Campaign Setup – Hotels Combined PPC Affiliate Experiment

Posted by: Robert Austin on Nov 2, 2009 | 8 Comments

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

Posted by: Robert Austin on Nov 1, 2009 | No Comments

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!

More PPC Affiliate Experiments In The Pipe

Posted by: Robert Austin on May 19, 2009 | One Comment

Well, I think I almost gave up on this blog. But I’ve had so many emails from interested people that I will try and keep some experiments going.

To be honest, I’m kind of depressed about the whole travel affiliate thing. I’ve been doing it for a long time before I wrote this blog and these days it can be a lot of work with little return ( or the risk profile is to high ). My favorite traffic source ( PPC ), just doesn’t work like she used to in travel

But travel is not alone. PPC profit margins in many industries are becoming over saturated and unprofitable. I’ve recently done some major work for clients in the ‘make money’ and clickbank affiliate verticals and I can tell you, its a hard margin. Making a profit off Clickbank products with Thin PPC is pretty bloodie hard.

I know what some of you are going to say, making money with affiliate products and PPC is possible, I do it every day! Ok sure, you can make profits…  but if you want it to work you need to build sites, networks, seo, social. You need to capture and loop your leads through multiple cycles. My point is it’s a lot of labor, you accept all the risk, and the profits are still probably small. So if I just went and worked for clients and got paid $100 an hour, wouldnt I just be better off that way?

Probably… But thats not as fun

So, I should probably come up with some more experiments. I think i’ll run a $1k/1 month campaign on hotelscombined.com. I’ve been looking at this travel affiliate product for awhile and I think it’s unique pay on click/lead model may create a viable ppc arbitrage opportunity.