New Challenge: £5,000 in a month doing ppc

[aaclapham]

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So what are the scores on the doors?

[hunt100]

First of all thank you beejeebers for amazing work. You are doing really amazing job giving valuable tips for all of us. Ive read lots of forums and lots of posts and there are very few people like you who are trying to help others
Please dont listen to all this trolls who are trying to discredit this thread and people like you.
thank you once again for help

[AffiliateWannabe]

Debts over £15k, min 3 creditors, min £1k monthly income, England and Wales Residents only = £75 per lead
Debts over £15k, min 3 creditors, min £1k monthly income, Scotland and Northern Ireland Residents only = £30 per lead
Debts over £5k, min 2 creditors, no income restrictions, residents of anywhere in UK = £20 per lead.

Thanks for that Beejeebers, and congrats with it all!

Sorry to be a pest, just wondering...are the two with debts over 15K IVAs, and the 5K debt one where the applicant takes on a debt management plan? Does the company loan ppl a consolidation loan or is it debt mgmt where you have to pay a % each month to them for managing the account for you? Can you say who the company is that you send leads to or do i have to join the school thingy?

Thanks

[Michael_Anthony]

1) "Debts over £15k, min 3 creditors, min £1k monthly income, England and Wales Residents only = £75 per lead"

These applicants are offered an IVA

2) "Debts over £15k, min 3 creditors, min £1k monthly income, Scotland and Northern Ireland Residents only = £30 per lead"

These applicants are offered a Trust Deed (Scottish version of an IVA)

3) "Debts over £5k, min 2 creditors, no income restrictions, residents of anywhere in UK = £20 per lead."

These applicants are offered a Debt Management plan

We have multiple merchants who bid for these leads via our database, access to which is restricted to our own school members.

[beejeebers]

Well here's the lastest, things are still moving up, but adwords really pissed me off so I shut it down completely while I redo the campaign there. Adwords is the hardest one to get going. Especially with something like this that is closely related to consolidation loans. Adwords wants big bucks for keywords because they know loans programs pay big bucks for leads. Unfortunately, this debt management program has 3 different payout levels and when I'm chasing the largest payout, smaller payout leads come in. That's the one thing I really don't like about this program. It limits my maximum bid severely and makes me unable to bid on terms I know would work, (because I may get a lead that doesn't meet the high payout criteria). So I've got to be very creative.

One other thing, what converts in overture and msn does not necessarily convert in adwords. I've never understood this, but that's the way it goes. I am not sure I'll hit my goal in the 30 days I set out, but I will hit my ROI goal, so all is good. I find when setting goals, if you make it too easy, it's not a challenge, so why bother? So I try to set it high and make my timeline shorter to make me work a bit harder to hit it. I'm sure one of these days I'll hit every goal within the designated timeline, but for now, I'll be happy almost doubling my money for now and for sure doubling it and more in the future. I will definitely continue tweaking this campaign. Once I get adwords cracked for this, the volume of leads should really jump. But I guess the main lesson is if adwords is screwing you around, pause them. You can still make money with overture and msn. I haven't even touched any of the other engines because I have heard nothing but bad things about them, (except for arbitrage sites, which I do not do).

Here's the numbers:

[Edwin]

Thanks for the update - it's good to see how this went.

I guess since you've got a month's worth of stats in the latest screenshot, you missed your target, but still... 750 quid profit in a month and I assume it can be left pretty much on autopilot or refined further. Nothing to be sniffed at!

[beejeebers]

No, I've got a little over a week left now. If adwords would kick in, I can still come close I think. I've found about 31 converting keywords so far, (some converted twice or more). As I run it longer, I get more converters and my roi will go up further. Testing mode is usually very expensive on adwords so I'll save that for next week.

[dunklk]

Testing mode is usually very expensive on adwords

So so true, I daren't speak of how much I've spent testing certain campaigns. It's worth it in the end though.

[Edwin]

Oh yes, it's not April 15th today, is it

The scary thing is, I looked at that spreadsheet dump 3 times and I didn't see anything wrong. "March 15th to April 15th is a month, so it must be over" my brain went...

[beejeebers]

Sorry about that Edwin...

I figured I'd just paste them together.

