Campaign Setup – Hotels Combined PPC Affiliate Experiment
So Hotels Combined offers a white label branding solution. This means we can pretty much just re-label their entire website and use our own domain. Really great for lazy PPC strategies because we don’t need to build any pages.
It also allows us to use our own domain in the Google ad text which gets rid of annoying destination URL issues. It is also important to avoid copyright / ppc rage from the affiliate program.
Using PPC to promote affiliate products these days can be heavily restricted and can often result in your commission being withheld. Make sure you read the TOC carefully and remain compliant. Bidding on their brand keywords, using their brand in your ad text, or using their domain in your URL are all pretty bad ideas…
Introducing… Tweeve
I’ve quickly purchased 2 domains. tweeve.com and tweeve.com.au. I wanted a short domain so I can use /sub folders/ in the Google ad text. Some region names like “sunshine coast” can be quite long, so they shorter your domain the better.
Since this whole thing is setup on their private labeling system there is no chance it will be indexed by Google. SEO just isnt a factor. So using a keyword stuffed domain has no value…
A domain which has branding potential would actually be more valuable here. Maybe some people will return directly… maybe not… but like I say, SEO is not possible so go the brand for an extra trickle of return traffic.
Hotels Combined Data Feeds
Looking around in the affiliate area I can see Hotels Combined offers some very nice data feeds. All hotel, region, pagename information is available for download in .csv files. This is perfect for rapidly setting up a PPC campaign.
I grabbed the .csv file which includes everything ( all countries, all fields )
I’m going to scrub these quickly for the data I need. I’ll do this manually through excel.
Basically I’m just going to wrap a table around the entire sheet. I’ll then filter by country > australia. Copy and paste this data to a new sheet to isolate it.
Then i’ve removed any columns I deemed useless, keeping the city name and state.
Rather then dumping every city in australia into the PPC campaign I only wanted to start with what I like to consider tier 1 & 2 regions. I have a bit of a method for rating regions.
Regional Tiers
- Tier 1: Brisbane, Sydney, Byron Bay
- Tier 2: Mooloolaba, Coffs Harbour, Port Macquarie
- tier 3: Bobmolvi ( insert small town you have never heard of here )
Understanding these tiers is important to travel affiliate marketing. Tier 1 regions are to competitive and the CPC is to expensive. They have the most inventory and the most search impressions.
Tier 2 are regions which are popular enough to have decent inventory but still arent tourism behemoths. They are often growing in popularity and are sub regions of popular spots. Many tier 2 regions are quickly turning into tier 1. Tier 3 destinations take longer to become tier 2, or may never become tier 2.
Tier 3 normally have little inventory, making conversions harder.
The thing to understand is, the CPC can often be similar for tier 2 and 3. But when the user arrives on a tier 3 affiliate page and only 1 -2 hotels are available, they bail.
Spreedsheet Now Ready
I added another column to my spreedsheet so i can just place an “x” next to cities which I believe fall into tier 1 and 2. I’m going to run tier 1 regions but anticipate this wont even make it onto the SERPS.
I’ve also got another column called “to strange”. It’s basically just a way to filter out any regions which have unsually long or difficult names to use in the PPC campaign. Since I plan to auto generate my entire campaign, small anomolies are better to be removed at the start. Don’t get caught up in making every variation fit, you will probably comprimise the other 90% of your campaign to make everything work.
Ok so my data is ready to go, all up that’s taken about half an hour.
Using Speed PPC to create the Campaign
I’ve tried both speed PPC and efficient PPC and Speed PPC is clearly better. I’m not a huge fan of these programs but they do work well for campaigns where geo region is the main element. Which makes them perfect for travel affiliate marketing.
Just copy and paste your cities into the seed box, set your expansion and settings and away you go.
Create your text ad and use the {Seed} etc variables.
View your output, make sure it’s legit.
Copy and paste into adwords editor.
It will probably take a few trys to get the formula working for every ad group.
Once you have pasted into adwords editor, you will probably need to manually clean some of the ad text up. Normally ad text which exceeds the character limit.
Upload Campaign & Grab A Beer.
That’s it. The campaign is now live, and I’ll report in a few days to show you the results, earnings etc.
Rules – Hotels Combined PPC Affiliate Experiment
Rules
- Affiliate: Hotels Combined Affiliate Program
- Timeframe: 1 Month: November 1st 2009 – November 30th 2009
- Google Adwords Budget: $1000
Goals
- Goal 1: Proof of concept that the arbitrage opportunity is profitable
- Goal 2: PPC campaign is sustainable.
- Goal 3: Scale PPC Campaign so the daily profit is worth getting out of bed for.
Let the games begin!
Booking.net.au – Experiment Part 2
So the booking.net.au experiment has been running for about 1 week now.
Heres some updates.
