One of the best ways to decrease your ad spending and increase your overall profit margin with your landing pages is to use the right kind of tracking. Tracking how your customers got from point a to z (a being a search and z being a sale) will help you to determine which parts of your process can be left alone, tweaked or removed. So if you're worried about budget or just want to increase profit, pay close attention.

Here's an example of how you might use tracking to your advantage. If you have 100 keywords, chances are that about 1-5% of them are going to convert most of the time and the rest are just going to eat up your budget that would otherwise be spent making you more money. So after using the methods found in this previous post "How to Put Tracking Code on Your Landing Page.", you'll find out which keywords convert. After about a week of testing or about 1000-3000 clicks, you'll be able to tell which of your keywords convert all the time, some of the time and none of the time.

With this information, you'll know which keywords to increase the bid on and which to decrease the bid on. In general, it's good to decrease the bid on those keywords that don't convert at all rather than completely removing them, just because you can never be too sure. When it comes to how much to increase your converting keywords by, you should never go above your eCPC (how much YOU get paid per click).

So if your average eCPC on AzoogleAds (for example) over a period of about a week is $0.75 and your bounce rate (how many people click on your ad but don't click on any of your jump links) is (for example) 40%, your actual eCPC is going to be 60% of $0.75 which is $0.45. This means you should never bid above this amount when settings your maximum bids. None of these things are static, of course, so you must continuously tweak them in order to maximize your profit. Marketing is an ongoing process.

That's just one example of how tracking will help you.

Another great example is in split testing. Say you have 10 different ads for a single campaign. You could use CTR (Click Through Ratio) to determine which ads are most successful, but CTR doesn't necessarily mean more conversions. The ad text in one ad could have a lower CTR but lead to more sales, so you should absolutely track which ads lead to conversions. Additionally, this will help you come up with more ads that are similar to those that convert the best. This way, you can determine what sort of ad text works the best for a particular product. Unfortunately, no two products are exactly alike when it comes to affiliate marketing and you should always test different ways of selling the product through the ad itself.

One last thing tracking is great for is determining which search engines convert the best for you. Believe it or not, some work better than others, regardless of traffic volume.

Good luck on maximizing your profit!

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This entry was posted on Sunday, November 18th, 2007 at 9:59 am and is filed under Ad Networks, Affiliate Marketing, AzoogleAds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.