Penny Profit Per Paid Click

26th November, 2007 4 Comments

I receive 26p for each visitor that arrives at my Shop Codes site. I know this based on the last 30 days unique visitor numbers using Google Analytics and commission totals using the Affmeter software tool for the same time period. In that time, 29 days worth of traffic was all from SEO or my own newsletter subscribers. Only one day was from Google pay-per-click.

In my last post (PPC experiment statistics revealed) I reported that I didn’t see much benefit in promoting my site via Pay-Per-Click as I wasn’t seeing a clear return on my investment. With PPC spend at 25p per click, it is now clear that it’s not worthwhile, when I make 26p for each visitor.

That’s one pence return. Now I may spend 1p to make 1p but I’m not spending £250 to see a return of just £260.

Shop Codes doesn’t use iframes on it’s site, so the 26p per visitor may be a lot less than other sites operating in the same arena.

However, it is a figure I am very happy at. I have no benchmarks to say whether it’s good or bad but for every 100 visitors landing at my site I am seeing a healthy conversion and profit of £26.

That 26p figure was almost blown through the roof this weekend when someone spent £56,688.33 at Empire Direct. In theory a company could have been kitting out a venue with 20 LCD tv’s, taking advantage of the Empire Direct 10% Voucher Code.

As it was, Marie Carrol of Empire Direct, confirmed this morning that the sale has been cancelled.

“There was no payment details entered. So it looks like the customer was either testing to see if the discount code worked or messing around.”

If the sale had gone through, it would have been a very Merry Christmas indeed.

My commission per site visitor would also have shot up to 31p. Then at least I’d make a 6p profit if I were to advertise on Google.

Affiliate Marketing Shop Codes

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.

  1. I was to measure how many visitors I can buy for £100.
  2. How much time £100 will buy me.
  3. 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.

Analytics Case Study Shop Codes

top secret 5 point post-a4uexpo plan

29th October, 2007 3 Comments

Between my massage on the first day of the a4uexpo and the bar closing at the post-party, I’d already made my five point plan to keep me busy and profitable over the next six months.

It wasn’t a hard decision to come to, as I’d already started talking to a few people close to home about my future plans. It was just that the sessions at the Excel and the subsequent chats at the Fox and Novotel hotel bar, confirmed my ideas.

So this is what I’m doing in the coming weeks and months to enhance my business, which is currently focussed on Shop Codes UK.

BRAND

Shop Codes is 18 months old and is now known around the affiliate industry by my presence on the Affiliates4u site. It was clear to me though that some people at some networks didn’t know much about me or my site.

At the moment I have three brands. There is “Ray Theakston”, the cheeky little Northern chap. There’s “Befuddle” which is my company name, pseudonym and name of my celebrity site that made its first affiliate sale on 25th October 2000.

Then there’s “Shop Codes”. You wouldn’t think that would be a difficult brand to master but in this post already I’ve used both “Shop Codes” and “Shop Codes UK”. Did you spot that? I have recently experimented with targeting non-UK merchants and so the brand will be important to tie down. Especially for where I want to drive the site in 2008 and 2009.

DESIGN

I’ve a designer working on redesigning my site to make it more professional whilst keeping the flavour of it’s ‘back-bedroom’ roots. Only last week he showed me a printout of a potential new home page. I liked what I saw. The design is not too different to where the site is today.

I didn’t want it to look too corporate but importantly I didn’t want to lose its good conversation rate. It was only the first draft too and so I look forward to further iterations.

CMS

I manually edit my site by hand and whilst it’s built using php, I still have to manually edit the files when the voucher codes expire. With the growing number of codes, I’ve found this is too time consuming, particularly at the end of the month, when typically 10% of existing codes expire.

So, I’ve had a meeting with a developer and talked through my requirements for a content management system. The plan is to have a simple solution in place for the first pass so that we can see what content is delivered by automated processes. As a part time affiliate, a CMS system will provide a lot of ease and will move me forward to my fourth and fifth plans.

MOBILE

If only I knew session 10 existed I wouldn’t have had to chew so many ears for the first two nights and day about lack of mobile advancement by the merchants and networks.

I was amazed by some of the negativity about mobile but PriceRunner seem to be doing well out of it, according to Gary Goodman, MD of ValueClick.

Many are clearly not thinking about mobile in 2007 and I bet when I see them at a4uexpo in 2008 they won’t be thinking about mobile for 2009. However, in those ‘lost’ years consumers are spending millions on mobile phone content and services.

I’m staking my claim for a bit of the plot as I type. I’ve a company working on developing my Shop Codes website for mobile. I took the opportunity to speak to several networks on how I can monetise the platform and extract revenue from my exclusive codes. These talks will obviously progress more seriously, rather than over a beer, once I’ve launched on that platform.

UGC

I’ve currently no interactivity on my Shop Codes site and so I shall be expanding on User Generated Content. I don’t just want methods for users to submit codes that I can then approve but I want it for B2B purposes. I often get sent emails from merchants to promote codes. However, they don’t have affiliate schemes and so sometimes I don’t promote them.

With mobile there will be plenty of opportunity for user-generated content too with text messaging of codes.

BRAND (20%), DESIGN (20%), CMS (20%), MOBILE (20%), UGC (20%)

There’s a lot of work to be done. Isn’t it the case that If i make a start or improve on each of those by 20%, I’ll see an 80% benefit?

There’s no timetable for the work to start and end but if I can have them all in place by Spring 2008, that will give me 6 months to assess what improvements they’ve brought me in terms of traffic, loyalty, revenue, exclusive content and industry respect.

I’ll then go into a4uexpo 2008 with a pad ready to draw up my next five-point plan. See you there!

a4uexpo Mobile Shop Codes

Do you deliver to Hong Kong?

20th October, 2007 1 Comment

Often when you go to Spain you think ‘I could live here and update my sites from my laptop’. Forgetting the fact that you can’t see the screen for the sun glare.

Well I had one of those moments whilst drinking a nice chilled cider at the Waterfront pub on Lamma Island, Hong Kong. I was taking advantage of the free wifi and one afternoon quietly updated my site whilst overlooking the sea.

And I was thinking this is the life. At the time it was too hot at 34 degrees and it was an ideal time to do a bit of work until the sun cooled later in the afternoon.

Just as I was wondering if I could replicate my Shop Codes site for the Hong Kong market, I received a message from Stefan Janssens of YesAsia. Via Facebook, he offered me the chance of a meeting and company visit.

I didn’t take up the offer as it was approaching the end of my holiday but I did some small research on the shopping habits and spends of the people of Hong Kong.

So YesAsia was strongly in my mind for one of the shops I could promote for that market. I also thought designer petwear would be a good type of product to market because they do love their dogs on Lamma Island.

Then when I returned from holiday, Webgains announced the launch of YesStyle.com and Stefan kindly set me up with an Exclusive code.

All I needed now was a domain and I acquired Shop Codes HK last week.

So, that’s where I’m at. I won’t be launching the site fully until my other developments are in place. In the meantime, there is a holding page and a sign-up form for my RSS feed.

Now all I need to research is which merchants deliver to Hong Kong and this is where I want your help. If you’re a merchant that targets or delivers to Hong Kong, I’d like to know.

You can either post comments here or send me an email message via the affiliate network channels.

I’m interested to know what the delivery charges are for instance.

This project may or may not be a success. Ultimately I believe it will be if I do put the time and effort into it. I am buoyed though by the recent sales I’ve made for the German market.

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