANKS!
Sorry about that, it was a wrong post, wheeze!
[...] Here is some good reading on this subject. Take note that shoemoney didn’t do so hot the first couple of times, but he learned and check out the payoff at the end! z_post_title=”$200 to get started with Microsoft adCenter for your contextual affiliate arbitrage”; z_post_category=”Affiliate News”; [...]
Cheers Shoe, thanks for the post
[...] PPC - I discovered Pay Per Click about 6 months ago when I set aside $40,000 to play with Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft Adcenter and Adbrite. I had ZERO prior experience with paid placement in search engines. If you missed my adventure you can check out this post here and the 2nd part here. [...]
We think Google and yahoo will get more traffic.
[...] Out of all the guru blogs out there, Shoemoney is probably one of the best. Unlike most other blogs, he will talk about specifics and give some good advice. [...]
[...] Shoemoney reports his ringtones love story. Give us a couple of ref links Jeremy! [...]
[...] Anyway a really interesting thing I came across was that this week I had pushed my 100,000 ringtone lead. Between the 18,278 we pushed in 2005 and the 1331 we have pushed so far in 2007 we have reached the 100,000 milestone. Its pretty amazing to think we have driven that many leads… especially when I think we did not even discover pay-per-click until april when we did the ringtone ppc experiments (see part1 and part2 ) and we have not done ANY ringtone really since last August. Those few months though sure were amazing….Now I think its fun to call myself the king of ringtones but seriously there are MUCH bigger players then me. Its no wonder why this is such a zillion dollar industry. [...]
Wow amazing series, part 1 and part 2. I have read the Super Affiliate Handbook, and Gooogle Cash but your experiments shed light on PPC in 2006. Very reavealing and enlightening. Those 2 books I just mentioned were a few years old and things change so fast online I wondered how relevant they were still. In any case you deserve every dollar you get, you give to the community and you get it back in 10 folds, well deserved!
And yes Yahoo does suck goat balls, I have been waiting 1 week for one of my keywords to get approved. Yahoo is very irritating, those lazy bastards over their need to wake up!
Great followup to what I just read. =)
It is just awesome. Not great.
[...] your bottom line negatively. Most of us publishers either do it currently (me, sadly), or have experimented with it at one time or another. I have no hard numbers here, but I would venture that most of the time (me, [...]
[...] online millionaires. Pay by phone allows website to charge people who can’t get credit cards. People like kids are the most likely to take advantage of these services sticking their parent with the bills. I was [...]
Very inspiring Shoe
I know this is an old post but I really enjoyed reading it!
Thanks for the insight.
Very good post , we only do experiment’s with 1000$ adsense , 10k$ PPC experiment might have helped you lot.
Great post - some very interesting ideas to consider for my next set of Adwords experiments!
Shoe, thank very much for letting me know about benefit of PPC, last month I spent 6 $ in adwords and get 12.4 $ only in adsense, i knew it is very small money but now i got enlight. and thank again your your adbrite advice almost miss it out with this PPC program
Well, ringtones affiliate , are they still alive ? or the market already saturated ?
both @ aditya
Ringtone market totally saturated…..I did like to invest in something new.
Very nice post. Of course the ringtone market is saturated, especially after this post.
*Looks for another niche*
“These guys only build these sites for 1 reason… to get AdSense clicks and the other dirty secret about them is they convert really well because the user gets exactly what they were searching for.”
this is pretty profound if you think about it. Honestly man. I wonder if the future of search will be based on ‘whoever pays more obviously has the best content else they wouldnt have the money to pay for it’
or maybe i am on crack
“Who is most likely to freely give out there phone number? Ya… your kids.”
LOL!
This is a great post. You obviously put a hell of a lot of time and effort into all this.
Setting up and monitoring pay per click campaigns is one thing I really hate and struggle with. And I suppose i will just have to be more persistent.
I wonder if ringtones have saturated from the market, along with copyrighted terms policy of Google i wonder how this work hand in hand.
I dont think they have yet, but after this post they probably have heh
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[...] 10k ppc experiment part2 [...]
with affiliate market i feel that it shooting the dark. a day i make 2 dales than sext 7 making no sales and burning money but the key is not give up.
Thanks for sharing this post with us
The market is saturated now, thanks for sharing Shoe. Im going to be trying some thing similar, lets see how that turns out.
heh if you try the market and the traffic now, you probably won’t get as far I guess. A lot of the market has gone into a chaos.
Information overload. Let me have my lunch first.
thats something to digest and put into action, top tips, thx
Great experiement, thanks.
Going to try out some of this myself in the near future. Not nearly with as much money as Shoe can throw around, but hopefully in time i will be at that level. Thanks for the info!
Inspiring post - have been working mostly with organic traffic, looking to use more PPC - thx!
Has it gotten easier or harder to make the same sums of money Shoe? You’d think easier considering the site is more established but somehow G keeps things in check, or at least something seems to.
Wow, high risk high return.. i’m trying also to convert one of my site to become an affiliate center.. i have thought of selling it after being struck by google and also to maybe install some other software to enhance it but after reading your post, i have decided to convert it into selling affiliate since it is already capturing organic search engine traffic
[...] Shoemoney’s $10k experiment part 1, part 2 [...]
I still don’t understand why always GROSS figures are mentioned. I am sure that you’ve got a lot more expenses on your sites that what you mention. Surely, all those moderators don’t do everything for free, right?
Would love an update, you can’t run a ppc campaign on google anymore with an artist nameor you’ll get a quick legal warning. Does anyone even search for “ringtones” ?
I actually tried making money in the ringtone market after reading this articles months ago….Failed miserably. Ahh well, a time and a place for everything, and that ship may have sailed.
Nice experiment but do you think that the ringtone market is pretty much saturated now?
Good post
Thanks for sharing.
hmm good.
thanks for share.I will do this tactic.
Interesting facts !
This a great experiment and good information to take into account when using any PPC.
Thanks,
B
Oh, also wanted to let you know a great adwords tool, the Google Assassin that can automate a lot of things when using adwords. This saves me tons of time and might help some people out in the process.
-B
Awesome post. Did some testing (of a small scale) on MSN and found that they really don’t have much traffic. Wish I’d read this first! Really great site.
Thanks,
Lory
I think Bidvertiser should not be overlooked. I used them and they are cheap and their results are ok.
My click-thru with them was a 1/10th of adsense. I like the $10 payout thresh-hold, but anyone else see that metric?
@ Domprofesor
I agree partial with your kind of view. First, the result are mainly good for those who have an American or English-related website. Because the most advertisers are english companies. Here in Holland I don’t make much money with Bidvertiser, becuase of the fact they don’t deliver enough money. There where Adsense gives me around $11 dollar a day, Bidvertiser delivers me around $2 a day. Not much as you can see.
Interesting experiment and useful results
About MSN, we’ve tried to advertise with them but the traffic was too low for keyword “blog” and I think this is a very very bad part.