My Journey from scratch (17.08.16)

[Andy Barden]

Day 12 - 12.09.16

Monday morning and I finally have a small amount of data to work with. I let the offer run over Friday and the weekend and have seen the following

Overall spend - $66.35
Overall return - $26.8

Profit - (-$39.98) - (-59% ROI)

Lander Win - 169 Clicks
Lander Test - 49 Clicks

Conversions - (total 12)

Lander Win - Offer 1 (Test based offer) - 3 leads
Lander Test - Offer 1 - 5 Leads - (-52% ROI)

Lander Win - Offer 2 (Win based offer) - 3 leads - (-37% ROI)
Lander Test - Offer 2 - 1 Lead

If we isolate the variables that saw the conversions, it would seem that it didn't need many clicks on these sites to return a lead. If we were working with these 9 sources alone, we would be $12.55 in the green! The only annoying part of all this is that the offer with the higher conversions is less than half the rate of the other one!

As the offer is now spending too slowly, I have upped the bid rate to $0.004 to try and get to the $50 a day spend and use our budget by EOP tomorrow. Then I will have another load of data to make some decisions. Early indications show that there is profit in this campaign, I just need to get the right combo or lander and offer, on the right sources.

Will update tomorrow...

 

[Andy Barden]

Day 13 - 14.09.16

So without boring you all with the details, I am now at a point where I can optimise having spent my $200 budget on 2 landers going in rotation to 2 offers.

If you remember, I had a 'Win' based lander and offer and a 'Test' based lander and offer.

The results for the entire test are as follows

Win lander - Win offer - -30% ROI (With an increased bid this went to -23% so this is the average)

Win lander - Test offer - -75% ROI

Test lander - Win offer - -77% ROI

Test lander - Test offer - -69% ROI

Interestingly, even though the clear winner here is the 'Win' offer in terms of return, it was actually the 'Test' offer that saw more conversions (13/12) but the rate of the win offer from Clickwork7 was over double which meant it was a clear winner #moneytalks

What now???

I still don't have enough data to start day parting or cutting variables however I am now going to drop the test lander and offer. However...rather than going balls deep on the win combo, I just want to through a different 'Win' lander in rotation to the 'Win' offer and see if there is another lander that converts even higher.

That is now live and will run until close of play tomorrow with $100 budget. Once I have a winner, I will look to scale and improve on that -23% ROI!

 

[TonyB]

Great job Andy - enjoying your journey. Your background in AM shows as you're not getting discouraged and keep running the numbers.

 

[Andy Barden]

So it's been a while since I last posted I to be honest I had to drop the pop tests in favor of doing my actual job! I know, shocking right?

I am now exploring Pay Per Call and after following a guide on how to best maximise this channel, I am up and running with a couple of ads on Google.

Having taken the advise of my account manager at Ring Partner, I have built out a campaign for Furnace and Heating repairs, US wide.

My Wordpress site is set up, LP built and optimised for SEO and a good quality score. My ads are approved and I am now waiting to see some initial results. To be honest, I think my CPC is too low and as the campaign is a 'Call Only' I may well chuck this right up assuming the conversions will be high, just to get some data.

Will keep you posted

 

[internalsoul]

Best of luck Andy Barden. Will be following to check out how well it goes.

 

[T J Tutor]

So it's been a while since I last posted I to be honest I had to drop the pop tests in favor of doing my actual job! I know, shocking right?

I am now exploring Pay Per Call and after following a guide on how to best maximise this channel, I am up and running with a couple of ads on Google.

Having taken the advise of my account manager at Ring Partner, I have built out a campaign for Furnace and Heating repairs, US wide.

My Wordpress site is set up, LP built and optimised for SEO and a good quality score. My ads are approved and I am now waiting to see some initial results. To be honest, I think my CPC is too low and as the campaign is a 'Call Only' I may well chuck this right up assuming the conversions will be high, just to get some data.

