I’ve spent several hours calculating all my incomes and expences for the past 4 months (i’ve been at hospital and was unable to do it).
For the month of June:
Income: 4820.20$
PPC Cost: 4213.14$
NET Profit: 607.06$
ROI: 14.4%
My return on investment is really bad, thanks positive ). Most of my test campaign for ClickBank were not profitable, except one direct linking campaign that made approx 100% ROI.
My main problem with CB now is I’m spending 3-4 times more than I made back. I look at may campaigns stats and see that with most of my tests I’ve made 1 or max 2 sales, and spend 3-4X more to get these sales. The problem seems to be keyword selection.
And my most “bleeding” campaign was for guitar niche, where I’ve made -1304.28$ NET loss, with 100% negative ROI. That means that for every 1$ I’ve made I’ve spent 2$. The biggest problem with this campaign was inaccurate Google tracking, when I’ve made 1-2 sales a day and Google showed 5-7 conversions. That really pissed me off! I couldn’t optimize my campaign properly because of this inaccuracy.
As you can see, tracking is CRITICALLY important and can seriously hurt your campaigns. The same stuff was with my another test campaign for CB offer, when I’ve made 2 sales and couldn’t track which keywords actually made these sales, due to OMS glitches.
Further Actions and Thoughts
All in all, I cannot call myself PPC professional yet. Most of my test campaigns were with losses, and considerable comparing to the incomes, which were tiny – 1-2 sales a day. That shows me that I’m making some mistake somewhere in my PPC activities. And this mistake drags all the business into the red ink.
Yes, I have profitable campaigns and I can invest in testing new offers thanks to these campaigns. But overally, I’m not satisfied with myself here.
My next actions will be analysing all my failed campaigns and try to find a common mistake that leads to failure. My initial guess is keyword selection. When I’m looking at the products I’ve tested, most of them are popular and sell well, according to gravity.
However, I’ve heard from several super-affiliates that CB is dead and working with ppc and Clickbank isn’t recommended now. There must be a reason why people making 4 figures daily from ppc tell so… Another stuff to think of…
Anyway, I need to diversify to CPA offers that convert really well. The biggest issue is cash flow, I’m still waiting for checks – close to 2000$ total. And I’ve stopped 2 or 3 campaigns because of cash flow (I need to buy bread and butter on these money too) . Ok, not bad for June, let’s be persistent and positive!
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Your mistake is direct linking.
[Reply]
Hi John!
You’re right, I’ve tried to test offers before investig time into building landers. Seems that with this keyword selection and direct linking CB products just don’t convert. I’ve got only 1 succesful campaign on Clickbank that makes me money with direct linking. But this is “low hanging fruits” keywords. I’ve took a serious analysis of my business model with CB offers, and now I’m thinking of new tweaks I can do in order to improve my PPC to Clickbank business.
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