GORILLA REPORT #1 PROMOTING NICHE CPA OFFERS WITH GOOGLE ADWORDS
DAVID SURK www.gorillareport.com
INTRODUCTION
This report is geared towards people who already have AdWords experience and hopefully understand the basics of CPA offers. What follows is a simple case study of an actual CPA campaign I was promoting using just Google AdWords. A friend of mine kept asking me for details on what I was doing exactly to profit from CPA offers and so the idea for this report was born. The CPA campaign shown in this report is an example of a solid performer in a underserved niche. It gave me a nice steady ROI. If I spent $100 in AdWords, the campaign would generate close to $200. The only downside to the campaign was a lack of volume. It still generated anywhere from $200-$400 a month in profits with very little intervention from me. While this is nothing compared to what you may have heard regarding people who make thousands of dollars promoting ringtones and such. This is an example of a realistic campaign that is much easier to replicate. The main thing you should try and get out of this report is how the whole process comes together. This is a general example of how most of my profitable campaigns unfold. Important - As you read this report you will notice affiliate links to certain products. I just want you to know that every product that is promoted in this report is something I actually use and fully endorse. They are quality products that have provided me with a real value.
If you are bothered by the fact that I am using an affiliate link for a particular product, please don't let that deter you from checking a product out. Just Google the product name and visit the page directly. I also want to point out that all tools mentioned in this report are not a requirement of any sorts. They just help you reduce the amount of time and effort to accomplish a task. Everything in this report can be done manually using a little elbow grease and free tools. It just will take more time. Lastly, I want to thank you for purchasing this report and I sincerely hope it provides you with valuable and useable information. Much love, Dave.
Part I – Choosing The Right CPA Offer
What I am going to write below is primarily directed towards simple e-mail or zip submit offers. I’m focusing on email and zip submits because they are pretty easy to promote. The general rule of thumb when promoting CPA offers is that the less there is to fill out on a form the better. Many people I have spoke with who are new to promoting CPA offers all make the same mistake. They promote the wrong type of things. After promoting a bunch of different CPA offers something became pretty apparent. Some campaigns were much easier to profit from while others I had to really grind out. I noticed that if a CPA offer targeted people with specific characteristics and the offer itself met a certain criteria it was much easier to turn a profit. What I'm about to say may come off a bit sleazy but is true nonetheless. I’m not going to pussyfoot around with words. So here goes nothing… When looking for a CPA offer to promote, take some time to think about who the offer will appeal to. What qualities or personality traits might they have that you could work to your advantage?
Ask yourself, is the target audience for this offer… Vain? Trendy? Desperate? Overly emotional in general? You want a CPA offer that appeals to emotions that elicit impulsive responses. Other questions to ask are… Has this target market been bombarded with similar offers? Is the target market tech savvy? Do they pay attention to detail? You want to target people who won't really think too much about filling out a CPA offer. You're basically trying to target people who are a slightly naïve, impulsive and not very tech savvy that really want something for free. The next thing you need to consider is how believable the offer is on the whole. For example when I chose to promote the cosmetics offer detailed in this report I had to pick from three different CPA offers. There were two e-mail submits and one zip submit offers. Most people assume that given the choice between promoting a zip submit versus an email submit, you should choose the zip submit since it’s probably easier to get someone to give up their zip code compared to their e-mail address.
The zip submit was giving away $1000 in free cosmetics in contrast to the e-mail submit which was only offering $60 in free cosmetics. If you put yourself in the shoes of the consumer which offer are you more likely to believe? To be honest this isn't something that I've tested extensively it's just something that I've noticed by observation in multiple campaigns. The best thing to do is split test both offers, but from my experience realistic sounding offers perform better. The cosmetics offer I choose to promote was for MAC Cosmetics. It was an email submit that paid 1.50 per lead. The affiliate network was COPEAC. If you’re not a member of COPEAC do yourself a favor and sign up. They’re a great network and really strive to help their affiliates. Click here to join COPEAC A few more things to consider when choosing a CPA offer… What does the landing page of the CPA offer look like? Is it well designed or confusing? Does it look cheesy or somewhat official? These questions all relate to the believability factor of the offer. Lastly, when looking for a CPA offer to promote try and pick something that you don't commonly see promoted. Stay away from free iPods, Macy’s gift cards and other crap like that.
I'm not saying you can't make money in those markets. It’s just a lot easier if you focus where there is less competition and saturation. Try and pick markets that haven’t already been slammed with CPA offers. Here’s a small tip for those new to CPA promotions. Always be on the lookout for seasonal and time sensitive offers. Most CPA networks ad new offers on a regular basis. In general being the first to promote a new offer is good thing.