Will keep you posted

Keep this going. Growing pains are part of the early stages of business. You will make this happen!

 

[Andy Barden]

Initial Pay Per Call update...

After a week of running the 'Service Experts' heating and furnace repair campaign I have the following set up in my Adwords account

6 Ad Groups - Broken out into...

Furnace Repair + City (Exact Match)
Furnace Repair + State (Broad + Phrase)

Heating Repair + City (Exact Match)
Heating Repair + State (Broad + Phrase)

Furnace Maintenance + City (Exact Match)
Furnace Maintenance + City (Broad + Phrase)

I have 9 ads that cover the keywords Furnace, Heating, Repairs and Maintenance and I am using the keyword insertion tool to add a dynamic city or state based on my keyword list in my account.

The ads are all 'Call Only' so conversion should of been high unless there was an issue. I am currently trying to get some answers from Ring Partner as to why each click in Google does not register a call their side.

CPC is very expensive as you can imagine but should come down once I get the data needed to improve my quality scores.

I have spent £108 and returned £40 so an ROI of -63% which is not great but at least I have something to work with. At the end of this week I will be going through the keywords and deleting any that are costing me. I will also go through the process of adding some negatives in to try and eradicate any unwanted impressions, causing a low CTR and in turn and lower Q score.

My current average position for the entire campaign is 3.2 which is good at this stage but it is costing me. I am convinced this offer can work but on the surface I am currently paying for clicks that are not even registering with Ring Partner.

Will update again on Friday

 

[T J Tutor]

When you are getting an ROI like that, it tells me there is action and that action can be refined to a positive ROI. Keep it going!

 

[orient33]

Have you tried Bing? From my experience with adwords, position 1 and 2 make a big difference.

Best of luck!

 

[Andy Barden]

Have you tried Bing? From my experience with adwords, position 1 and 2 make a big difference.

Best of luck!

I have not tried Bing yet as I am just getting to grips with Adwords. Will certainly be trying it in due course however

 

[Andy Barden]

09.12.16

So I have been running Pay Per Call offers with Ring Partner for a couple of weeks now and already I am in profit with one of my 3 campaigns.

Let me have a moan before I share my keys to success...

1) An Auto Insurance campaign that needs a caller to be on the phone for 2 min 30 for the payout to trigger. Nothing wrong with that. What does piss me off however is that only option 1 and 2 are tracked but option 3 is not. As well as that, it cuts the caller off after 34 seconds. You can guess which option people are pressing!!!

2) On the same offer, the caller has an option to have a call back after 1 min 45 so you have very little chance of hitting the 2 min 30 threshold. What a joke

Despite these set backs, I focused on my Furnace Repair campaign and had some promising results in week one

Spent £137, returned £58

After some tweaking and new ad creation, I went again with some 'Cold State' based ads to target the areas that would need this most. This is when I had some success

You can see that I now have 4 focused as groups with a variety of ads that mix up the message some what. At the start of this week I was using the 'Call Now' angle however even with that I was getting wasted clicks as people still thought you could click through to a site. I believe people were hitting 'Cancel' on the call prompt which lowered my conversion.

I created a new ad with the subtle change 'Press Call' and 'Hit Call Now' and the game changed completely. You can see that both these ads saw very good ROI with one being well over 100%.

This offer paused today which is most annoying but I have proved in 2 weeks that I can make money from this so feel pretty good. I will move on for the rest of December and come back to this in January

Thanks

 

[internalsoul]

Wow man. Congrats on making it green. Yeah, a small change can be a game changer. Sorry to hear that the campaign paused but since you have gathered great experience so you should do much better in your next campaigns. Keep us updated.

 

[azgold]

Wow, that was fast! Congrats on 100%+ ROI, that's awesome!

Best part? If you did it once, you can do it again.

 

[Unicorn]

Just don't stop trying and you will succeed.

