Can I Teach This PPC-CPA Stuff?
When I started becoming highly successful brokering traffic from pay per click search engines to CPA lead offers, the question in the back of my mind was whether this stuff could be taught to and replicated by others.
That is when “Project Guelph” was born.
Guelph is the city where my brother-in-law (his name is Waseem) attends university. It is about 1.5 hours south-west of Toronto.
The whole idea was to have my brother-in-law stay with me during the summer and see that if he could replicate any of my successes.
The college degree that he is completing is in human resources management and he may have taken only one marketing course in his college life.
He had absolutely no prior Internet marketing experience.
Zip. Zada. Ziltch.
All he knew was that I was making large amounts of money every day.
It wasn’t after months when I started talking to him about pay per click did he realize what I was doing.
Based on what he heard in the past, he thought I was in the “paper clip” industry.
No bro, it is “pay per click.”
I cut him a deal and said that I would teach him all my methods and see if I could get him to make money.
Not only could I prove to myself that this stuff is teachable and write an entire course on it, I figured I could get an awesome testimonial from my brother-in-law if I ever did release a course.
So he came to my house in mid-May 2006. I was to be his mentor and he was to be the apprentice.
Basically, I was Yoda and he was Luke Skywalker as he kept insisting.
I made a phone call to one of my favorite affiliate managers and had him approved for Primary Ads CPA network in about 24 hours.
I have a white board in my office, so I sat him down and started from scratch.
I explained to him:
1. What CPA lead offer was.
2. What a CPA Network was
3. What a pay per click search engine was.
I drew out on the white board the concept of driving paid targeted traffic to CPA lead offers and making money.
We converted half of the my baby son’s room into a small office so my brother-in-law could work from there on a separate computer.
I told him to open up an Google Adwords account and pick an offer from Primary Ads to promote.
The guy is a fanatic about cars (especially luxury cars) so he picked out a car quote lead offer that was paying about $6.25 a lead.
I told him the basics of doing keyword research and setting up a Google ad.
He used a software tool called Keyword Elite by Brad Callon to research his keywords and went about setting up ad groups.
I told him to keep the keywords within each group very specific and targeted towards the theme of the ad group.
For example, and Honda related keywords should be in a Honda ad group so that we could write a targeted ad for prospects looking for Honda quotes.
He then set about creating his ads and ad groups quietly while I worked in my office.
Big mistake.
I had basically thrown him into a lake without giving him enough swimming lessons.
He started getting clicks coming on his ads, but NO conversions.
More clicks kept coming, but NO conversions.
I started thinking to myself, okay well this is a crap offer.
** Note **
In my experience, around 7 out of 10 campaigns you start will either breakeven or not be profitable at all. No big deal. Mo need to cry over spilled milk. Just move on to another.
** End of Note **
Then I realized a couple of things. I logged into Primary ads and discovered that the car quote offer lead stats were not real time and that we would have to wait until the next day for those leads to be imported into the network stats.
Okay I said, that is one reason why we are not seeing anything.
Then I logged into his Google Adwords account and was stunned at how badly written his ads were.
Dude, you need Copywriting 101.
His click-thru rates were not very good, so I told him to rewrite his ads from his prospect’s point of view and try to make it more benefit oriented.
At the same time, I told him to start other easier campaigns such as the ones that only ask for a zip code or email address.
Here is where things got really screwed up.
Whenever he set up another ad group, Google would charge outrageous minimum bid prices. For a particular CPA lead offer he wanted to promote at a $1.25 payout, Google wanted a $1.00 minimum bid on most keywords.
Ummmm, how the heck he supposed to make money promoting a $1.25 lead offer while paying $1.00 per click. He would have to have close to a 100% conversion rate to make any decent money.
Why, oh why, are you doing this Google?!
Then it hit me… “Quality Score.”
You see, Waseem’s overall “quality score” was low because of that stupid “car quote” campaign and because Google looks at your historical account click-thru rate, they were effectively punishing Waseem for his initial ad campaign.
Google basis the quality score of any keyword you bid on based on these factors:
1. Click-thru Rate (CTR)
2. Ad Text
3. Historical Keyword Performance
4. Landing Page
5. Web Site The Landing Page Is Residing On
Google had really nothing to go on as far as click-thru rate or historical keyword performance for his second ad campaign, so they looked at Waseem’s ENTIRE account when determining bid prices.
So now Yoda is getting pissed and Skywalker is getting frustrated.
So at this point… I cheated and told him to get out of the room and put my son to sleep in the other room while I worked on his campaign.
So I am staring at the computer screen trying to figure out how I am going to make it work with Google Adwords now that my brother-in-law has a bad historical record. Google is basically going to punish him for anything new he sets up, so now what?
I had the option of just starting an entirely new Google Adwords account to get a fresh start.
** Note **
If your Google Adwords account has a bad history of low click-thru rates and crappy ads, you may want open a new account and start fresh.
** End of Note **
I didn’t want to start a new account and based on my experience, I knew of a way around this problem.
But it would *cost* my brother-in-law money.
I decided to place the minimum bid at $1.00 for the $1.25 lead offer and let the campaign run, but only AFTER I wrote the ads for him hoping that Google would reward this account if I wrote ads that were very keyword *specific* and had a good click-thru rate.
So, boom! I let it run knowing that every click was costing my “college-broke” brother-in-law a full dollar.
On May 18th, 2006, Waseem generated his first (2) leads at $1.25 a piece for a total of $2.50 in affiliate commissions.
But it took him (6) clicks to generate those leads for a total cost of $1.00 x 6 = $6.00.
Ouch! He lost $3.50.
But a 33% click to lead conversion. Now that is great!
So I tell him to keep running the campaign at a loss and he is looking at me with this serious “I am a college student, $3.50 is a huge amount of money to me” look.
Trust me, I say.
The next day, four clicks and zero leads.
Not good.
But wait, the click-thru rate on the ad is over 10% for the last two days. Are the Google Gods watching?
Not bad ad writing Gauher, pat yourself on the back.
But Waseem is still looking at me with that “$4 is almost a full lunch at McDonald’s” look.
Hang in bro.
The next day I figured Google must be loving me for my great click-thru rate and I decided to drop the bid drastically.
I was hoping that I wouldn’t see the dreaded “Keyword Inactive: Minimum Bid $1.00″ message beside each keyword.
Do you want to know what happened?
Story to be continued…
