Affiliate Odyssey

The 5 day test is over and I’ve learned a lot about AdWords, which was the whole point of the exercise.

CPC has come down to £0.36 which is pretty cool which gave me an idea:

I was already split testing two ads, obviously sending them to the same page on my site which, because of its low bounce rate, I guess gave a decent quality score.

I’d read that if you send traffic direct from an ad to a merchant’s category listing page, the quality score would be very low but what if you send one of your split test ads to your own site and one to the merchant.

Today, an equal number of clicks went to my page as went to the merchant’s page with no increase in CPC, but whereas my page/site has a 1:15 CTR, sending traffic direct to the merchant of course has a 1:1 CTR.

I wonder whether this might work long term?

Today’s Results

Google Adwords Spend: £9.82

Impressions: 97

Clicks: 28

Click Through Rate (CTR): 28.86%

Affiliate Commissions: £0

Adsense Income: $0.85

Running Totals

Advertising Spend: £53.99

Income: £8.40

Profit/Loss: -£45.59

Mood in the camp

Not brilliant. A £45 loss for the week is pretty poor but next week an extra niche and a new campaign might turn things around.
Here’s hoping.