Initially I had a lot of problems with ad’s being disapproved because the display URL did not match the Destination URL. After trying many combinations to get this to work only 1 method passed approval and allowed me to keep a display URL with the /region visible. For example Booking.net.au/Brisbane/
- I had to disable 301 redirects through .htaccess
- I had to create physical .html pages for each region. See www.booking.net.au/brisbane/
- I then entered the affiliate link at the keyword level “destination URL”
Using the destination URL at the keyword level is a popular trick but is kinda crap because you lose the flexibility of changing your campaign on the fly through the .htaccess.
Anyway, first problem solvered.
The 2nd issue I’ve run into is low bids. I mentioned in the first post my maximum bid would be $0.50. Pretty much all generic keywords like “brisbane accommodation” etc won’t even trigger with a bid this low. So I’m stuck with pretty low impressions overall.
Why not increase the bid?
If you can make enough money from commissions with a PPC bid higher then 0.50 on a setup like this then your 1 of a lucky few.
Using my magic forumla for profitability you will see we have a very hard margin. This formula is actually based on a lot of real data from similiar previous campaigns and is a great rule of thumb. It relates to generic travel keywords and niche keywords. It does not include brand. Also it is landing customers on a website which is a brand they have never heard of, and has no level of trust established.
100 clicks = 1 conversion
1 conversion = insert average commission
So based on my max CPC of $0.50
100 clicks * $0.50 = $50
My average commission will need to be higher then $50 to make a profit. And let me tell you that’s a stretch.
Here is a screenshot of today’s search volume and clicks from Google Adwords.
In total I have spent $100, generated 200 clicks and made 2 commissions. This is the hard margin formula to a tee.
Total commissions worth $79. average commission $39.50
I have produced an average commission of $80 over 2-3 month periods with a similar setup so I’m not writing this campaign off yet.
What is my prediction for the campaigns profit by march 31st? Loss of $150.
Booking.net.au – Travel Affiliate PPC Experiment
The idea: create a scalable PPC campaign promoting an affiliate travel site using only redirects.
I’ve allocated a budget of $1000 for March and the goal is to generate a profit.
There are no physical pages except for the homepage. It just redirects from Google Adwords into the affiliate booking engine with a custom theme.
This is not a new idea, many have tried it, dreaming of the easy money and 2 years ago something like this was an awesome money spinner.
But rising click costs ( because of increased competition ) and increasingly strict Google guidelines & affiliate guidelines made it unprofitable ( well mainly the click costs made it unprofitable, the latter just made it more difficult ). So years later, I’ve returned to see if holy grail still exists.
Register and host booking.net.au / create logo
It was important to register a short domain name because I want to use regional sub folders in the Google Ad text.
For example Booking.net.au/Brisbane
It is my opinion that using regional sub directories in the ad text will slightly increase consumer confidence and quality score.
Setup .htaccess file for redirection
I used a .htaccess file to control the affiliate redirects for maximum future flexibility. Also it’s pretty easy to use excel to create all the redirect combinations and then copy and paste into the .htaccess file. If you have a spreedsheet provided by the affiliate program its even faster.
Setup Google Adwords campaign
I’ve opted to start by pushing generic accommodation keywords grouped by region. A generic region would be “gold coast” while a sub region might be “broadbeach”
The core accommodation keywords are “accommodation”, “hotels”, “resorts” & “apartments”
Generally the volume of impressions also goes in that order, “accommodation” recieving the highest and “apartments” the lowest. Sometimes this changes based on region. For example CBD’s and major cities normally have lower impressions for “resorts” and “apartments”. On the flip side “hotels” will have a higher impressions, sometimes out pacing “accommodation”
For those of you interested you can take a peek at my campaign structure exported directly from the adwords editor.
Why target generic accommodation keywords?
Mainly because I’m interested in seeing if the margin is there. It’s also natural starting point. If costs are too high, or the margin is not there, it is a more logical process to sub divide and chase the long tail from this point.
My predictions are:
- Generic accommodation keywords are going to be expensive. Probably to expensive to generate a decent profit margin.
- Generic accommodation keywords have the advantage of landing the user on a page with more choices. Which in theory should increase the change of a conversion.
Will the increased number of conversions counter balance the higher click costs. I doubt it but that’s the whole point, to experiment.
Bids & Targeting
So far the campaign targets most of Queenslands most popular destinations. I’ve set the max bid to $0.30 so it’s quite likely I wont even get 1 impression after I go live.
Upload & Go Live
When your working with large campaigns it’s critical to segment campaigns and adgroups and not overload one particular campaign with to much data. If you try and upload it all in one hit the adwords editor will crap out and you will be stuck with errors that can be difficult to get rid of. Just say you upload 80% of a massive campaign and it stuffs up, if you then go and try and delete it so its smaller, it will stuff up again, because its trying to delete to many ad groups and keywords, get it?
So segment carefully and upload in blocks. To be honest, this is actually a better approach as well because your going to take more care with your campaign.