Testing Pay Per Click Search Engines

by inga posted Oct 13th 2005 at 22:00PM

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Which pay per click search engines will bring you a positive ROI if you promote poker there? How do you know where you will get the most profit for your advertising dollar?

When I first became a poker affiliate, I advertised almost exclusively on Google Adwords. They no longer allow ads for gambling products, and neither does Overture, but there are still several secondary pay per click search engines that can send niche traffic to your poker website. My goal in this article is for you to know how to measure ROI from the different pay per click engines, and be able to maximize your advertising budget based on that.

One thing I'm not interested in discussing in this article is pay per click fraud. Frankly, fraud is irrelevant to me as an advertiser, because I've accounted for it when I've tested and re-tested the pay per click search engine I'm doing business with.

Step 1 - Keyword Selection

You should use the exact same keywords for your testing of the different pay per click search engines. If you use different keywords in your testing, then your results won't tell you anything about the pay per click engine. There are lots of tools to select keywords. For our purposes in testing, it doesn't matter much whether or not you use a large or small keyword list, just as long as you use the same keyword list for each of your campaigns.

Step 2 - Writing Your Ad Copy

Again, you want to use the same title and description for all your ads. If the results from one engine to another are different, and you've used different ad copy, the difference could be based on the ad copy, not the search engine.

Step 3 - Selecting Pay Per Click Search Engines to Test

Many pay per click search engines don't allow gambling ads, and some pay per click search engines specialize in gambling ads. I'll leave it to you to select pay per click search engines, but I recommend limiting the number of search engines you're testing to a manageable amount, both from a budgetary perspective and from a time perspective.

Step 4 - Tracking Your Results

This is where things get tricky.

My recommendation is to launch multiple sites that are practically identical from the perspective of sales copy and graphics, with similar domain names. These websites should be used exclusively for pay per click traffic; they should NOT be sites that you're doing SEO on.

The affiliate codes for each of your sites should be distinct, so you can measure conversions and ROI from search engine to search engine.

You should aim for similar positioning for your keywords in each pay per click engine. (Position can affect conversion ratios.)

Step 5 - Measuring Your Results

At the end of the test period, you need to do some calculations for each search engine.

A. How many visitors did each search engine send?

B. How much did each visitor cost on average?

C. How much did you spend at each search engine total?

D. How much commission did you make per visitor per search engine? (You calculate this by dividing your commissions by the amount of traffic you received.)

E. How much profit did you make total for each search engine? (Profit is calculated by subtracting how much your spent on traffic from how much commission you made.)

F. What was your ROI for each search engine? (This is calculated by dividing your profit by your ad spend, and converting the result into a percentage.)

What to do with the Information from your Test

Once you know which pay per click search engine is going to provide you with the best ROI, you need to dedicate all of your ad budget to that engine.

Only if there is money left over from that campaign should you move to the next best ROI search engine. (In other words, if you've bought ALL the traffic that you can from the engine with the best ROI, and you still have money left over, then spend it at the PPC search engine with the 2nd best ROI.)

A Couple of Final Notes

Keep in mind the law of large numbers. If you have a very small results-set from a PPC engine, it's very possible that your results are based on standard deviation, or short-term luck. The larger your test, the more faith you can have in the results.

Please don't private message or email me asking where you should spend your advertising dollars. I won't tell you.

Because for one thing, I don't know. I only do SEO these days, because the ROI is much better for free traffic. And, like anything else, your results with pay per click search engines may vary. It's just one strategy to consider when you're deciding how to market your affiliate products.

My goal with this article was to present an approach that you can use to determine for yourself where to spend your pay per click advertising dollars. I'd rather teach a man to fish than give a man a fish any day.

Also, be sure to have a look at the author's review of Full Tilt Poker.