When looking for a new affiliate offer to start testing (which is a never ending process), it’s easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of offers out there. But you should be able to narrow the field down quite a bit based on your preferences. Each person has their own needs, but here are some things I avoid when choosing offers to test.

1. High competition offers. If I have read about it on a forum, or I hear it’s a “hot offer”, I keep looking.

2. Seasonal offers. I try to stay away from them. With the time it takes to set up a campaign properly, I want something that is going to covert all year long, not drop off to 0 after a certain date. Of course each group of keywords has peaks and valleys which you should stay on top of. http://trends.google.com is a good place to start.

3. Trademarked term offers. These are tough with all the restrictions on keywords and ad copy that you can’t use. So I pass these by as well.

4. Super high payout offers. If you pick the highest paying offers in a CPA network, most likely everyone else will too. This goes back to #1. There is plenty of money to be made with lower paying offers.

5. Low search volume offers. It’s important to do a lot of research on monthly search volumes for the keyword set you are using. If the volume is too low, it’s not worth building a campaign around. Of course the key is to balance a good search volume, with a relatively low competition offer. These niches are rare, but they are out there.

I have found it really hard to find objective information about different Pay Per Click (PPC) networks, especially second tier networks. If you pose the question in a forum, the response will usually be something like “XYZ sucks”, which isn’t too helpful as far as hard data is concerned. So I decided to run my own, somewhat scientific test of PPC networks. Here is what happened.

About the test

I chose a set of ads and keywords that were proven to do well on Google Adwords for these tests. I won’t say the niche (competition is tough enough already), but it’s about a mid-range set of keywords as far as monthly impressions and click pricing. The minimum spent at each PPC network was $50, with most of the test running in the $100-$300 range. If it was clear the traffic was not going to convert, I cut the test short, but if it showed some promise I let it run for a while.

After examining the results, I assigned a score between 1 and 5, with 5 being the highest, to each of these 5 categories:

• Traffic Volume (Highest volume = 5)
• Conversion Rate (Best conversion rate = 5)
• Click Pricing (Lowest pricing = 5)
• Keyword Competition (Lowest competition = 5)
• Interface ease of use (Easiest to use = 5)

After totaling up the scores, each PPC network was given a final score. Winners for each category and an overall winner were chosen, based on the scores.

The 10 networks tested

• Google Adwords
• Yahoo Search Marketing (Panama system)
• MSN Adcenter
• Adbrite
• Miva
• Searchfeed
• Kanoodle
• Enhance
• Looksmart
• Search123

The Results

Category Winners

Traffic Volume:

Not a big surprise here, the king of Traffic is Google by a long shot.

Conversion Rate:

MSN takes the prize for the best conversion rate. Adcenter’s traffic converted about 10% better than the closest competitor.

Click Pricing:

The lower traffic networks are always going to have the cheapest clicks, so we have a 5 way tie here between MSN, Miva, Adbrite, Enhance, and Kanoodle.

Keyword Competition:

Keywords were easy to buy with little to no competition on Enhance, Kanoodle, and Search 123.

Interface ease of use:

Google reigns supreme again in the interface department. Their continually improving web interface along with its offline Adwords editor make it tough to beat. Although the new Yahoo Panama system is a close second and gaining quickly.

Overall Winner:

The winner of the smackdown is MSN. Their strong placing for conversions and click pricing, coupled with a decent traffic volume puts them in the number one spot. A surprisingly strong second place tie goes to Searchfeed and Looksmart. Their low click pricing, and low competition helped them edge out some of the Tier 1 heavyweights in the field.

Although the undisputed kings of volume, Google and Yahoo were hit hard by their higher pricing and extreme keyword competition.

Keep in mind these results were for one specific niche and keyword group, your results may vary wildly.

I will completely guarantee 100% that this tip will work for every person without fail. If you follow this tip, you will instantly increase your ROI 1% across the board on every cent your spend on your PPC campaign. Now that I have got your attention with the cheesy, E-book style hype, here’s the tip.

Instead of optimizing your actual campaign, it’s about optimizing how you pay. Instead of paying with a normal credit card, as most people do, sign up for a 1% cash back rewards card. There are many cards that do this, personally I have an American Express Business Rebates card. So for every dollar I spend in my campaigns, I get 1 penny back. This may not sound like a big deal but sometimes PPC margins can be tight and 1% does in fact make a difference.

Consider an average search engine marketer spending 20k per month: that 1% works out to $200 a month, or $2,400 a year.

Every bit helps, and for something this simple it’s a no brainer

One of the new metrics in the PPC universe is the concept of keyword assists. The idea is that the final keyword that actually converts the action you are tracking may have had a trail of non-converting keywords that lead to this action. In other words, the keyword or phrase that the customer’s search began with was probably not the keyword that ended in a conversion. Wouldn’t it be nice to know the value that these “helper” keywords have, that don’t directly show on stats? Well Yahoo is on the ball with their new analytics program built into their PPC interface. You can configure it to count the number of times that a keyword contributed to the conversion of another keyword within a timeframe of 45 days. I think this is a significant stat that can really be put to good use in optimizing campaigns!

I got an email from a friend of mine getting into PPC asking me what’s best tip I can give him.  There are so many different directions I could have gone in my answer, but it always come back to segmentation of your campaign.   Segmentation is just another way of saying “breaking your campaign up into small chunks”.  The initial work you do in setting up numerous adgroups with highly targeted keywords and ads will pay off many times in the long run.  It’s tempting to just throw everything in 1 campaign to get something running, but laying the ground work is the key to a campaign’s success. 

For a real world example, I recently worked with a client to improve their Adwords campaign.  They had about 1,000 keywords in 3 adgroups.  I examined their keywords list and was able to break out 45 different adgroups from their original 3.  I then wrote more targeted ads for each group of keywords.  Sure it was a ton of work, but their total average CTR increased by 70% within a week.  That’s before even touching the keyword list or match types.  Just goes the show the power of good campaign structure.