In Hotels Combined

Week 1 – Hotels Combined PPC Affiliate Experiment

Posted by: Robert Austin on Nov 7, 2009 | No Comments

End of week 1. Overall the campaign is not profitable so far. But on day 1 & 6 I made a small profit, which is hinting at a profitbale arbitrage opportunity.

I went a bit crazy on Day 5, breaking my rule of a max bid $0.30 and going up to $1.00. This was probably a bad move, I became impatient, More on this in a sec.

Expenses:$143.21
Commissions: $47.28

Week 1 Profit: -$95.93

Google Spending Vs Hotel Combined Commissions

Here you can see how much I spent per day on Adwords, how much I earnt on hotels combined.

hc-week1-adwords1hc-week1-performance1

Hotels Combined Transactions Report

The transactions report is not enabled by default, you need to request it. I strongly recommend you do, because without it you cannot identify which keywords are converting. Adam “The Captain” from hotels combined was nice enough to contact me and offer to enable this report on about day 2. Great support from Hotels combined.

hc-week-transactions

Labels

Labels allow you to track which keyword’s and traffic sources are leading to actions. You need to manually tag your links with labels.

As you can see on day 1, I have no labels, hence no way to identify which keywords from my PPC campaign actually generated sales. So I went back through my campaign and added labels to everything.

I added the label paramter to all of my destination URL’s within the adtext

Example: http://www.tweeve.com.au/City/Healesville.htm?label=Healesville

Important Notes About Deeplink Naming Convention

Deeplinks are highly case sensitive. It took me a while to get this.
The golden rule is: You must write the links as they appear in the hotels combined data feed.

For Example…

  • http://www.tweeve.com.au/City/Coffs_Harbour.htm?label=Coffs_Harbour – Label Remains Complete
  • http://www.tweeve.com.au/City/Coffs_harbour.htm?label=Coffs_Harbour – Label Breaks

The 2nd link breaks, because the H is the wrong case… hence it redirects, and your label is stripped.

DO NOT MAKE ALL LINKS Capital Case…

At first I thought it would be correct to just make all links Capital_Case, but this is wrong.

For Example…

  • http://www.tweeve.com/City/Umm_al_Quwain.htm?label=Umm_al_Quwain – Deeplink Works, Label Works
  • http://www.tweeve.com/City/Umm_al-Quwain.htm?label=Umm_al-Quwain - Deeplink Breaks , Label Breaks ( lands on default homepage )
  • http://www.tweeve.com/City/Umm_Al_Quwain.htm?label=Umm_al-Quwain – Deeplink works, Label breaks

So what is correct?
The only correct method is to use the exact cityFileName data from the hotels combined spreedsheet. Sometimes it is capital case, other times there are lower case letters mixed in.

If your using speed PPC, i would recommend the following method to clean your city keywords list.

First in excel isolate the cityfilename column in it’s own sheet. remove duplicates, use find and replace to change all _ & -  with a space.

Copy and paste into speed PPC.

I have wrapped this quick guide into it’s own post: Hotels Combined Labels & Deeplinks – Correct Naming Conventions

Day 5 – The Dump

On day 5 I got impatient, The last few days had seen some profitability but on a tiny scale. I wanted test results back quick and I wanted to see the payout and conversion rate from more popular areas like capital cities such as brisbane etc.

As you can see the ROI was a bombshell, lost alot of money here.

Day 6 & 7

Back to the regular pissy little trickle of traffic at $0.30 max bid. Back to profitability.

Concerns

A couple of things concern me.

  • Heaps of people click the adsense ad’s, but the payout is a flat rate of $0.14 Even in more popular regions ( where the adsense payout should be higher ) it is still $0.14 – This is a killer.
  • The “Book Button” conversion rate ( which gives you the most cash ) is much lower than expected.
  • The “Book Button” Payout varies ALOT. You really need to identify the regions which pay $0.80+

Post to Twitter

Leave a Reply