So now you’re at the point where you have found a great affiliate network and product, have done research on the subject to find the best keywords for the market, set up your Adwords campaign and are now receiving clicks. Unfortunately, not all campaigns are created equally. Some perform better than others, but why? Your next task is to test your campaign performance and [probably] tweak it in order to maximize your profits.

I’m getting clicks…why change anything?

Though your advertising campaign may be doing well, it may be able to do better! How much are you really profiting from it at this point? Ten dollars a day? Less? Perhaps your ads are getting tons of traffic but you just can’t seem to make that sale, meaning you are actually losing money. It’s been said that the average number of low performing keywords is 80%. That means only 1/5 keywords actually turn a decent profit. This is when you must start creating additional adds to throw into the rotation to weed out the good from the bad. Not only does this pertain to Adwords campaigns, but also targeted traffic coming to your website, landing page or anything else.

Adwords Traffic

Let’s say you have an Adwords campaign set up and it is generating semi decent traffic. Whether the ad brings someone to an affiliate landing page or your own website is irrelevant at this point. We are just concerned about getting more targeted traffic. The next thing you can do is analyze what your ad actually says. Would it entice you to click it? Even if you may think it is perfect, sometimes simply changing the words around ever so slightly can make all the difference.

Once you have another or a few more ads for the same product, make sure to put them under the same ad campaign and change the campaign’s settings from “Optimize” to “Rotate.” Optimize means only letting the better performing ads show up more frequently, but since we are creating some new ones for comparison purposes, we want them all equally shown. This way we can see what works and what doesn’t. The best strategy to use here is creating two ads at a time, both with different text styles (such as one being a question and another being a call to action), but still linking to the same landing page. Figure out which one is better and get rid of the worse performing ad. Now rinse and repeat. Also keep in mind that you can keep a few of the better performing ads in your collection and have them rotated on a regular basis. If two ads are working great at about the same click through rate (CTR), why waste one?

What about conversions?

Ok, now we’ve got ourselves a high performing Adwords campaign. Now we need to see how well our ad performs in the overall scheme of generating money. Simply, if you get a click on your ad, are you making money too? This is known as your conversion rate (number of sales per click).

Let’s start with a tracking strategy. Say we have an ad with a good CTR. If you want to know how many sales you’ve made simply login to your affiliate account and check how many sales or pending sales you have. That’s easy enough. But what if you want to test which landing page they’ve provided works best? At Commission Junction affiliate partners provide you with hundreds of different links, many of which bring buyers to different pages. We want to know which works best for us. Unfortunately, most of the time when your affiliate network tracks your sales they only track them based on each partner affiliate and not on the specific links used. This means that if you have two ads that are exactly the same but link to two different landing pages for the same product you most likely will never know which one is converting better.

Solution: Create two accounts on your affiliate network site. You will probably need to use two different email addresses. Tip – Gmail users can add “+” and some text at the end of their email address and it will still be sent to your normal address, but many websites see it as a different email address (walffle@gmail.com -> walffle+clickbank@gmail.com) Create two ads that are identical except for the destination address. Find a landing page you wish to try and use that for the address of your first ad. Now find a second landing page with your other account (remember, for the same product) and put that as the link for your second ad. Success! You can now decipher what landing page is generating better conversions by checking the sales in each account.

Think you’re done? Guess again. Just kidding. It really all depends on what you want to do and how much time you are willing to put into this. There are plenty more ways to earn money online, each with their own ways of optimizing performance. Stay tuned for more, or simply sign up to my mailing list and/or rss feed on the top right of this page to always stay up to date on my latest content.