[dave1167]

Thanks for updating us beejeebers, I know what you mean about adwords. I did some experimenting using an obvious term on my debt managment site and wanted to see what google would want to get on the the first page.... £8.20 per click got me to position 4. Makes it totally unprofitable. This was on a word with a 'great' quality score. Out of interest, Beejeebers, it would be interesting if you posted a similar comparison for MS adcenter and Yahoo.

I am still not totally convinced about googles quality score as on some of my other sites which I have used SEO optimised pages with regard to keyword density and meta tags etc and google rates some of the words which are the product names and very relevant as 'poor' and yet other words/phrases which are barely or not even mentioned as ok and on two terms as 'great'. Is anyone else got any comments or worked out google's logic on quality scores.

Apologies if this takes the thread off track we can always move it to another thread if it does.

[metafunk]

I am very keen to see how you are getting on. Do you have any updates for us?


Thanks.

[lumargin]

CCL is a non-issue, we're all compliant. Why does the same person keep bringing this up?

As for networks accepting every lead. I could out about 5 companies that do not do accept every lead, but I won't. If you have any experience with lead generation in the financial sector you would know that companies love to reject about 30 to 40% of leads entered to them. These are real leads, not fakes or ones with incorrect information. It's not right and their reasons are suspect at best. They say they are running "pay per lead" programs but then reject leads because the legitimate applicant, "wasn't interested" or "went with somone else". That's not a reason in the pay per lead business model.

It is in the pay per sale world though and if they're taking this route, they should state it upfront. Too many companies are basically stealing leads from affiliates this way. Affiliates usually pay ppc costs for these leads and sign up in good faith to these so called pay per lead programs, only to be kicked in the groin later when a big chunk of legit leads are rejected.

It is indeed very sad beejeebers, I am getting kicked on the groin at the moment by a merchant that not only accepts a mere 30% of leads I send through but put their phone number on affiliate landing page!?!

The model is quite depressing as affiliates have less control the moment the merchant receives an affiliate click on their site.

sad,,,very sad. I just want to break even and pull out asap.

[beejeebers]

I am still not totally convinced about googles quality score as on some of my other sites which I have used SEO optimised pages with regard to keyword density and meta tags etc and google rates some of the words which are the product names and very relevant as 'poor' and yet other words/phrases which are barely or not even mentioned as ok and on two terms as 'great'. Is anyone else got any comments or worked out google's logic on quality scores.

Apologies if this takes the thread off track we can always move it to another thread if it does.

My personal, non proven, only a hunch theory is adwords takes time into account with everything they do. So if you open a brand new campaign and start trying to hit page one for very competitive terms, you'll pay an arm and a leg and could never be profitable. I think it's their way of saying, "you're new, we're not giving you first page unless you take a loss for awhile."

I seriously believe this because I've done tests where I'll bite the bullet, take a loss and then one day *BAM* my bids are lowered and I'm getting the same position for a lot cheaper. I don't change anything, except about 3 weeks pass without me touching it. Could be another money grab too...?

It is indeed very sad beejeebers, I am getting kicked on the groin at the moment by a merchant that not only accepts a mere 30% of leads I send through but put their phone number on affiliate landing page!?!

The model is quite depressing as affiliates have less control the moment the merchant receives an affiliate click on their site.

sad,,,very sad. I just want to break even and pull out asap.

If they rejected 70%, just dump them. You will never make your money back. I think we should all out these arsehole merchants on a big list of "who to never deal with..." Then maybe they shape up and stop lying and ripping us off so blatantly...

I will post the last update on the 15th, (only 2 more days now... )

[beejeebers]

I know nobody here gives a rats ass about this, but I like to finish things off so here's the last update. I didn't hit 5k goal but I have found a really profitable program that will turn out great numbers in the future. Here's the final stats:



I've done 2 challenges here and both have not hit my goal. HOWEVER this also illustrates a very important thing, affiliate marketing and specifically PPC marketing takes TIME to get profitable. Unless you're in a non-competitive area, a 30 day window is pushing the limits of these projects. So if you think you can jump in and be getting a very good roi in under a couple weeks, you're either very lucky or have a tremendous budget to blow through. I do get lucky once in awhile, but I find the harder I work, the luckier I get.

I'll let this run and keep tweaking things, but for now I'm off to the next project!