Shop Codes PPC experiment statistics revealed

20th November, 2007 9 Comments

When I cashed a cheque for �17,100 that Google sent me last week, I knew how I was going to spend that extra �100 on the first rainy day. So on Monday, I dusted off the cobwebs of my Google Adwords account and set about creating my first PPC campaign since 12th April 2007.

I’d said to a few of my fellow code peers at a4uexpo and online that all my traffic is via SEO and I no longer take part in PPC as I haven’t seen any evidence to suggest it is beneficial. So I told them that I’d pick a random day and join in and then take an indepth look at the stats.

I was to measure how many visitors I can buy for �100.

How much time �100 will buy me.

How much revenue that �100 investment would make me.

However, I also had to measure the benefit. And so I’ve collated traffic and commission figures for the day previous (Sunday 18th November) and one week back (Monday 12th November).

So here’s the backdrop. Sunday 18th November 2007 was Shop Codes highest traffic day ever, since launch. All this traffic was from SEO with Google contributing to over 1,000 of those visitors.

So to experiment on the following day was not probably the wisest choice as traffic may be on the increase and I may find the best is yet to come. And so it was. Yesterday Google (organic) delivered an extra 168 unique visitors, to make Monday 19th my highest ever.

I created one new campaign in Adwords that was to simply highlight that Shop Codes has 140 exclusive codes and I targeted keywords such as “voucher codes”, “discount codes”, “promotional codes” and “coupon codes”.

The minimum spend I was allowed to pay was �0.25. I set the daily budget to �300 and the maximum cost at �0.30.

As soon as the ad went live, it appeared in the top slot in the main part of the Google page. So within minutes I had maximum exposure.

Then soon after I could see that an affiliate network had started clicking on my advert. During my campaign an IP address of Affiliate Window appeared in my analytics.

The stats say that the first visit was at 15:10:53 for the search term “dixons discount codes”. The green url in the image is the url clicked on. The second url is the landing url. If the url is appended with “?clid” then that shows it is a paid-for link on Google.

The statistics summarise that this visitor stayed on my site for 2 hours 18 minutes and 28 seconds.

It shows they clicked on those adverts that were costing me �0.25 a click each, 26 times in those 138 minutes.

It shows that searches included “dixons discount codes”, “dixsons discount codes”, “shop codes” and “voucher codes”.

Some clicks were within seconds of each other, which suggests the visitor was using their browser back button and re-clicking.

After only a few hours, my campaign was at �95.91 and before closing it down completely I reduced the cost to �0.10 to see if the ad would show at all. It didn’t and so at 18:14 the last paid-for link was clicked and normal SEO traffic resumed.

It was not until this morning that I could assess the success or failure of paying for an extra 380 visitors. Was it a success?

Well, yes and no.

On Monday 19th November 2007 I received my highest days level of commission received this year.

Not surprising when I’ve joust bought 380 visitors but remember my organic traffic is on the up with Google organic sending an extra 250 visitors a day compared to just seven days ago.

OK, if I made the most money ever this year, why wasn’t it a success?

Well, the total commission was only �8 more than what I made on 12th November. That day there was no PPC.

I also made one fewer sale on Monday 19th than I did on Sunday 18th. That day there was no PPC.

So, �95 bought me only �8 worth of extra commission.

What else can I measure? Well, lets take a look at my RSS and newsletter subscriber figures. Did those 380 people contribute to an uplift in sign-ups? No, in the last two days I’ve had 5 new subscribers on both days.

So, I’ve summarised that I don’t receive any material gain from PPC. Yes, I’ll make more money (just) but I’d rather carry on making money without spending �95 a day. Or the �89 it would have been if a network wasn’t so keen on my site.

25k debt to 50k in the bank in 10 months

16th October, 2007 17 Comments

People make New Years resolutions for fun. I’ve stuck to mine when it was clear I had no other choice. It was 6:30pm on New Years Eve 2006 and I logged onto my bank online to see how much I could spend at the New Years Eve party at the Middlesbrough working mans club, with my friends and family.

I got a shock. It told me that I was over my over-draft limit and so I had no cash available. The worrying thing was that my next pay cheque wouldn’t arrive until the end of January and I still had rent and other bills to pay well before then.

Fortunately my Shop Codes site reported excellent traffic and sales from October and so my business bank account had a few thousand sat in it. I transferred some money over as emergency cover and then set about to rebuild my finances.

On the 4th January I sent myself an email detailing the debt I was in that included one overdraft, one loan and six credit cards. I wasn’t concerned about the loan but it was the credit cards. One card alone raised its interest rate from 9% to 16% and the other banks were soon to follow.

Each month I was paying a significant amount of money just paying off the interest and so my debt wasn’t getting cleared. In fact I was spending so much meeting minimum repayments that I had to keep using the credit cards to shop for essentials.

