For those of us who have tried to use Adwords to promote affiliate products, however, the process can be maddening. There seems to be no end in sight of experts who promise to explain just how easy it is to use Adwords as a commission maker. And while they are off pulling in earnings (like the ones you see to your right) following their simple process, they never seem to tell you enough to turn your struggling Adwords campaigns into money makers.
The result is that there are thousands of affiliates burning money away on Adwords promoting Clickbank products that simply don't convert (thank to Jerry Moore, I now call these people Clickbank Junkies).
After personally buying Steven's Adwords guide (I couldn't turn away from Clickbank earnings like he was pulling in), I had one of those 'Aha!' moments and started to put the pieces together. I sent Steven an email and started to pick his brains for more information on Adwords.
This article is based off of our conversation. If you have never bought a guide on how to use Adwords to promote Clickbank products, then this will hopefully be a good introduction on the topic. If you have bought an Adwords guide, then hopefully this article will clarify what you have already learned, and fill in those missing pieces that you need to finally see your Clickbank account explode with commissions.
Clickbank and Adwords - Dispelling a Common Myth
One of the first objections people have when they hear about using Adwords to promote Clickbank products is that it isn't allowed by Google. Somehow they fell under the misconception that Google does not allow affiliates to use Adwords as a promotional tool.
This is simply false.
When I brought this up to Steven, he explained that he has been successful linking directly over to Clickbank affiliate products. "People can still succeed online without owning a website of their own. I don't know why everyone says and thinks that you can't but it is still very possible... I use both methods, creating a landing page and direct linking to the merchants page. They both have their advantages and disadvantages. Direct linking is faster and easier to experiment with, but can be a bit more risky because their website may go down, change, etc. Creating a landing page is more time consuming, but is easier to optimize for traffic and you can change your content without changing your destination URL."
Google does in fact allow affiliates to use Adwords to send traffic to an affiliate product. However, Google will only display one ad for an affiliate product for any given search. For example, if there were five affiliates promoting this article using Adwords (yes, we do have a partner program) and all five affiliates chose the keyword phrase "clickbank and adwords", when a user performed a search for "clickbank and adwords" they would only see one of the affiliate ads rather than all five.
Obviously this creates a question: how do you get your ad shown rather than the other four affiliates who are also advertising the same product?
It Starts With Your Adwords Quality Score
Your Google Adwords Quality Score is the key to setting up a successful Adwords campaign. Most people do not realize just how important your quality score is in reducing your overall costs, increasing your ranking, and most importantly, beating out other affiliates who are trying to advertise the same product or service.
So what is the Adwords Quality Score? When pay per click (PPC) marketing first started, the model was very simple. If a user performed a search on a keyword they would see a list of results. The advertisers who were willing to pay the most amount of money per click were ranked first, followed by the advertiser who is willing to pay the second most amount of money per click, and so on. Google, as they are prone to do, added a wrinkle to this model.
Recognizing that they didn't want to just put up ads on their search results page, but actually wanted those ads to contribute to the content on their results pages, they moved away from giving the top position to the highest bidder. They developed a system that would take into account the "quality" of an ad. How relevant is the ad to the user's search? How relevant is the ad, and the keyword used to trigger that ad to the text on the page that the visitor will be sent to? How well is that ad performing over time?
Taking these other factors into account, Google developed a way of ranking their ads based on bid price, ad relevancy, performance, and history.
So let's bring this back to Clickbank products. You want to promote an affiliate product on Clickbank - how do you make sure that your ad for that Clickbank product outperforms other affiliate's ads? Let's look at the different factors of the Ad Quality Score to figure this out:
1. The Landing Page
This is obviously a bit beyond our control. Since we are promoting someone else's product, we do not have direct control of the text that appears on the page that we are going to send people over to. But there are things that we can look for in a landing page which will indicate whether or not it is a good candidate to promote:
- Is the landing page well written and designed well?
- Do they have some of the things that Google looks for on a site? A privacy policy? A Terms of Use? A contact page?
