Newbie's Challenge: Spend £30 earn £60 with Amazon using PPC

[wackimonki]

Tweet

I challenge myself to attain 100% ROI on a minimal of £30 spend in one calendar month. I will promote products from one Amazon.co.uk category. The method of promotion will be Pay Per Click, using only Google AdWords

The AdWords campaign will kick off on the 1st of November. I will prepare my ads so they are ready to go by then.

My modest challenge is heavily inspired by beejeebers' much grander ones.
Challenge: £3,000 profit in a month with PPC
New Challenge: £5,000 in a month doing ppc

They are definitely worth a read. There are a lot of good information in there, particularly on keyword research and campaign management.

Why only £30?
I'm new to this wonderful game and have a limited budget. My aim is to learn as much as I can without spending a fortune. I hope to set another challenge for 300 after this.

So who are you Zin?

I am 23, recently moved to SW London and work in web development. I've been trying to make money online for 2.5 years without much success. But I have learnt alot, including technical skills and things about myself. Now I'm making a stance with Affiliate Marketing, and with everybody's help on here, I hope to succeed.

Right. Enough babble. I will reply back with my prep details later today.`

[smingle]

I challenge myself to attain 100% ROI on a minimal of £30 spend in one calendar month. I will promote products from one Amazon.co.uk category. The method of promotion will be Pay Per Click, using only Google AdWords

The AdWords campaign will kick off on the 1st of November. I will prepare my ads so they are ready to go by then.

My modest challenge is heavily inspired by beejeebers' much grander ones.
Challenge: £3,000 profit in a month with PPC
New Challenge: £5,000 in a month doing ppc

They are definitely worth a read. There are a lot of good information in there, particularly on keyword research and campaign management.

Why only £30?
I'm new to this wonderful game and have a limited budget. My aim is to learn as much as I can without spending a fortune. I hope to set another challenge for 300 after this.

So who are you Zin?

I am 23, recently moved to SW London and work in web development. I've been trying to make money online for 2.5 years without much success. But I have learnt alot, including technical skills and things about myself. Now I'm making a stance with Affiliate Marketing, and with everybody's help on here, I hope to succeed.

Right. Enough babble. I will reply back with my prep details later today.`

Well done with this mate I will be following you and I wish you the best of luck

[DioBach]

Good luck, and if you succeed in your 100% ROI, don't forget to share the products and keywords you used to attain it.

[Barry]

Yeah, hi and welcome to the forum.

And good luck with your little experiment.

Ta

[marky]

Welcome & best of luck

I love these kind of posts / challenges and really enjoy reading and following them
As you go through - you will learn a lot as you write about it and everyone who reads it will potentially get something too from veteran to newcomer - look forward to the updates - I am sure you will do it and build upon it

[shyguy0507]

Hello and welcome to the forum

Good luck with your experiment, I will be following with interest - I always like folllowing these types of threads / challenges.

[wackimonki]

Thanks for the welcome and encouragement guys. It's good to see some familiar faces from my lurking days.

OK. I've chosen a category. I want to reveal it as I believe it will make this challenge more educational. I hope it's not against any forum policies.

I've chosen Amazon's new Baby section. I believe the buyers from this sector will be motivated and will convert well. Many of the products are of highish value to make it potentially profitable.

Assuming a conversion rate of 10%, at 10p a click = 1 pound CPA. Using amazon's lowest referral percentage of 5%, I need to promote products of 20 pounds or over to break even.

Amazon's referral percentage can increase to 7.5% if I linked directly to a product that was bought. The percentage also increases with the number of products referred. With those in mind, I'm looking at products 15 pounds and over.

I'm all roaring to go now, it's a pity I'd have to wait until the 1st of Nov!

Next Actions:

1) Write some generic but gripping ads. Use template from www.selfemployer.co.uk. I like Ajay's method of focusing on what might trigger my potential customers.

[mainlime]

Hi

Looking forward to hearing about your progress. Not exactly experienced with PPC myself but I ran some numbers based on what I have done and your target seems entirely reasonable and your strategy seems sound. In my limited experience it'll come down to whether you can target people who are ready to buy now as opposed to those shopping around.

Good luck!

[KamikzMX]

Are you going to be going direct to the merchant or create a landing page/site?

Good luck

[lowndsy]

Good luck, andwell done for setting a reasonable target and taking the time to learn thisgame properly. But... You don't have to spend £30! Google offer £50 free to new sign ups, and msn and Yahoo have similar offers - that's about £150 to play with!

[tbp]

Good luck with this, I really don't think it will be too long to achieve your goal, just stick with it, and go slow - To me Adwords is 40% taught, 60% intuition.

Everything changes in adwords depending on your target market, something that works in one market fails miserably in another. There are a few basic rules that work all round, but more don't than do. As a result you need to get a feel for your target market to find out what works, factual ad's, funny ad's etc

Do tests, changing one variable at time (very important, so you can attribute results to that one variable only), and allow adequate time for each test, at least a couple of days. Do split testing on your ad's continuously, where you use 2 ad's and google cycles them, eventually the best performing ad is shown more. Delete the worst ad and create a new one, and repeat. That way your ad keeps evolving and getting more and more successfull.

Also, don't go overboard to get a good click through rate. Sometimes a high click through rate isn't good at all, just costs a lot of money, and few sales. Its the number of sales from an ad that counts more than the click though rate. An ad with a click through rate of 10%, but with a 2% conversion rate is worse than a click through rate of 4% with a 50% conversion rate!

When you reach your target, set another straight away, when you break that, set another! You always do best when you are pushing yourself to perform, so keep on going for higher and higher goals.

[Shane]

Good luck with this, I really don't think it will be too long to achieve your goal, just stick with it, and go slow - To me Adwords is 40% taught, 60% intuition.

hmmm sorry but take issue with your percentages

40% Taught
50% Intuition
10% Frustration

[Fraser]

Assuming a conversion rate of 10%, at 10p a click = 1 pound CPA. Using amazon's lowest referral percentage of 5%, I need to promote products of 20 pounds or over to break even.

Good luck with the challenge but I think you are assuming too high a conversion rate. Maybe someone else can help out with more relevant stats but 10% is quite hopeful.

[aaclapham]

I get 8% on one of my niche sites, but Amazon is so frustrating as a) you never get any cookie sales which is a big part of anyone's campaigns b) people cancel orders due to the time taken to dispatch things.

I only use Amazon when I have to

Good Luck!!

[kier]

Fraser's right, 10% is a very optimistic projected conversion rate.