Jill writes:

Marc, I’ve followed your suggestions and now have Adwords running for two affiliate products. The click through rates on the ads I have up aren’t great, around 0.50%. Just wanted to know how many impressions or clicks you wait for before altering the ads? Do you have rule of thumb on this? What click through rate do you aim for? And what about clicks? How many clicks that don’t convert before you look for another product?

Hi Jill,

I can’t advise you very well without seeing the market, the product, and the ads you are using.

Keep in mind that the purpose for this exercise is to learn for yourself about good clickthrough rates, when you should alter your ads, and how many clicks to take before ditching a product. This phase is all about learning and education, rather than actively attempting to make a profit. If you do profit, that’s great - but what you learn from doing this excerise is far more valuable in the long run.

With that in mind, here are your answers:

Is My Ad Bad?

Is your ad a dog, or is it high on impressions and low on clickthroughs because you’re only bidding 10 cents per click, and it’s appearing at the bottom of 8-10 other ads?

Test: To find this out, I’ll bump my max bid up to a dollar or so per click for one or two days (and set a comfortable daily limit.) If your clickthrough rate shoots through the roof when you do this, then your ad is probably good - you’re just getting shafted in the positioning due to your low max bid. This market may tune advertising out really well, and they are simply not seeing your ad mixed in with all the others.

Solution: You’ll either need to increase your max bid or try some new headlines that really grab them and demand “Look at me now!” from the bottom of the list of ads. Since at this point you don’t know what your Value per visitor is, I would not bump my max bid up very much, so it may be time to try some new headlines.

You’ll probably also want to throttle down your bids on the content network to perhaps 3 cents if you’re using Adwords. The content network traffic really stinks.

How many clickthroughs or impressions are enough to start tweaking ads?

I generally let an ad run for one week before I’ll start playing with it. This allows the ad to run through the entire cycle of the market.

Within each market, there is a definite one-week cycle. People in that market do things on certain days of the week. For example, some crochet clubs may meet on Tuesday and Thursday nights, while others meet on Monday and Wednesday nights. If this is the case (I have no idea whether it is), the traffic will be lower then normal (and sales will be lower than normal) from Monday to Thursday.

If I start my ad on Monday, and then decide it’s a dog on Thursday and take it down, I will have missed out on the fact that crochet people do all their internet surfing and crochet pattern buying on Saturdays.
Because of this consistant one-week cycle, you should almost always allow your ads to run for a full week.

The only time I’ll start tweaking an ad before one week is up is if I get 150 clickthroughs on it with no sales. When this happens, your ad is probably doing its job, but the product may not be attractive to the market. If you aren’t using a good negative qualifier, that can result in lots of clickthroughs with no sales - make sure yours is in place and understandable.

What click through rate do you aim for?

At this point, I don’t. Seriously.

Every click on your ad is money you’re paying Google or Yahoo. High clickthrough rate is great with email ads, or CPM advertising, but not with PPC advertising. Keep it simple: the only numbers I pay attention to are dollars out and dollars in. You don’t want lots of clickthroughs - unless you’re also getting lots of sales in addition to those clickthroughs. High clickthroughs without high sales is just wasting your money.

Right now we’re keeping clickthroughs low on purpose so that we can test this market, and this product in particular. Once we’ve determined that this is a good market, and sales for this particular product look good, and once we know our value per visitor, THEN we’ll crank it up and worry about upping our clickthrough rate.

How many clicks that don’t convert before you look for another product?

I have four criteria that must be met before I’ll even consider dumping a product:

• A full week must have gone by, so that the product has been exposed during the full market cycle
• The product must have received at least 150 clickthroughs
• I must have spent at least what I would earn from a single affiliate commission on PPC ads
• There have been zero sales

With my crochet example, I earn $16.02 per sale, and I am spending 10 cents per click. Once I’ve spent $16.10 in clickthroughs (161 clicks) with no sales at all, AND if the ad has run a full week, then I’d probably ditch the product.

However, before doing so, you should examine your market more closely. What if you started your ad run and this week was the “National Crochet League Annual Pig Roast”? Chances are, a fair share of your market is either attending that event, or are spending more time following that event, and therefore your sales will be depressed. You could end up walking away from a very lucrative market just because your timing stunk.

You could also be testing that market at a bad time of the year. Just as there is a weekly cycle within each market, there is also a yearly cycle. You can use Google Trends to help determine if you’re just trying to penetrate a market during a slump. If it looks like you may just be in a bad part of the cycle, pause your ads for a few months and then try again.