[Follow Along] Attempting to go green on 7Search

[lumeire]

Okay, this is my first follow along here, and hopefully the first of many.

7Search is a pretty old network, stable yes, but not known for getting profitable campaigns going. So here's another attempt into it and I'm documenting it here.

I've worked with 7Search in the past, and I've had a few campaigns that went green there but sadly, they weren't scalable.

So let's begin.

Task #1: Offer: A Get-Paid-To Survey, First page submit offer from PeerFly. Always loved PeerFly you see.

From experience, I've had offers that worked with 7Search in Careers and Dating niche, all of them first page submit offers, so picked a similar one.

Task #2: Create a campaign. *Done* Keywords, added the 26 with the most traffic all in phrase match. I used the default bid, $0.05 for all keywords but I made sure that my bids were within the Top 3 and the visibility for all keywords are in Good to Fair, at least.

I know you can down the bid to $0.03 for some keywords but since I'm still at the first stage, I need to get as much data as I can.

Also, I'm tracking the clicks and keywords so I know what to Blacklist.

Here's a screenie of the campaign.

Done for today, letting the data come in. Let's hope for the best.

 

[CaramelRocks]

Good luck on your journey.

Are you direct linking or using a landing page?

On Luke Peerfly's blog, in his post about 7Search, he mentions something about blacklisting losing sources. Is that different from pausing keywords?

 

[game333]

Haven't seen anyone started a Journey using 7Search traffic for a very long time, hoping to see for updates, good luck.

 

[lumeire]

Good luck on your journey.

Are you direct linking or using a landing page?

On Luke Peerfly's blog, in his post about 7Search, he mentions something about blacklisting losing sources. Is that different from pausing keywords?

Yes I am direct linking. The offer's LP is good enough by itself from what I can see. I will get a landing page ready if I see it deem fit.

Blacklisting sources is different from pausing keywords. To understand that, 7Search is not a giant search engine company like big G or Bing you see, they have lots of affiliates and partner networks that have various kinds of traffic mixed in, including ppc and search. They pool them on together onto their network. Blacklisting sources is simply blocking some of these affiliates and their websites. Pausing keywords on the other hand would stop all the traffic.

Haven't seen anyone started a Journey using 7Search traffic for a very long time, hoping to see for updates, good luck.

Yes, because it's pretty unpopular. Thanks!

Here's today's update:

19 clicks on 7 keywords, pretty slow if you ask me.

CTR is ~0.70%. From the looks of it, the top keyword seems to be getting traffic from display.

Here's the click data from yesterday:

From my referrer analysis, most of these are parked domain PPC or domain redirect, which aren't worth $0.05 a click. The top keyword (prize survey) received most of them. About 6-8 clicks are what I suspect to be search traffic, these are what I want and what I will pursue.

I blocked the sources that I suspect to be coming from parked domain PPC and redirect traffic, and increased the bid for the sources I suspected to be search, to 130% bid ($0.07), more than enough to top the network bid.

Let's see what happens tomorrow.

 

[BMFDigital]

Good luck @lumeire

 

[CaramelRocks]

What is in the s3 variable column?

Is that used for referrer analysis or something else?

 

[lumeire]

What is in the s3 variable column?

Is that used for referrer analysis or something else?

In above, s2 is the affiliate ID, s3 is the RID. You can say subId2 is the 'siteowner' or 'network' and subID3 is the 'site' itself that's sending you traffic. You need both IDs to block the source like what I did here:

But yes, the RID can sometimes give you a hint of the referrer. Like in my previous post, in one s3 entry: 40546_survemonkey.com - I checked the click referrer and it was 7search.com/click, so I'm assuming it was search traffic.

I checked survemonkey.com, and it was a dead, parked domain, with ads and a search box in it. This is tier 2 traffic, the kind of traffic you're mostly getting in 7Search. The click must've come from the ads in there, or from the search box which showed the ad.

 

[CaramelRocks]

Any updates?

 

[lumeire]

After about a week of running the campaign, I only got about a hundred clicks coming from a handful of affiliate IDs. And yes, no conversions still. That is with the bids already at max and higher than the network bid. Most of them are from domain redirects.

I'm thinking this niche has little traffic on 7Search. I'll run it for a few more days, see if it's worth continuing. In the meantime, I'm gonna start looking for a new niche.

 

[Gurpreet Dhillon]

Keep on trying buddy.

 

[CaramelRocks]

Have you tried promoting survey offers on Bing ads?

I've tried it, but I couldn't make an ROI because the CPC in this niche is high, about $0.50 to $0.75 I spent about 3-4 times more than I earned.

The fact that people are paying so much per click shows that people must be profitable in the survey niche. I don't know how they do it though. Even with optimization, you can only reduce the CPC so much or else you don't get clicks.

 

[lumeire]

Have you tried promoting survey offers on Bing ads?

I've tried it, but I could make an ROI because the CPC in this niche is high, about $0.50 to $0.75 I spent about 3-4 times more than I earned.

The fact that people are paying so much per click shows that people must be profitable in the survey niche. I don't know how they do it though.

Hi, you won't a make a good ROI on surveys in there, unless you can bring down the cpc significantly, or you have lots of $100 coupons + virtual credit cards + IPs and accounts.

Try going for offers that pay at least $4 and up.

 

[CaramelRocks]

Hi, you won't a make a good ROI on surveys in there, unless you can bring down the cpc significantly, or you have lots of $100 coupons + virtual credit cards + IPs and accounts.

Try going for offers that pay at least $4 and up.

Hi,

I did promote survey offers that were the higher paying end of the scale, such as $3 to $4. However, most survey offers are in the pay range of about $2.50 to $3 so there isn't much choice.

Have you read the thread by Gadi? He said that he earned $4,500 per month with survey offers, and $3,000 of that is profit. So he's making more than 100% ROI.

The thread is here.

MaxBounty 4.5K$ / month with Surveys

 

[lumeire]

Hi, you won't a make a good ROI on surveys in there, unless you can bring down the cpc significantly, or you have lots of $100 coupons + virtual credit cards + IPs and accounts.

Try going for offers that pay at least $4 and up.

I saw it just now, and yes he stated he does buy Adwords accounts so yeah, I think what's he's doing has a bit of a blackhat touch. Anyway you can spy his LPs if you've got the right tools.

@ontopic I ran another campaign on the education niche, I hope this pans out.

 

[lumeire]

Okay I paused the surveys campaign as it isn't getting traffic now. Traffic with new campaign on education niche is also very slow. I only got about 40 clicks in 5 days.

I would be searching for another probable niche today.