Whilst pay per click affiliate marketing can be a great way to drive high volumes of traffic through your site without having to worry about SEO and organic search results, there’s a risk that if you don’t do your research you’ll end up spending a lot more money than you make back in commission.

Flying blind into a PPC campaign is a sure fire way of losing your investment and wasting your time, but it doesn’t have to play out that way.

Merchant brand bidding constraints
Merchants haven’t been standing still in PPC over the last couple of years, evidenced by the ever growing number of emails we all see from direct merchants and the networks alike, forbidding us to bid on selected merchant brand names and terms. The more cynical among you may conclude that merchants have simply used affiliates’ PPC campaigns as free research, with the poor old affiliate taking the hit and the merchant getting plenty of rich data from which to construct their own effective PPC campaigns at little or no risk. Whilst this may be partially true in some cases, the reality is that merchants and their search advisers are simply, and rather inevitably, getting better at online marketing. In doing so, they have recognised that competing with their own affiliates for the same PPC “real estate” simply serves to drive up the unit cost of sale. Hence the constraints. Therefore, in architecting a workable PPC campaign, it is essential that you stick to any merchant bidding rules — if nothing else to avoid commission declines or reversals.

Keyword Research
Knowing the market and having a view as to how your PPC campaign is “likely” to play out is one thing, but actually making your money back and being successful with PPC is quite another. PPC campaigns sink or swim based on the keywords that you choose. It also goes without saying that the more competitive the market sector, the more difficult it will be to make any money from a PPC campaign. However if you think you’ve found an unexploited niche which you’re eager to fill, picking the right keywords should lead to some level of success. Most PPC affiliates are, by now, familiar with the concept of core and long tail keywords. The more specific the keyword, the less it is likely to cost per click and the more relevant the traffic is likely to be to the product or service in question. Conversely, the more generic the keyword, the greater the unit costs and the greater search volumes and traffic.

Most of the major search engines, perhaps most notably Google in the form of the AdWords keyword suggestion tool, provide extremely useful search volume data. Simply fire in some relevant terms and you will be presented with a list of related searches, together with the search volumes and the degree of advertiser competition for the term. This data, together with data from other sources such as Word Tracker and indeed your own data collected from previous campaigns and site visits should allow you to find the “sweet spot”, balancing unit cost, traffic volumes and relevance. The key when using these tools is to try as many different combinations as you can and to try and think like an average surfer looking for your product. When picking your PPC keywords you’ll also need to consider the geography of the campaign. If you’re providing a service that’s only available in a specific area then you’ll be able to filter out irrelevant results if you include a regional or nationally specific keyword. You’ll be surprised at the word combinations that some people use and the more time you spend looking for the keywords that will provide value and performance the more likely you are to save money rather than burning it through lack of preparation.

Negative Keywords
Just as important as the main keywords for your PPC campaign are the evil siblings, negative keywords, and your initial research should also cover this area. Essentially you don’t want a bunch of irrelevant but expensive hits simply because of a similarity or overlap in keywords. There are a couple of ways in which to identify potential threats before you launch the campaign. For example, if you’re trying to sell ‘blue tooth headsets’ you could get hits from people looking for blue toothbrushes, headbands and a whole bunch of irrelevant terms, all of which will cost you dearly without producing any meaningful results. One of the best ways in which to identify negative keywords is to use the various tools at your disposal to weedle them out. Otherwise just head to a search engine, type in your target keywords and note down any of the irrelevant entries that come up, blacklisting the keywords unearthing them as you go along. The degree of support for the exclusion of negative keywords varies somewhat based upon the advertising network.

Driving CTR
At least two of the major advertising networks – Google and Yahoo – use the click through ratio (CTR) as one of the major factors in determining where your PPC ads appear in the list. From their perspective this makes perfect sense: after all their goal is to maximise the click-through rates for displayed ads and thus their own revenues. From your perspective as a PPC advertiser this is both an opportunity and a challenge. If you get the ads right, you could see them appearing higher in the list for a lower unit cost than some of your competitors. The inverse is true: no matter how much you pay, you can’t always buy the top spots! Driving CTR is not only about keyword relevance but encompasses the quality of your ad text and the visible relevance of your landing page URL and content (the content will also have associated costs in the form of the search engines’ “landing page quality score” so ensure your pages are high quality). You will almost invariably need to play with and refine the ad text, perhaps running multiple groups simultaneously to see which drive the best combination of volume and value (conversion to commission rates). The great thing here is that it is very easy to see what the competition are doing, with the top performing ads appearing . . .at the top! The landing page URL relevance is thus vital: try where possible to include the relevant keywords in the displayed URL. This can make a significant difference.

Refine refine refine
At the beginning you’ll want to sort out a reasonable spread of keywords, particularly if you’re aiming for a wide audience. As the campaign unfolds, you need to monitor the results continuously. Most of the major advertising networks allow you to play with multiple ad groups and campaigns and to monitor click-through rates in real time. Similarly, your own server logs and commission data from your merchants and networks should provide you with the all-important data regarding conversion into commissions so that you can balance the various elements of the campaign accordingly.

Site and conversion quality
We have written extensively around themes relating to site quality and maximising conversions / minimising leakage here at lammo.net. Nowhere are these factors more important than in a paid search campaign and it is vital that you get your house fully in order before commencing a PPC campaign.

Management costs
There are now endless tools, many of which are free of charge, allowing you to manage campaigns across multiple advertising networks. This is particularly important where the volume of keywords or ad groups is high: many affiliates fail to account for the cost of time in managing PPC campaigns and yet, as most of us are “time poor” there is a significant “opportunity cost” in real monetary terms associated with the time lost for other tasks that could have generated similar or potentially better revenue.

Dig deep
We’re not talking about longtail keywords yet again here! By digging deep we mean explore the opportunities presented by some of the lesser known advertising networks. Although there has been considerable consolidation over the last few years, there are some surviving “independent” advertising networks, some of which may be relevant to your target market and audience at lower unit costs. There are also endless sites out there willing to offer paid advertising, some of them at highly competitive rates if you are willing to take the time to hunt them down. All of this may help in further driving down the unit cost for relevant traffic.

Hopefully this hasn’t made the whole PPC thing sound too daunting and if you’re just starting out and haven’t had prior PPC experience then following advice and learning from others’ mistakes is better (and less expensive!) than making them yourself. Although words like ‘research’ may sound bland and anaemic, all forms of effective SEO and PPC are reliant upon deep market knowledge and keywords skills, so getting used to being thorough in the early stages will ease the pressure as your affiliate career progresses.

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

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3. How can I earn money with Affiliate Marketing?