Part II – Choosing The Right Keywords
I'm not going to cover every aspect of keyword research, but I want to go over the specific methods I used to build the keyword list used in the Mac cosmetics example outlined in this report. Keyword research is a skill I am always trying to improve and can literally be the key to PPC success. There are two schools of thought predominant to PPC keyword research. 1. Use a large keyword list covering everything under the sun. 2. Use a small keyword list targeting buying phase keywords. Both methodologies work, but from my personal experience in promoting CPA offers, the larger the keyword list the better. Your best bet is to start with a medium sized list and grow and prune the list over time. Here are the specific techniques I used to build my initial keyword list. First, I looked at the common base keywords directly related to the CPA offer. These keywords were along the lines of "mac, mac cosmetics, mac cosmetic, mac makeup, mac make up" and so on. Then I started to look at the product specific base keywords like “mascara, eye liner, barbie, viva glam, eyeshadow" and so on. Let me explain things in a bit more detail‌
I consider base keywords any keyword that can be joined with other related keywords to make new keywords. To start building base keywords I first used the tools at Nichebot which allowed me to grab wordtracker and keyword discovery data all from one place (I pay like $9 a month). I personally feel Nichebot is the best value period when it comes to keyword research tools. If you have never checked Nichebot out, do yourself a favor and click here. Next I went to the Mac cosmetics home page and looked through their product catalog and made a list of specific product names and product types. For example, viva glam is a specific product name while mascara is a product type. Once I had both lists finished I made sure I also had some important keyword variations. These included plural and singular keywords as well as any alternate spellings and joined phrases. Here's an example, Plural - mac cosmetics Singular - mac cosmetic Joined - maccosmetic, maccosmetics A quick note about joined keywords - these keywords can be some of your most profitable words. Do not take them lightly. Many of these types of keywords have very little competition but still get traffic. When you get the hang of creating these types of keywords you can start with a few base words and build a ton of variations. Some of these joined words can also become new base keyword themselves.
Example, mac eyeshadow mac eyeshadows mac eye shadow mac eye shadows maceyeshadows maceyeshadow mac cosmetics eyeshadow mac cosmetics eye shadow mac cosmetics eyeshadows mac cosmetics eye shadows maccosmetics eyeshadow maccosmetics eye shadow mac cosmetic eyeshadow mac cosmetic eye shadow mac cosmetic eyeshadows mac cosmetic eye shadow mac makeup eyeshadow mac makeup eye shadow mac make up eyeshadow mac make up eye shadow macmakeup eyeshadow macmakeup eye shadow
macmake up eyeshadow macmake up eye shadow I left out some variations which you should be able to spot if you look carefully at the list above. Let’s continue... When you create your starting set of base keywords take note of which ones get a good amount of traffic. These higher traffic keywords can go through another process of transformation to create even more great keywords. For example the keyword "mac make up", basic keyword joining gives us the following. mac make up macmakeup mac makup macmake up Now we can take this new set of keywords and turn them into domain variations. Lots of people search Google by typing out keywords formatted like domain names. They assume that a keyword is an actual website. For example, using the keywords above we could create the following additional keywords. www.macmakeup.com www.mac make up.com
www.mac makeup.com wwwmacmakeupcom www macmakeup com macmakeup.com mac make up.com mac makeup com www.macmakeup www.mac makeup www macmakeup http://www.macmakeup.com http://www.mac makeup.com http://www.macmakeup http://www.mac makeup http:// www.macmakeup.com As you can see you can pretty crazy with this. I do want to say that the majority of these funky keyword variations will probably get very little traffic. But when you combine lots of keywords that all get a little bit of traffic you end up with a nice amount of combined traffic. This is how a large keyword list can end up paying big. Creating, joining and transforming keywords can be a major pain in the ass. But I have found one tool that reduces the amount of work tremendously in every way possible.
