Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving
David Ogilvy
Contents:
1.) Introduction
2.) The Process
3.) How to Scale This Campaign and Reach a Wider Audience
4.) In Closing / Lessons Learned
1.) Introduction
Search Traffic is one of the highest quality of traffic out there because the user himself is searching for your products and services and may have already decided to make a purchase, unlike Facebook ads, which is interruptive marketing.
With search, people are searching for a solution to their problem. All you have to do is have an answer, then write a convincing ad and target the right keyword(s) so you can get the most traffic and make the most sales.
Search engine marketing (SEM) is completely re-active since you have to wait for someone to type in a problem. Social Media Advertising, on the other hand, is more interruption marketing.
For example, Facebook is giving you access to people who are interested in a niche, but at that time, are highly unlikely to be in a buying frame of mind. It is just like when you see an ad on TV. You don’t usually stop watching the program; get ready and go out and buy the product. It is interruptive marketing, just like Facebook!
SEO also is an excellent long-term strategy to get consistent search traffic, but this case study focuses on the PPC (Pay Per Click) side of things.
2.) The Process
In this case study, I tried promoting an affiliate product on Google Ads. The product is from ClickBank; it is called carbofix, a weight loss supplement.
The steps that were taken in this case study were as follows:
- Picked an affiliate product from the ClickBank marketplace.
- Created a landing page (I used Elementor and WordPress, you can use any page builder)
- Set up Tracking (I used clickmagick, you can use any link tracker)
- Launched a Google search campaign
The campaign got approved within less than 48 hours.
I was bidding on the product’s name keyword, using the exact match type. The keyword doesn’t have a high search volume. (it gets about 320 US searches per month)
Other keywords were:
[carbofix], [carbofix discount], [carbofix promo] … etc.
The traffic from this type of campaign is limited, but it is highly targeted traffic. In this case study, I was targeting people at the bottom of the buyer funnel, who most likely had decided to make a purchase.
I created a very simple landing page with very little content, and to be honest, it could’ve used a little bit of optimization that will help get a higher quality score on Google Ads.
I made a sale with this method shortly after starting the campaign.
3.) How to Scale This Campaign and Reach a Wider Audience
The product’s main keyword has only 320 searches, as I said before, but upon keyword research, it appears that many consumers search for weight loss supplements online who don’t know or heard of this specific product. These users can be reached by targeting the top of the funnel keywords like [best weight loss supplements], which gets (100K+ US Searches) with relevant content that recommends the product and convincing them to make a purchase.
The keywords that contain the products name usually have a high CPC and are very competitive, so targeting middle and top of the funnel keywords with informative articles may work better.
4.) In Closing / Lessons Learned
Even though the results weren’t spectacular and I was breaking even, this experiment has proven to me that promoting affiliate products on Google Ads is still useful, contrary to popularly held belief on internet marketing forums, that is why sometimes testing a strategy is the best way to know whether it works or not.