As my business had been regularly bringing in good revenue for a few months I gambled that my bank would give me a big loan to cover all my outstanding debts, including a �9,000 debt to themselves.

So I applied for a �25,000 loan during January online rather than seeing someone at the bank face-to-face. If I failed the application I’d have to get in touch with a debt management agency. As it was, I got an instant approval and the money was soon in my account.

It would be repaid over 3 years. My repayment would be less than the minimum payments I was paying towards my credit cards. And it would cost over �2,500. So I was effectively �27,000 in debt at the start of this year.

Instantly I paid off all my credit cards and attempted to close four. That wasn’t without complication. So I still have a few unused with credit balances.

I then closed all my online accounts where I could pay for anything with a previous credit card, such as gambling, book clubs or magazine subscriptions.

I am now only 26 months away from being debt free. That sounds a lot but it would have been 260 months minimum in the previous situation.

The picture is also far more rosier. I don’t actually struggle any month now and get by on my day job monthly pay. I’ve also had three fantastic holidays this year including back-to-back holidays to Portugal and Ibiza and a two-week stay in Hong Kong.

I’ve only had to use a credit card once in the whole of this year and that was to fund my Middlesbrough season ticket at �400.

A milestone came for me in September when I realised just how far I’d turned the corner. For the first time ever my total amount of money sat in my bank accounts covered all of my debts and more. So I was above water albeit that some would be paid to the tax man at some point.

Plus, with the news that Google are sending me a cheque for �17,000 in the coming weeks, my business bank account will soon have well over �50,000 sat there until the next tax bill is due.

�50,000 is a milestone that I’ll be quietly celebrating with cash up front, with my friends at the working mans club.

Accounting Case Study

Shop Codes California Dreamin

20th September, 2007 0 Comments

Shop Codes visitors arrive from 96 different countries. So as well as promoting those in Great Britain I’ve trialled diversifying into other lucrative markets.

Outside of the UK and USA, my visitors are mainly from Europe, Canada and Australia. Germany and France make up most of the European market.

I contacted Webgains to see if they could help me find a few European merchants I could promote. Their German counterpart got in touch and was keen to send me lots of promotional coupons for merchants in that market.

So using Babelfish, I translated the offers and built a couple of pages. Now I had a dilemna. Was the wisest thing to try and translate the German into my own English version or paste verbatim the German text. I ended up with a mish mash and the page promoting a herrenausstatter.de Coupon Code is the 5th result in the German Google for the same search term.

I’ve been building pages in German yet the closest I’ve come to learning German is from episodes of ‘Auf Wiedersehen Pet‘ and those seventies movies with the American ‘actors’ with German voices and English subtitles. So I quickly realised that promoting European merchants may not be the wisest choice. Geographically I should expand there but I have to follow the quick wins. So USA was the next target.

This morning I noticed in my referrer logs that I had two visitors searching for “20% code classiccloseouts” and “coupon code classiccloseouts.com”. As this screen grab shows I am top result in Google.com for the term “classiccloseouts.com $10 code”. This is a US only merchant on the CJ network that always has coupons to promote.

Both visitors came from California but the stats also show that they didn’t stick around for more than a second, if that. All the same, World domination has started with that red speck to the left.

If Google UK decide to drop my site in the rankings in the coming weeks, I’ll be doing some ‘California dreamin on such a winter’s day’.

Analytics Case Study Google Shop Codes

‘Save Befuddle’ group tops 50 members

18th September, 2007 1 Comment

50 friends, colleagues and Internet marketeers have joined the ‘Save Befuddle’ group on Facebook. The group was created as a morale boosting exercise as my site Befuddle hit its lowest ever patch. I needed quick solutions and support to save my site within a self-imposed 10-day deadline.

As reported on Facebook, this blog and Affiliates4u, Befuddle had been punished by Google for distributing Malware. A search in Google for say “Victoria Beckham drunk”, returned “Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer!”

Traffic has nose dived. Google organic was sending me approximately 1,000 unique visitors a day and now it’s just a handful.

The site is still receiving a few hundred visitors each day, down from just short of 2,000 visitors.

Not knowing where the problem came from I removed all US based third party advertising and counters. This left the pages looking terribly ugly so I deleted all celebrity pages. This drastic course of action also meant I didn’t have to single handedly have to manually check each one. Some celebrities had 100 pages in their own sections.

I’ve posted up some new drunk celebs pages in a different directory and used the opportunity to display larger size images along with some YouTube clips to make the site more sticky.

I’ve also added Google AdSense to the pages so that not all revenue is lost. AdSense is generating about $6 a day with the current levels of traffic, which is a lot more than the flashing advertising ever did.

On Sunday I submitted my site for review at StopBadware.org where the site is currently in the process of being reviewed.

Thanks for the support here, on Affiliates4u and Facebook.

Befuddle will be saved and will come out stronger.