As many may know, I am both a Google AdSense publisher and a Google AdWords advertiser. There are way more discussions about AdSense than AdWords because one makes you money while the other cost you money. I’ve been using AdWords to send traffic to this blog by purchasing Google SiteMatch ads on other blogs that I feel are a good match for what I offer.
The problem with a SiteMatch campaign is there’s not way to measure the effectiveness. You know how many people click on the ad and come to your site but you don’t know if you’ve made any money off them or if they will stick around. Some say this is just part of the cost of doing business, that if you want to make money online, you sometimes need to spend money online. I don’t have a problem with spending money online. However, I would like to recover the advertising cost whenever possible.
Recovering AdWords Cost With Affiliate Sales
Most affiliate marketers use Google AdWords to send traffic to their affiliate landing page in the hopes that the visitor would buy whatever it is they’re offering. If the AdWord cost is less than the profit from the sales, then you got yourself a winner. If the ads cost more than sale, you need to keep tweaking or you’ll have a loser on your hands.
I’ve decided to expand on this concept. The page I used isn’t really a true affiliate landing page in any sense of the word. I’m using AdWords to send traffic to my review of Affiliate Outline. There’s enough links in that post to lead visitors to explore other parts of the blog. In addition, the review does a fairly good presell of the Affiliate Outline eBook.
The object of the exercise is to send traffic to the post with AdWords to gain new readers and sell enough eBooks to recover the advertising cost. The problem with most affiliate landing page is it’s only one page and most people (up 99%) will not buy your offer and leave. However, by sending the traffic to a blog that offers way more than just trying sell an eBook, I’m hoping some of those 99% who won’t buy will explore the blog and become readers. Since they came to the blog by clicking on a Google ad on how to make money online, there’s a good chance they’ll stick around.
The Results So Far
These are really early stats (just two days) so please don’t draw any conclusion from them. Using Google AdWords, I sent 796 visitors to the Affiliate Outline review post. Those visitors cost me $62.09. Out of the 796 visitors, two purchased the Affiliate Outline eBook. This is what the numbers look like after two days.
- eBook sales: $84.80
- AdWords Cost: $62.09
- Net Profit: $22.71
It looks like I have a winner on my hands but it’s really too early to tell. I will need another week or two of data before I can crank up the ad budget. Conversion is very low at 0.25% because the targeted post isn’t a true landing page. However, the stats are very encouraging.
Remember, the object is not to make money on eBook sales, it’s to gain new readers by finding a low to no cost way of using Google AdWords to send targeted traffic to the blog. AdWords sent 796 people to this blog in the past two days and instead of costing me money, I made at $22.71 on the deal. Looking at the above Analytics chart, I can see the 796 visitors viewed 871 page, so some of the visitors are checking out the blog. However, I would like to see the page view per unique at a higher ratio.
Most webmasters use Google AdWords to either make affiliate sales or send traffic to their site in the hopes of gaining new readers. This little trick allows you to do both. When you think about it, it’s pretty evil. No wonder I came up with it. 😈