I ran a PPC campaign for my site BankBonuses.com during June to make a little extra money. I’ve run PPC campaigns in the past with mixed results. I usually make either a very small profit or a very small loss. I’ve been making adjustments to hopefully make my PPC campaign consistently profitable.
My initial results for June were disappointing when I examined them at the beginning of July. My revenue from Adsense and Chitika were a couple dollars less than what I spent on Adwords and I had no affiliate sales. My goal is to have my ad revenue equal my PPC expenditure and any affiliate sales will be profit. As it turns out I did have an affiliate sale in June but it didn’t post until a few days into July. I also found out that I had a couple of $25 Wachovia Visa gift cards in the mail for referring new customers. I don’t have any way of tracking where the referrals came from so I am going to guess that one was generated at Bank Bonuses and the other one was generated by my eHow article on the Wachovia $25 referral bonus. These unexpected earning combined to create a nice profit for June.
I’m running the PPC campaign again this month. I’ve already made an affiliate sale although it is for a smaller amount due to a promotion they have running this month. My ad revenue is running slightly higher than my PPC expense and I’ve made a couple more Wachovia referrals in addition to a couple of ING Electric Orange referrals. Even if I don’t make any more sales I will once again have a nice profit this month.
Even though I’m making a profit the past couple of months it still isn’t a lot of money. There are lots of things I could do to improve my site and my PPC campaign. I’ve been reading ShoeMoney’s PPC course and once I’m finished I will be implementing some ideas from the course. If I can be consistently successful with this PPC campaign I will start some more campaigns. I’ll keep you updated on my results.
I have never myself done a PPC campaign. Did you use Myspace ads or adwords?
I think that facebook and myspace are pretty much bad for conversions, whereas adwords is a little better, though more competitive.
I have learned never to trust anything someone tells me at face value. Just because it works for John Chow to sell affiliate products doesn’t mean that relying on adsense is bad for your revenues..
I used adwords. I haven’t tried myspace or facebook ads. I’ve tried Yahoo ads in the past and they didn’t work as well as adwords. I originally set a $1 a day cap on my budget so there wasn’t much risk.
I don’t have adsense on this site but I do use it on my other sites. I didn’t make that decision because of John Chow. I don’t read his site. This was a personal decision and one that is costing me money but I feel it was the right choice for this site.
Andy,
My comment on John Chow was not meant on you, but rather in general terms.
With the levels of traffic you are pulling on TFM you could be making at least $70- $100/month from this blog. You could use adsense, konterra, adsdaq and possibly an affiliate program.
BB – I wasn’t sure if your comment was directed at me or not. I just wanted to make it clear that I wasn’t blindly following some Internet guru’s advice. Adsense was making me about $30 a month and I’m working on replacing that through affiliate programs or who knows what. I still make money on this blog from paid text links which are enough to cover my expenses and provide me with a little spending money every month.