For example, you can enter a base keyword and hit a single button and it will create just about every type of domain variation for that keyword instantly. It also handles joining keywords, building ad groups, etc. The program is called SpeedPPC. It saves me a ridiculous amount of time and effort. I consider it a must have if you are serious about PPC and it's within your budget. You can read more about the program and watch some killer video demonstrations by clicking here. Let’s continue with more domain related keyword goodness. Next I build a keyword list around actual domain names. First I take the actual product website which in this case is maccosmetics.com and run it through SpeedPPC's domain mixer tool. For example, SpeedPPC created the entire list below in under 1 second just from the keyword “maccosmetics”. http ww maccosmetics http ww maccosmetics com http ww maccosmetics.com http ww maccosmeticscom http www maccosmetics http www maccosmetics http www maccosmetics.com http www maccosmeticscom http://ww.maccosmetics
http://ww.maccosmetics com http://ww.maccosmetics.com http://ww.maccosmeticscom http://www.maccosmetics http://www.maccosmetics com http://www.maccosmetics.com http://www.maccosmeticscom maccosmetics maccosmetics com maccosmetics.com maccosmeticscom ww maccosmetics ww maccosmetics com ww maccosmetics.com ww maccosmeticscom ww.maccosmetics ww.maccosmetics com ww.maccosmetics.com ww.maccosmeticscom wwmaccosmetics wwmaccosmetics com wwmaccosmetics.com wwmaccosmeticscom www maccosmetics www maccosmetics com www maccosmetics.com www maccosmeticscom www.maccosmetics www.maccosmetics com
www.maccosmetics.com www.maccosmeticscom wwwmaccosmetics wwwmaccosmetics com wwwmaccosmetics.com wwwmaccosmeticscom Next I look for more websites that appeal to the same target audience. To do this I leverage free information provided by 2 powerful websites. 1. http://www.quantcast.com/ 2. http://www.alexa.com/ Both these sites provide some really potent information. Quantcasts information can be extremely powerful. What you want to do on these sites is look up the domain of the product you want to promote and see what other sites the target audience visits. For example when you type www.maccosmetics.com in the quantcast.com search box you get a page like the one shown below. (It’s kind of hard to make out the details in the screen shot unless you increase the page zoom. It may be easier to just visit Quantcasts website and type in the domain for yourself.)
Do you think you could come up with more domain names to bid on after looking at the information above? Now if we type maccosmetics.com in Alexa and click on the link called "related sites" we get a list of even more domains we could use as part of our campaign.
There is some cross over between the sites in the information they provide, but I still like checking both. One of the sites I found using this method that brought a nice amount of traffic was www.Sephora.com. They are a well known retailer for high quality cosmetics. So those are the core techniques I use for building my initial keyword list. I also add misspellings for high volume keywords as well as general synonyms.
There are other ways to generate more keywords. But the methods I mentioned above work well for me on a regular basis. Keyword research is one skill I am always trying to improve. It’s one of the few ways you can still get an edge over the competition. If you’re serious about using typos and misspellings (there is a difference between the two) as part of your keyword research, you should really check out the book called Typo Gold. The method outlined in this book is pretty ingenious yet very simple. The book is from Jaclyn Easton & Alexis Dawes. You can read more about Typo Gold by click here.
Part III- The Landing Page For most CPA campaigns I promote I create my own landing page that acts as a "go between" for the actual offer page. The reason for this is simple; I want Google to give me a good quality score to bring down my bid prices. While I hear people say you can get around this using various tricks and scripts. I just create a 10 page minisite to go along with my landing page using PLR articles and maybe a little public domain content. To build the actual site I use SEO Website Builder from Dr. Andy Williams. SEO Website Builder makes it easy for me to do some basic SEO to the site while I'm putting it together. The reason I perform some minor SEO when I build the site is to make the site look as legit as possible to Google even if I’m using duplicate content. Does this make much difference? I don’t know, but it doesn’t take me very long so I do it anyway. For the site content I use whatever PLR I have on hand, but most of the time I use PLR from Article Underground. For additional content I use material from Wikipedia, press releases, media kits, etc. Here is what the sites end up looking like,
For the actually landing page itself I first check if there is a banner for the CPA offer provided by the affiliate network. If there is one, I beef it up a little with my own personal touches and stuff it inside a basic template. Here’s the landing page I used for this campaign.