- Are you able to develop a good list of keywords for the page?
Since we are limited in what we can do with the landing page, as an affiliate marketer, we need to focus primarily on choosing the right page.
2. Ad Relevancy
This is the part where we can really control our Adwords Quality score. Adwords wants their ads to be highly relevant. If you were promoting this article, for example, you wouldn't want to use keywords that were not targeted for this article. Instead, you would want to use keywords that focused on "Adwords", "Clickbank", and even "Affiliate Marketing".
In addition, Google will compare the keywords you are using to advertise a website against the words that you use in your Adwords Ad. Let's use an example...
Suppose I had recently published an article here on AffiliateKB on how to easily write sales copy. In fact, let's say that the title of the article is "Write Sales Copy in These Three Easy Steps". To advertise this article, we would want to focus in on keywords that were tightly wrapped around the word "Sales Copy" (I'll explain in a minute how to develop your keyword lists). But not only do we want to choose keywords that match the content of the landing page, we also want to design our ads to match the words in our keyword lists. So for this example, we might use an ad that looks like the one to the left.
Every one of our keywords would be focused on "Sales Copy", our ad would use the word "Sales Copy" in it, and the landing page as well would be highly focused on Sales Copy. If we get these three aspects to all center around the same theme, then we have developed a highly relevant ad - and will definitely improve our overall quality ad score.
3. Performance and History
This one is pretty simple - if you have an ad that has a good performance history, you're ad score will go up. In other words, even if you have the most relevant ads possible, if your average clickthrough rate on your ads is woefully low, Google will eventually ask for more money from you in order to continue displaying your ads.
Steven suggested to me to do something that every marketer should be used to hearing: test variation. He specifcally recommends running up to 4 ads at the same time. Google has a feature which allows you to run multiple ads at once - they will automatically rotate those ads and tell you which ads are getting clicked the most. As you start seeing traffic, view your ads - the one with the lowest clickthrough rate should be edited to try and beat your best performing ad.
Through constantly testing and refining, you will be able to eventually develop an ad that is both relevant to your keyword list and landing page, but also performs well over time.
Getting Those Keyword Lists
Keywords = traffic and the more traffic you get the more money you make. It would be like someone saying to only buy ideal lots in a subdivision and sell them later, whereas I'm saying to buy the whole subdivision without worrying about certain lots because you have them all. I don't ever use their approach because the difference is $30,000 per month and $160,000 per month.Developing a highly relevant ad is important, but it means nothing if you you have a bad keyword list.
Learning how to develop keyword lists is one of those things that most marketers keep very secret. After all, if you find a keyword that converts extremely well and doesn't cost you much money, do you want every other marketer to start using that same keyword and drive your price up? Of course not. So learning from any marketer how to develop keyword lists is something that is quite rare.
But you do need those keyword lists. Steven Holdaway is an advocate of developing huge lists of keywords. Whenever I talk to an Adwords expert, I ask them if they prefer developing large keyword lists, or smaller, more refined keyword lists. Most of the time people tell me to focus on the smaller, more refined lists. But Steven's answer was different...
"Keywords = traffic and the more traffic you get the more money you make. It would be like someone saying to only buy ideal lots in a subdivision and sell them later, whereas I'm saying to buy the whole subdivision without worrying about certain lots because you have them all. I don't ever use their approach because the difference is $30,000 per month and $160,000 per month."
Whenever you read a guide on developing keyword lists, the same recommendations usually follow. Use WordTracker, Keyword Discovery, and Overture's free tool. Most of the time, each of those services will be linked to with an affiliate URL.
Steven's approach is more simple: he goes directly to the source. Google's free keyword suggestion tool is a quick and easy way for you to develop huge keyword lists all grouped together in a tightly wrapped theme. Let me show you how by using Debt Management Talk (one of my most recent websites) as an example. The following __ steps is how I would develop Adgroups in Google filled with all sorts of highly targeted keywords:
