SpeedPPC

In my April training for SpeedPPC members, I showed you how to diagnose whether your PPC campaign had low ad impressions and what steps to take. Because if you’re marketing a potentially profitable offer, then I want you to be able to reach past the obstacles and grab those profits!

Following the video training, I got a couple of comic requests for the next training on “How to know when to give up on your PPC Campaign”!

Only I got to thinking, this is a serious question for any affiliate marketer – it was just comically phrased.

And if you were to put all the effort in to rescue a campaign that frustratingly couldn’t be saved, how discouraging is it when it comes to starting your next campaign? What if it’s PPC groundhog day?

Most of what I talked about in that training video was based on working with the research you’d already done (I hope), and going over the results.

Now I’d like to go back a giant step and take you through an example of how you could conduct that initial research, before you even sniff at AdWords, so that you’re not plagued with doubts down the track, thinking did I pick a dud and when should I throw in the towel and try my luck with another product?

My main aim is that you finish reading this article and know:

How to get the information you need to make money from a product, in advance of you starting your PPC campaigns, and be confident knowing that you’ve given yourself the best possible shot of reaping profits from the offer.

To achieve this, I’ll be demonstrating a 4-step combination and in the final step I’ll be zeroing in on 5 detailed methods to carve out a competitive advantage in any niche:

• Step 1 – Find a Niche with Google Insights
• Step 2 – Confirm your Niche with Real Intelligence
• Step 3 – Source an Affiliate Network & Product
• Step 4 – Identifying Opportunities & Advantages with PPC Bully 2.0
• Method 1: Reveal competitors’ top ads and keywords for a particular offer
• Method 2: Find all ads (on any offer) for your chosen keywords
• Method 3: Expose all the ads and keywords for one specific advertiser
• Method 4: Cross Advertiser Research – Discover all offers marketed by a successful affiliate advertiser
• Method 5: Cross Network Searching – Identify similar successful offers on other networks

This is a real example with plenty of screenshots, so feel free to follow it through yourself. Let’s get started.

Step 1 – Find a Niche with Google Insights

Normally you do need a starting point and if you’ve got a particular field that interests you, then great! It helps to work with an offer you’re actively interested in.

I’m going to start from the vaguest possible point here and just open Google Insights. It’s freely available – just Google it :)

The blurb pretty much describes it – “See what the world is searching for”.

Setting your filter from the home page of Google Insights.

Now I want to see the latest trending so I’ve chosen 2009, and then I decided to browse the categories to see what was of interest to me. I settled on Lifestyles. I didn’t enter any keywords, I wasn’t sure what to enter at this stage and I wanted to see what it brought back for me.

View the top searches and rising searches for a category in Google Insights.

At the top of the Top Searchers list we see “baby”. Having two close friends about to produce a couple of these, I decided to follow through on this and I clicked on the number 1 “Baby” search.

This is what I got and I’ll draw your attention to the rising searches on the right hand side. Baby names 2009 is leading way out front and it’s risen a whopping 1600%. Aside from that, there are also 3 rising searches for baby registries.

I’m still not sure how at the moment, but I am thinking how can I get in on this baby boom?

Drilling down further into the Top Searches.

When I drill down further by clicking on “baby names 2009″, I see the top searches.

Drilling down further into the Rising Searches.

There are plenty of rising searches with strong growth. I drill down further into one of the baby registry searches and I see again further evidence of rising growth.

Top searches related to “baby registry”.

From Google Insights I can also see the regions of growth which gives me a great starting list of countries I can market to (assuming the merchant I decide to promote supplies to these areas). You can also click the “City” link on the top right to view by city for even more precise targeting.

Find out the best regions to target in Google Insights.

Although I don’t know which affiliate product I’m going to promote yet, this is fine. I’ve got a great base of evidence to start shopping around for the best product for me to promote. I’ve found a field where there are plenty of prospective customers, growth and demand – in a variety of countries.

I usually find this is the best order to go about finding a product, rather than settling on a product, without any research, then trying to find the market (if any exists).

I’m going to take “baby names” and plug it into an intelligence tool so I can find out possible ways I can work with it. Here goes…

Step 2 – Confirm your Niche with Real Intelligence

I’m now at the stage where I want more evidence to support what I’ve found in Google Insights. For this, I need up-to-date intelligence from the coal face.

For this demonstration I’m using PPC Bully 2.0, a competitive intelligence or “spy tool” that gives me insider knowledge that I can use to pull the covers off competitor campaigns and make sure that I launch the best possible marketing campaign I can.

I begin by entering “baby names” as a keyword search into PPC Bully 2.

Enter the Top Search from Google Insights into PPC Bully 2.

Immediately, my eyes are drawn to baby names with over 3 million searches. Plenty of volume, plenty of potential profit. Let’s click further!

See the top PPC ads for the Top Search from Google Insights.

Here I can now see the top 6 ads based on PPC Bully’s PI or profitability indicator which basically tells me how successful an ad has been. The way PPC Bully rates the PI is based on the number of days and the percentage the ad was seen, against how many days since it was last seen. While nothing is 100%, this is a great indication for me since an affiliate ad that’s shown for a long period of time in a high position is likely to be a successful one.

So for example, PPC Bully is telling me the first ad has been shown 98 times out of 98 and it’s been shown right until the present time.

Also the CPCs are only $0.36 which is very reasonable.

Now that I’ve done some initial research, I want to take a peek at what affiliate products I can fit to this market.

Step 3 – Source an Affiliate Network & Product

Unfortunately, when I looked at ClickBank and Commission Junction (CJ), there weren’t any products specifically on “baby names” that I could promote.

Another consideration I had was that the long term potential of baby names for recurring income wasn’t great. It occurred to me that promoting baby products where you could have continual and repeat customers would be a better source of constant income in the long run. I could still take advantage of baby names and baby registry searches since people searching for these terms would be in the same market for baby products – thinking laterally and all….

So I searched in ClickBank under “baby”, but every search result had gravity in single figures and it put me off a bit. If not a lot of affiliates are making sales on these products, they’re not ventures I want to risk on a limited budget.

I then went to Commission Junction and this was very positive. Check it out.

Search results from “baby” in Commission Junction.

The fourth listing for Land of Nod looks fantastic, both the 3 month and 7 day earnings per click bode well for profitable long-term campaigns.

Commission Junction information page for The Land of Nod.

I’m happy with the finer details they’ve provided above and the web site itself is attractive and follows Google quality guidelines as you can see below.

Checking out The Land of Nod web site.

So now I want to see what other advertisers are doing to promote Land of Nod and what keywords they are having success with.

Step 4 – Identifying Opportunities & Advantages with PPC Bully

Method 1 – Reveal competitors’ top ads and keywords for a particular offer

I go back to PPC Bully 2 and I enter “landofnod” in the search box and search under destination URLs.

Searching PPC Bully for destination URLs containing “landofnod”.

These are my first few results listings that PPC Bully returns. I’ve again filtered it by greater than a 28 profitability indicator, because I want to see ads that have at least been running successfully for at least a month.

Land of Nod pay per click ads with a Profitability Indicator (PI) greater than 28 from PPC Bully.

This is great stuff!

Here I’m seeing examples of ads that have:

1. High profitability indicators (greater than 28 so they’ve been advertised for at least a month)
2. Been shown on a high percentage of searches – see the found/searched column at the end
3. Last been seen on 30th May which means they are still running (at the time I wrote this)
4. Achieved relatively high ad positions for the most part – 192 total ads ranged from ad positions 1-10, so the majority are appearing on the first search results page of Google
5. Specific keywords and long tail search terms that I can capitalize on further for better quality score and placement

Scrolling down the list, it becomes clear that the longer tail search terms still have plenty of searches, but at a lower bid cost. In this screen, PPC Bully also shows me what the going rate is on clicks for these ads and keywords.

I know that if I can target an ad at each keyword and product, I’ll have a huge advantage over anyone else currently. There are very few ads that are precisely targeted back to the keywords.

This is plenty to get me off to a great start on composing my PPC campaigns.

Before I export the results to CSV, I’m going to filter the list down further to pick out the very best ads.

PPC Bully filters based on PI, Search Volume, % Found, Affiliate.

So above you can see, I’ve kept my minimum profitability indicator at 28, then I’ve added:

1. Search volume of greater than 500 searchers per month. You can set this higher if you wish. There is the possibility that Google may de-activate ads with lower search volumes, however I’ve also seen some uncommon searches yield great conversions.
2. I’m also going to be brave and filter the ads that have been presented over 90% of the searches, so I’m just seeing the best of the best.

I end up with a list of 167 ads and keywords that I can export directly from PPC Bully and start working with in Excel.

Method 2 – Find all ads across offers for your chosen keywords

Another way I can research my campaign further within PPC Bully is to drill down into particular keywords.

So far, I’ve just looked at other Land of Nod ads, but I also want to check out the other ads that are being shown for the top keywords.

For example, one of the most highly searched phrases was “maxi-cosi”.

Maxi-Cosi ad/keyword example with search volume over 1m and PPC Bully PI of 44.

To see other advertisers for this search term, I’ll click on the keyword link which then expands to the page below.

Maxi-Cosi PPC ads listed from highest to lowest PI in PPC Bully.

I then clicked on profitability indicator to sort the ads from best to worst in PPC Bully.

I noticed something very interesting. When I sorted by ad position, the ads ranked at number 1 and 2 weren’t shown very often at all. Their performance was very inconsistent.

If I sorted the list by the ads that were shown consistently, the ad ranking wasn’t as high.

My deduction from this would be that the highest ranking ads aren’t necessarily the most profitable. So I’d want to experiment with my ad positions as well to achieve the most profitable space.

This list of top ads for Maxi-Cosi is also another confirmation for me that Land of Nod is a good choice to promote.

I’m going to export these from PPC Bully so I’ve got more ad copy to play with, because I don’t want to copy the existing Land of Nod ads word for word. I’ll use them as a base and then I want to do better.

Method 3 – Find all the ads and keywords for a particular advertiser

The other way I can turn my data a different angle in PPC Bully is to drill down further on a particular advertiser, and check out all their ads and keywords.

The third listing above for Baby Earth I happened to notice in my previous Commission Junction shortlist, so I’m going to check out the ads and keywords that are working well for Baby Earth.

So I search for Baby Earth in PPC Bully under destination URLs.

PPC Bully search results of PPC ads with Baby Earth in the destination URL.

This has given me some valuable new information.

Some of these long tail search terms including brand names are an average cost per click of $0.05.

This is dramatically less (in certain cases a few dollars) than some of the same brand names on their own, and of course it’s far more targeted, so guess what I’m going to be bidding on!

I can also single out a particular ad and ask PPC Bully to show me all the keywords associated with this ad.

Use PPC Bully to uncover all the keywords an advertiser is bidding on for a particular ad.

So here I have a list of 45 keywords that the advertiser is bidding on, and in response showing the “Maclaren Strollers” ad.

I’m seeing opportunity straight away here. I know I can target my ads to each product automatically using SpeedPPC. In fact, I’m already seeing my seed keywords “maclaren” and “mclaren” paired with an expansion list containing xt, triumph, quest, etc.

If you were searching for a “Maclaren XT Techno”, which ad would you be more likely to follow – one headlined “Maclaren Strollers” or “Maclaren XT Techno”? The more specific you can be to the searcher’s query, the better.

You see this type of research is not just about finding opportunities, it’s about identifying advantages. Not just what your competitors are doing well, but how you can do it better.

I’ll be exporting these ads and keywords for Baby Earth as well so I can build a complete campaign that’s guided by the “best of” from the top advertisers in my niche.

In addition, I can also click on the information button next to any ad in PPC Bully to open up specific ad information.

View specific ad information for any ad in PPC Bully.

And this will lead me onto my next method.

Method 4: Cross Advertiser Research – Find all offers marketed by a successful affiliate advertiser

Continued from the above screenshot, I now have the affiliate URL of a successful advertiser in the baby products niche.

I bet they’re successful in other niches as well.

What I did next was plug their domain back into PPC Bully using a destination URL search. So basically, bring me back everything (not just in baby stuff) that this affiliate is promoting.

Enter the competitors’ domain into the destination URL of PPC Bully.

PPC Bully returns all the other offers this affiliate is promoting.

Look what I got back. Very diverse and looking extremely profitable! The profitability indicators are high, each ad is shown regularly and up to the minute with fairly low bid costs. Obviously I’m seeing the blueprint of a highly successful affiliate.

This is one blueprint you’d be silly not to follow, PPC Bully has practically handed it to you on a silver platter. By searching on the domain of a successful advertiser, you can often find goldmines in other niches that you can also promote successfully.

Method 5: Cross Network Searching – Identify similar successful offers on other networks

Now on a similar vein, let’s say I want to look at other offers to market baby products. Perhaps I can look at doing a comparison or review page that offers visitors the best deal through multiple merchants.

I can then search for “baby products” in PPC Bully 2 under a keyword search. PPC Bully has access to 70 networks at this stage, so I can find other profitable opportunities across networks.

PPC Bully has over70 affiliate networks included so you can find similar offers.

One of the most popular searches was for “Avent Baby Products” so I’ve pulled up the ad creative for these search terms. When I look at the Affiliate Networks, I see there are several opportunities with Amazon, Azoogle, Commission Junction, LinkShare and Target.

I decide since I’m already registered and about to market one Commission Junction product (or a few thanks to the affiliate in method 4), I’ll choose CJ and filter the list. That gives me one listing for www.baby-wise.com.

A similar product that’s worth investigating on PPC Bully.

Now, I’m not that impressed by the stats on this one, but I’m going to dig deeper in PPC Bully. This is one that most people would look at and move on, and sometimes there’s a good reason for this. Other times it’s a great opportunity for you so don’t be scared to put the magnifying glass to it. Because I already know this niche is profitable, I’m willing to investigate further because I already have strong evidence that there’s opportunity here.

PPC Bully has various checks that you can apply to see how the ad has performed over time and what the ad’s distribution is. I’m going to use these to see if I can come up with a good diagnosis on why this ad/advertiser is not successful, given the popularity of the search term. More importantly, I want to see if I can turn it into a winner with some good “intel”.

In the first graph, I can see that the ad has had a steady ranking around position 4 which is promising. On the top left of the chart, you can see options to view the ads position over 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, 6 month and all time. This is also great if you want to view the seasonality of a particular offer for a long-term marketing plan.

The green dots are when the ad was shown and the red on the bottom of the graph is when the ad was not shown when it could’ve been. As you can see, there were a lot of missed opportunities over the past month.

See an ad’s position over time in PPC Bully “Checks”.

I’m now going to look at the ads distribution over each day of the week.

View PPC Bully charts of the ads distribution per day.

Well, this is interesting. Weekends are definitely peak time with the Monday and Friday on either side also being busy. PPC Bully is showing me that mid week appears to be a slight lull. This is going to help me focus my budget. I definitely want to take advantage of the additional searches on weekends. I’m also going to start my campaign on the weekend to try and get some high CTRs first up to help with Quality Score.

Next let’s look at the hours. Wow!

Similarly, view PPC Bully charts of the ads distribution down to the hour.

This is mind boggling. This ad is only showing from midnight and lasting up until about 7:30am. Now, this could possibly mean that this is when the mums and prospective mums are up shopping, but I doubt it. Given the trend of the bars and the fact that it peters down to nothing for the rest of the day, I’m betting they are using up their budget early and the ad is not being shown for the majority of the day, hence why the found/searched ration was so low on PPC Bully.

Their ad could be perfectly profitable, if only it was shown! I feel a bit sorry for this advertiser. If they had PPC Bully, they could see where they’re going wrong. As it stands, they’ll possibly give up never knowing why it didn’t work for them.

That’s another great thing about competitive intelligence tools like PPC Bully, you can use it to check on your own marketing and see how you stack up to the competition.

Now, on that note, I’d just like to show you an example of healthy distribution on a PPC Bully graph.

An example of good ad distribution per hour in PPC Bully Checks.

I’m showing you this as well because this is what you can use to plan your ad scheduling on Google AdWords. Say I saw a huge spike from 10:00pm to midnight. Then I might choose to bid more during those times, at the very least I’d want to make sure my budget lasted until the end of the day and I had enough left to take advantage of the peak.

So there are two lessons in this method:

1. Use the main keyword/s and search across affiliate networks to identify other possible opportunities, particularly if you are using bridge pages with comparisons or reviews
2. Be sure to use the “Checks” link in PPC Bully to check on your own progress, as well as competitors. This will help you identify where you can beat your competitors, and when!

Combined Knowledge from Google Insights and PPC Bully

Thanks for staying with me this far! As you’ve seen, you can use great tools to maximum advantage by not just finding potential opportunities, but establishing your advantages so you can do it better, and bring in a heap of money while you’re at it (without wasting so much on trial and error).

After researching potential products in both Google Insights and PPC Bully 2.0, we now know:

• How to uncover profitable niches using Google Insights
• How to find the top searches and rising search terms within our niche
• How to use intelligence such as PPC Bully to confirm the potential of your niche
• When and how to source an affiliate network and product
• Which competitors’ ads are profitable for a particular offer or keyword
• What keywords competitors are using to draw people to their ads
• What other offers can be marketed using those same profitable keywords
• The going rate or average CPCs on those keywords
• Which affiliate network those products are on
• How to identify similar successful offers on other networks
• The seasonal trend on a particular affiliate offer
• What are the best times to schedule your ads
• What global regions and cities you should target your ads to
• How to find another affiliate’s blueprint to lead you onto other profitable offers

This is a truckload of knowledge to have before you even launch your PPC campaigns! If you’re armed with this intel beforehand, you can be confident in your marketing and you won’t be as tempted to give up just short of the profit line.

I hope this has given you helpful, practical information you can use to find and research money-making offers from the get go.

PPC Bully 2 will be released on 9th June 2009 at 12:00pm Eastern Time and we have a fantastic training bonus pack available below.

You can watch the video and check out PPC Bully for yourself here.

UPDATE: The difference in method between affiliate marketers and non-affiliate marketers

I’ve added this to the PPC Bully case study in response to queries on how you’d use a spy tool if you weren’t affiliate marketing; or if you were only affiliate marketing.

There is common information to PPC campaigns that you’d want to dig out, regardless of your purpose and that’s usually the keywords and ads that your competitors are using.

As either an affiliate or non-affiliate, you always want to:

• Understand the environment you’ll be competing in
• See what keywords (and their traffic) are working for the competition
• View the top ads (and average CPCs) that your competitors are using to get their profits
• Find out when the best time is to place your ads in front of your market
• Use all of the above to bring in your own profits

For non-affiliate marketers:

The best way to find this out is to search PPC Bully 2.0 using:

1. A keyword search eg. “ppc bully”- enter main keywords and then drill down further from there to find more
2. Leverage that search by seeing who the competition is for those keywords, then clicking deeper into their details to see what other keywords and ads they are using (and most importantly how those are performing)
3. If you have a particular competitor in mind – then try a URL search, eg. Domain.com to view the competitors activity including keywords, ads, when those ads are being shown and seasonal trending
4. Don’t forget to enter this competitors name as a keyword search as well to find other keywords and ads that their other competitors are bidding on

For affiliate marketers:

Steps 1- 4 steps above remain the same. Then to find other affiliates’ strategies, you can:

1. Use the destination URL search to find a specific affiliate ID
2. Combine the affiliate ID with “tid” or “sid” and other common tracking ID strings to find the more experienced affiliates using tracking Ids, this is often a good filter to find choice data
3. Search direct linking ads on a specific affiliate network through the destination URL, eg. “network.com” or just “network”
4. Use the keyword search with a particular offer to find other advertisers and networks to get a great cross-section of information

As you can see, there are some similarities and differences in how to use the same tool for a different purpose. I’ll be covering this in greater detail in the bonus training video that you’ll receive when you order through our link.

See everything included in the full training bonus pack below.

PPC BULLY 2.0 – COMPLETE *TRAINING* BONUS PACK

Following on from the demonstration above, I’ve based our bonus gifts to you on further training to show you how to really use your PPC Affiliate marketing tools in conjunction with each other (so all your horses are pulling in the same direction). You’ll be able to get the maximum leverage out of PPC Bully, the ClickBank Mining tool, SpeedPPC Affiliate Pro and see some serious return on your investment.

This bonus pack is exclusive to people who order through our link, so to obtain these bonuses, simply order through our affiliate link here.

Don’t forget to clear your cookies before you order otherwise we won’t get the credit and won’t be able to give you these important bonuses.

Here is a summary of the PPC Bully 2.0 bonuses:

BONUS 1: Take advanced niche finding even further with 12 months access to our private Clickbank Mining tool. With tens of thousands of ClickBank products on offer, the ClickBank Miner is a no-fuss tool that will help you extract the profitable offers simply and easily. This is the perfect complement to PPC Bully and gives you an added advantage over other PPC Bully members.

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BONUS 3: Exclusive Bonus video demonstrating how to leverage all of the above tools so you can get the maximum result out of each one. If you’ve seen my other training videos then you know I try to give you as much information as I possibly can. This video is all about helping you to get the most profit by teaching you to use the tools at your disposal effectively (and better than you might’ve otherwise).

All you need to do is clear your cookies, and then click the link below immediately before purchasing. Then just forward your receipt to reena (AT) speedppc.com to claim these bonuses.

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