So it seems there is a lot of interest in ringtones again, after the big shake up this summer. I don’t usually discuss the niches I am promoting, but with ringtones the cat is so far out of the bag that it makes no difference at this point.

Like almost all newbies starting with PPC, I tried ringtones. I did OK, nothing to brag about; at least I didn’t lose money. I eventually moved on to other niches that have been much more profitable for me. So now that I am doing pretty well and have learned about 1000% more than I knew back then, I decided to give them another shot.

I started on Jan 1st, and went about creating super focused keyword lists and ad groupings. I hooked those up to super relevant ad copy and landing pages. Using the same traffic sources as before (the big 3) and pretty much the same bid prices, the second round of ringtone testing began. The results were pretty surprising to me. The first time around I think I had eCPCs around .30-.50. This time around with my focused campaign I am seeing eCPCs in the $1.50 up to $5.00 range! Pretty amazing. I know the market hasn’t gotten any easier, so my techniques have definitely improved.

Not to brag or anything, but it would seem I now have the PPC ninja skills!

This is an update to the first Pay Per Click Network challenge of a few weeks ago. There is new data, new PPC networks included, and a new scoring system based on everyone’s input from the last one. Hopefully it will be even more helpful now.

To review:

These networks were all tested running the same PPC campaign (meaning the keywords and the ad texts were the same) to an affiliate offer with the exact same landing page.

Scoring system:

I threw out the interface rating as many people thought it skewed the results of bad performing networks that had a good interface. I agree that performance is king and if something converts well I can live with a bad interface (MSN, cough, cough). Now the scoring is based on 3 factors with 2 being double weighted. This should more accurately show the total performance of a PPC network.

• Traffic Volume (Highest volume = 10 out of possible 10)
• Conversion Rate (Best conversion rate = 10 out of possible 10)
• Click Pricing (Lowest pricing = 5 out of possible 5)

For a possible total score of 30

The Results:

Traffic Volume Winner:

As always Google is king of traffic volume. The only thing that keeps it from the overall leader is its stiff click pricing.

Conversion Rate Winner:

MSN is the tops for conversions. Too bad their volume isn’t up to Google or Yahoo’s levels.

Recommended:
• MSN
• Yahoo
• Google
• Searchfeed
• Looksmart
• Miva

Stay Away!
• Adbrite
• 7Search
• Enhance
• Kanoodle
• Search 123
• Bidvertiser

Remember these results are based on my campaign and niche, your results may vary wildly.

So I had dropped my campaigns with Searchfeed and Miva a while ago. Searchfeed conversion rates just started dropping, and also their GEO-targeting started getting really off. I take random samplings of GEO accuracy and one day in mid December it just took a big nosedive. It was disappointing too, because SF used to be a very strong converting PPC source for me. I ended up emailing them with a spreadsheet of my stats and explaining what happened. To my surprise, less than a day later, they refunded me almost $1,000 in clicks for December and wanted me to give them another shot. Since I resumed my campaigns they seem to be back on track.

I had tested Miva in the past and the conversions were just not there, so I stopped using them. Then my account rep called me last week offering me free matching clicks to try them again on their new “precision” network. Well, I am never one to turn down free money so I fired up a campaign with them for more testing. I was pretty impressed at their effort to retain me as a customer.

These results will be included in a new and improved PPC Smackdown 2.0 that I will be putting together at the end of this month. Stay tuned!

I have to say after 2 months of use, I am liking YSM more and more all the time. From the totally un-useable system it was before, they really nailed it with Panama. Is it perfect? Of course not, but it’s pretty damn good. The upload/campaign conversion tool is the best feature. If you are a spreadsheet geek like me, being able to lay out the whole campaign in Excel, then hit upload is great. Or if you already have a campaign running in Adwords and you want to lauch it on YSM, it’s as simple as opening your Adwords editor, exporting the campaign to a CSV, running the convert tool in YSM, then uploading the converted CSV back to YSM. I took a 40 adgroup campaign with a hundred ads and 8,000 keywords from Adcenter to YSM in under 5 minutes. Another great technique I have found is to build the campaign in the Adwords editor, then export, convert, and upload to YSM.

Are you listening MSN? You need to make a solid, campaign level upload tool!

One of the best ways to test the effectiveness of you landing pages is through Google Analytics Bounce Rate metric. This particular report can be found under content optimization, navigational analysis, entrance page bounce rates. With a bit of tweaking you can view a chart like this:

So what does this show? Well, like in golf, a lower number is better here. The lower the percentage, the more people are clicking through your landing page and taking the action you want them to. The higher the percentage, the more people are abandoning your landing page. In the example above, the landing page with the 46.3% rate is the most effective page, while the 76.5% page is pretty bad. This is a tremendously important way to gauge the effectiveness of your landing pages.

It’s also import because it gives you an even more detailed view than just conversion rate. For example if you have a 5% conversion rate, you still don’t know how many people are abandoning your landing page versus abandoning the affiliate offer page. By looking at bounce rate, you can tell not only the average rate that users click through your page, but also you now know how many users get all the way to the affiliate offer page then quit without buying. Pretty good stuff.

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.