Wrapping Up the PPC Challenge

Today is the last day of the PPC challenge over at Matt Levenhagen’s forum and my last update. It’s going to be a short, one, as I haven’t been able to add any more campaigns this past week.

Taking a look at the image to the right, you’ll see :

Impressions: 87,922
Clicks: 889
CTR: 1.01%
Cost: $182.17
Commission: $115.82
Profit: - $66.35

So, I ended up spending more than I made, but that’s OK: now it’s time to go back and analyze things and make adjustments. As a matter of fact, I already paused a few ad groups.

During this challenge I found some amazing merchants that I want to explore/promote further: some I realized would do better with video promotion, some with bum marketing, and some by even creating sites around some of the products. In the end, that is the reason I blasted in the first place: to find merchants and/or products to promote.

Am I disappointed I didn’t reach my goal of 50? Yes, a little. But honestly, my first inclination was to set a goal of 20 blasts (one for each business day of the month), knowing I was going on vacation, and would miss some time. And I ended the challenge with 23 blasts.

Now it’s time to pick a challenge for the month of April, and I am not sure what to do. Here are my options:

- create sites for my existing domains just sitting there (probably 25 or so). This would be intense, but the results would probably be awesome!

- organize some of my PLR and use it to update several sites I have but really neglected for the past several months

- work on creating links and revenue for 2 sites I have and would love to flip, but not in their current state, as I want as much as possible for them.

Any thoughts? What would you like to see me do? Please comment below.

PPC Challenge Update – Week 4

It’s now been 4 weeks since the beginning of the PPC challenge, and the end is in sight. While the month is almost over, the challenge will go on for another week.

Let’s see: blasting new campaigns is not hard, but finding the time to sit down and do it, is another matter.

Last week I said I was going for 15 new blasts, and I ended up doing 7. My total count as of now is

- 2 to  landing pages

- 12 direct to a merchant on CJ

- 9 direct to merchants on SAS

And here are my stats:

Impressions: 72,301
Clicks: 631
CTR: 0.87% (it  went up a little more again. BTW, some of my ad groups are getting as high as 4.85$, but some are not getting any clicks))
Cost: $129.90
Commission: $115.82
Profit: - $14.08 I am still in deficit, but I am confident that once the blasting phase is over, and I go into the account and remove those keywords and phrases taht are getting lots of clicks and no sales, I will be in profit.

I made a total of 6 sales from 4 campaigns, and that is pretty good.

This week I went back and got reacquainted with the AdWords Editor, which I’ve used a lot in the past, but forgot how to use it, since I haven’t done much PPC in the past year or so.

My FaceBook campaign is also getting some action, after I increased my bid amount. No sales yet, but I am seeing clicks from there.

Nest week I’ll wrap up this challenge, and will probably give a follow up update in a month or two.

Do you need help stating new campaigns? Do you have questions? Post below and I’ll be happy to help you. Here is to PPC success!