 

[Pay Per Call Guru]

Awesome journey! Following this

 

[Andy Barden]

20.12.16

I trust everyone is full of Christmas cheer and getting ready for the big day.

I have spent the last 2 weeks since my Furnace campaign was paused trying to replicate the success and have had a nightmare! I am trying a shit load of ads, variations on the copy and separating my ad groups into manageable sections.

I am getting good CTR but here is my current issue...

PEOPLE ARE NOT STAYING ON THE PHONE!!!

I have tested the following offers

HVAC Now
Stair Lift
Auto Insurance (2 different networks)
Carpets and Hard Flooring
Water Damage

I have also just put a Locksmith offer live.

My issue with a couple of these offers is that I am seeing valid calls in the platform in terms of time on the phone however they are not being attributed revenue. I have 5 conversions alone on a small test for the Water Damage offer that should have revenue attributed and haven't. The network is now looking into this as it is the difference between success and total failure

I may be being naive but I am struggling to trust these people as some of my other call logs would suggest something is very wrong. I am seeing bad patterns forming and have no way to prove it.

Not a great couple of weeks and my overall ROI for this project is getting worse by the day. I will try the Locksmith offer this week as it is a pure 'Emergency' based offer that hopefully should show signs of promise and will not drop off due to Christmas.

Will update on Friday!

 

[azgold]

The network is now looking into this

Hopefully, they figure out what's going on. Don't blame you for wondering about trust. This is one reason to track and keep data for your campaigns. It could be completely legit but it lets you know something may be amiss.

 

[Unicorn]

It's good if you can record and listen calls at least in the first week of your campaign. That way you will know if something gets wrong pretty soon.

 

[mnemonist]

Amazing journal.

Congrats on going for phone calls too. That must be a challenging conversion point. Plus, they're probably split-testing the script and making changes as well that won't always be in your best interest.

Rock on!

 

[Andy Barden]

17.01.16

So its been a while since my last update and quite a few campaigns have been tested. Before I let you know what I am having success with, let me tell you some of the issues I have uncovered...

If you are using Google Adwords as many running PPCall do, you will find for obvious reasons that you have very limited space to write your ad. For some offers this is ok as you can get to the point easily however for others it is tough.

An example would be the mortgage offer I have just started working on. It is for people that are behind on their mortgages which on the surface is no big deal. However...They have to be 3 months or more behind and have a loan value of over $125k to qualify. Getting that in a mobile only ad on Google takes creativity to say the least!

The next thing you have to watch is the criteria of the campaign in terms of what they need the caller to do to get paid. Very often the caller needs to push a particular number from the options to qualify. When you listen to test calls however you will often find the options are very similar...Sneaky!

Even on the campaigns I have seen success with, there have been countless calls that went well over the time threshold but were not paid out based on the caller hitting 2 instead of 1.

As with any media buy, you also need to accept you are going to lose money, sometimes lots of money! Data is everything with this and unless you chuck you bids up to the point where you would literally break even if you had 100% conversion rate. You will not get that early data you need.

In time, and with sufficient impressions, clicks and conversions, you will be able to reduce your bids and maintain the same volume. Just be sure to keep optimising that lander to ensure it is as relevant as it can be. The difference between success and failure can rest on your ability to buy the right traffic at the right price and your quality scores play a huge part here.

What do I have live now?

Following several unsuccessful tests, I tried a Carpets and Hard Floors offer before Christmas and saw some initial stats that suggested there was potential.

After £1000 spent, I now have 2 ads from 20 tested that see profit pretty much everyday to the tune of about 60% ROI. I am now in a place where I want to leave this ticking over so I can replicate the success with another, and another. My short term aim is to get to £200 profit a day across 3-4 offers that pretty much look after themselves (As I have a full time job as well!)

Lots still to do however I have taught myself the basics of adwords in 2 months and have seen potential in 2 offers that I believe are sustainable.

Will update again soon