IMPORTANT – The following information is designed to increase the believability factor of a CPA offer. The tactics used are a bit "shady". It’s up to you how you want to use the following information. Let’s talk a little about domain names. Since we are creating our own landing pages to improve our quality score, why don’t we take things a step further and host our landing pages on a highly relevant domain. Besides wanting our domain to be relevant, we want our domain to resemble an "official" site or the actual merchant’s site. Many of you may already be familiar with the domain name trick involving a dash character. Advertisers use to make it appear as if they are the official site merchant site. It looks something like this, www-microsoft.com The full url for the site above is really http://www.www-micrsoft.com, but since displaying the www portion of a url in your AdWords ad is optional you can make yourself appear as an official site with a little domain name trickery. There is another domain naming trick that you may have never seen before that also works pretty well in giving your site an “official” looking domain. Take a look at this domain name, microsoft.com-updates.info
Do you see what’s going on here? This is a .info domain that looks like a .com. The actual registered domain in the example above would be com-updates.info, the microsoft part is just subdomain that you create. Heck by just registering comupdates.info you could have a bunch of urls that look pretty damn official. apple.com-updates.info firefox.com-updates.info microsoft.com-updates.info xbox.com-updates.info Obviously some people will notice something strange with the url, but many people will think the site is legit. For the Mac cosmetics campaign I used comfreeoffer.info The actual url displayed in the AdWords ad was, Maccosmetics.com-freeoffer.info A better choice for this campaign would have been com-samples.info. This would have looked like, Maccosmetics.com-samples.info
Now I want talk about making your landing page more personalized to the actual visitor and to Google so they give you a better quality score. For each CPA offer I create a single landing page, but that single page will look like multiple landing pages specific to every individual keyword. You can do this really easy with SpeedPPC by adding a small snippet of php code to your landing page. For example, the headline on my landing page that appears for anyone who clicks on the AdWords ad displayed for the keyword "mac cosmetics" looks like this, Get your FREE MAC Cosmetics kit A $60 value - Ends soon
But if the person arrived at my landing page using the phrase "mac make up" They would see the following, Get your FREE MAC Make Up kit A $60 value - Ends soon
You obviously don’t want to do this for misspellings and domain related keywords. Is there anything SpeedPPC can’t do?
This next tactic I'm going to explain kicks some serious ass. Yes its a bit sneaky but it can have a nice impact on your campaign performance. If you look at the screenshot below look take notice of the text that says,
ATTENTION - This Offer Is For Boston And Surrounding Locations!
Now look at this screen shot of the same exact page but with one MAJOR difference, ATTENTION - This Offer Is For New York And Surrounding Locations!
These are both the same exact landing pages, but the text "ATTENTION - This Offer Is For New York And Surrounding Locations!" changes to match the geographical vicinity of the person visiting the web page. So if you where from Atlanta Georgia, the text would read “ATTENTION - This Offer Is For Atlanta And Surrounding Locations!"
This is done by using a geotargeting script that looks at the visitors IP address and then displays their location anywhere on your webpage. You can do a lot of cool things with this script. In this particular case I made it seem as if a CPA offer is only available in a selected area, like a special promotion of sorts. I first learned of the script in Dan Raines membership site the Immediate edge. He provides a copy of the script and gives all members a special license key that is needed to access the geo targeting database. The only problem with Dan's script is every so often his database goes offline and the script doesn’t work. A quick note about Dan's membership site - This guy is the real deal and holds nothing back. What I love about his content is that it’s all taught using fully disclosed live case studies. He always has real world examples to back up anything he’s teaching. I highly recommend checking his site out even for just 1 month, here’s a link.
Part IV – AdWords Specifics
I'm going to assume you already know the basics of setting up an AdWords campaign and things like that. If not you need to read something to bring you up to speed fast. First I create a single ad group for each keyword unless it's a domain name or misspellings. With domain name variations and misspellings I bunch these up into tight groups. For example, all the keywords below would be part of a single ad group. http://www.maccosmetics.com http://www.maccosmeticscom maccosmetics com maccosmetics.com maccosmeticscom ww maccosmetics ww maccosmetics com Using a single ad group per keyword is a must for me. It's much easier to track what keywords are profitable. It's also easier to get a good quality score and improve your ctr since each ad group has ad copy tailored to a specific keyword. Again this may seem like a lot of work, and I'm almost tired of bringing this tool up. But SpeedPPC makes it super easy and super fast to create your AdWords campaigns with individual ad groups for each keyword.
Now I want to go over 3 features within AdWords I used to improve my ctr that are really easy to setup. 1. Ad Scheduling - Google gives you the option to have your ad’s appear only at certain times of the day and certain days of the week. This is such a simple feature that can easily boost your ctr. From your Google AdWords account you want to create a report that that will show you what times of the day you’re getting impressions and clicks. For example, there were quite a few hours late at night that where dragging my ctr down. I was getting impressions but a low click thru. This pattern was consistent over 7 days. Once I noticed it I just stopped having my ad's appear between 1 am and 6 am. That in turn gave me a nice little ctr boost since I wasn’t racking up useless impressions. 2. Negative keywords - You want to build a negative keyword list right from the start and keep adding to it over time. When first building my keyword list using Nichebot, I looked through the results to spot any oddball words that wouldn’t make sense for the promotion. For example I noticed the phrase "mac cosmetics history" appeared in my keyword list, so I just added the word "history" to my negatives list. I also had a bunch of keywords related to apple computers I added to my negatives. 3. Position preferencing - This AdWords feature lets me tell Google what positions I want my ad’s to appear in. I didn’t use this for every keyword but there were certain words and phrases that I wanted to maintain a certain placement for. You do have to have a high enough bid for this to take effect.
