Q: I have just started affiliate marketing and started paying for search engine ads, however, i haven’t got a single conversion so far. I am so nervious now about spending on paid advertising. Please could you advise why i am not getting any conversions. I have just started affiliate marketing in this week. Been running ads for 5 days now and no conversions. Let me know if you have any questions so you can help me.
A: One issue there is that I have not seen your campaigns on Google AdWords, and I don’t know the URL(s) for your landing page(s), so I am doing this a bit blindly.
But I will give you some recommendations on how you can optimize and track your paid search campaigns.
As soon as your ad is created in AdWords, you can see how it is doing on the AdWords homepage in a graph they display on your performance, and they have some tables that outline how the various categories of keywords are performing.
If you drill down further from the homepage, you can select your campaign and then an ad group.
A side note here — AdWords is very competitive and the prices are high for many keywords. I am not sure what kind of keywords you are targeting.
Anyhow, look for a column marked “status” and then the keywords that are indicated as “eligible” are the ones that are running.
Anything marked as “below first page bid” is not.
The issue there is that you aren’t bidding enough money or the “quality score” for your ad is too low. The “quality score” is a measure from Google on your ads and the keywords you target, and the landing page where you are sending people.
Google makes some conclusions from this information and assigns a “quality score”. The better all of the pieces match up, the higher your quality score.
The best way to turn around any of these “below first page bid” ratings is to increase your bid. That might help you also.
As far as fine tuning yours ads, it can be a challenging and frustrating experience, because some ads that performed great last week might be inactive this week. This could be due to Google conducting an audit on your ads and they have determined that they do not measure up this week, or a competitor might be bidding more than you.
It’s essential to check your ads regularly to see what is working and what is not, and sometimes you just have to raise your bids.
Also, you should kill off any poor performing ads, as they are a distraction. Also, change your copy entirely every once in a while to see if the change can generate more clicks and conversions.
Hopefully, you’re already doing some A/B split testing. If you’re not, you should. If you don’t already have a Google Analytics account, get one (they are free) and connect it to your Google AdWords account.
They have a feature called Google Analytics Content Experiments, which allows you to test variations of your pages on your site to determine whether any changes may alter the behavior of your site visitors. You can see which elements might increase conversions for you.
You can get great insight from Google when you hook up Analytics and AdWords, so do it. Constantly monitor, modify, and test your campaigns.
And if you’re getting tight on money for the ads and you’re not seeing a return, I would suggest halting your campaigns, and try generating original content to bring in organic traffic.
Video: I Don’t Have Any Conversions With My Paid Search Ads video
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