As for the ad copy I used in this campaign it was all pretty standard. The campaign CTR was in the 2-3% range. The best performance I got was when my ad’s had specific details. For example,
Another thing about the ad is the context I used to “sell” the CPA offer. I tried to make it sound like I was offering free samples. It all comes back to believability, the goal was to make it seem like the offer was an official promotion of sorts. I also want to mention that I did try some site targeting when promoting this CPA offer. This is what I did. I took all base keywords with a decent level of traffic and put them into a piece of software called Site Sniper Pro. What Site Sniper Pro does is take a list of keywords and searches Google, Yahoo and MSN looking for all pages within the natural search results that are websites displaying AdSense ad’s. If a website has AdSense on its pages you could actually pay to have your ad appear on that site using Google’s site targeting feature. In this case I wasn’t targeting whole websites just the specific pages that showed up in the natural results for my set of keywords.
For example, a person searching for "mac eyeshadow" could click on the #1 result in Google and if that website had AdSense on the page I could put up an ad for "free mac eyeshadow" right on that specific page. I only played around with this strategy a little bit, but it definitely showed promise. At the time Google only allowed you to site target on a CPM basis. That means you pay not for clicks but per 1000 impressions. On some sites I was getting clicks at around 5-7 cents (based on avg CPM) while on other sites. On the whole my avg CPC for the entire site targeted campaign was 14 cents. My avg CPC for this campaign with normal AdWords ad’s was around 20 cents. Site targeting is a whole different ball game, but it's worth investigating. The traffic was decent. It converted at a .75-1% CTR, which was ok but not as good as straight up AdWords. Next time I try site targeting I’m going to go after general demographics instead of specific words. For example, I wonder how the campaign would have performed if I targeted sites related to beauty and fashion in general...
Part V – Tracking
To make money on a regular basis with CPA campaigns you have to test and track. Tracking what keywords are profitable and which keywords are not can literally make the difference between making a few hundred bucks or losing a few hundred bucks. Becoming profitable promoting CPA offers with PPC is all about tracking and crunching numbers. Figuring out what keywords are making you money and which are costing you money is pretty simple if you have the right tools. I personally use a php script called Xtreme Conversions for all my tracking needs. How it works is you add a bit of php code to the top of your landing page and then a small snippet of code to the end of your affiliate link. After you have had a campaign running for a few days (or however long it takes to get some decent data) you need to do a couple of things. First you need to find out how the CPA network you’re promoting handles appended tracking data. With COPEAC they allow you to attach tracking ids or actual keywords at the end of the of the affiliate link. I personally don't like the idea of exposing which keywords convert best for me to any affiliate network. With Xtreme conversions you don't have to display any actual keywords to your affiliate network. Every time someone hits your landing page and clicks through a link, the script attaches a tracking id number to the end of the url.
The tracking id number is then passed on to the affiliate network every time someone completes the cpa offer. Inside Xtreme conversions the tracking id number is associated with a specific keyword. Now what you need to do is download the conversion data from your affiliate network. With COPEAC this data is provided as a CSV file under what’s called “optional info”.
Once you have the CSV data you simply log in to Xtreme conversions and compare the tracking id numbers shown in the CSV file to the keywords listed in Xtreme conversions. For example, say you notice in the CSV file that tracking id 117 is converting really well. You then look up the number 117 in Xtreme conversions and see that it's the keyword "macmackup". Once you know the conversion rate for a specific keyword you want to further analyze that keyword in your AdWords campaign and see if you’re getting a good return on your cost per click. Say you have a 20% conversion rate on a given keyword and you’re paying 15 cents a click on average. Now let’s say the payout for the CPA offer is $1.50 per email address. That means for every 75 cents spent on that keyword in AdWords your making $1.50. (FYI - A 20% conversion rate for a freebie zip or email submit offer is not unreasonable.) So what happens if you’re not tracking on a keyword level? Well you could have a campaign that is losing money or just breaking even and the cause could be a few piss poor keywords dragging everything down, but you would never know. Hopefully this all made sense and you now understand the basics of how to use tracking to create a profitable CPA campaign. Well that’s the end of the first Gorilla Report… Much love and success, Dave.