AdWords Search Campaign - Initial Phase

A lesson about AdWords on an affiliate marketing forum!? Surely you must be joking?! Affiliate marketing is alive and well on AdWords, but not how most affiliates would run it. Being a member here, I can assume you don’t want to run your business like most affiliates so let’s get started.
In this lesson, I’m talking about the search network only. The search network is the ads you see on the top and right side of Google when you search for something. The content network (covered in another lesson) is where your ad shows on websites that display adsense ads.
The search network can be a difficult places to run traffic as an affiliate. It’s not difficult in the sense that you don’t know why your ad’s are getting denied, or how to optimize your campaign. What makes it difficult is the amount of work that needs to go into a campaign, and finding offers to run.
This phase is only about direct linking on the search network. AdWords has many options that we’ll cover in future installments of this series. This method is a great way to get started, and one I currently use all the time.
This seems to be what stops people from running on AdWords; they have no idea what they can run without being banned. Just as a disclaimer, I’ll say that I’ve seen people get banned for almost anything. It doesn’t matter if you are a mom and pop store, or a company spending lots of money. My point is, I can’t say for certain what will make you ‘safe’. If you ran anything in the past that was sketchy (more on this later) it could come back to bite you. Meaning, if you ran something a couple years back and now try to do ‘legit’ campaigns, those older campaigns can still have a negative effect on your account. Don’t spend much time worrying about this since there’s nothing you can do, but at the very least make sure they are paused!
It might be easier to talk about what you can’t run on the search network. For every ‘bad’ example I’m going to give, I guarantee you’ll find affiliates running it on search. Just as life isn’t fair, neither is AdWords. People will well aged accounts in good standing can get away with stuff that newer accounts can’t. There are also people who have just been running the same campaigns for so long, Google has (this is a guess) granted them some sort of almost permanently decent quality score.
With the list below, just keep in mind these are my recommendations from what I’ve seen.
On Google search, I wouldn’t run:
– Clickbank offers
– CPA offers direct linked (The advertiser can change the LP without you knowing and cause your account to get banned)
– Dating offers (Quality scores, traffic too expensive)
– Most offers you find on CPA networks
Don’t get too discouraged yet. We can still run some of that on the content network where there’s much more volume anyway. It’s not a guarantee that you’ll get banned by running the above types of offers, but I personally wouldn’t recommend people do it.
Even with the above, I know people are going to ask, so here is my official position:
I don’t feel safe recommending people run offers from CPA networks on Google search. There aren’t any ‘well, but what about’s…’ 
That doesn’t mean your automatically going to get banned running any offer from a CPA network on AdWords search, but I think it dramatically increases your odds.
However…there are some cases where you could have an authority site in a niche, where you monetized with some (not all) offers from CPA networks. More on this when we get to landing pages in the next phase.
So what offers can you run? A good place to start is the physical product merchants like Shareasale and Linkshare. These make a good choice for a few reasons:
– In general, physical products fit the role of giving the searcher what they want. You’re really just giving them a site they can buy whatever they searched for on. The customer is happy, which makes Google happy.
– Ecommerce stores generally do a good job getting their site set up properly for SEO traffic. There are usually many pages on the site, and all the required contact, disclaimer, company information, etc. This helps your quality score quite a bit.
– You can still get cheap enough keywords for these niches.
– There are thousands and thousands of different products to promote vs the few same (dating, weight loss, insurance) offers traditionally found on CPA networks.

Getting clicks on Google search can be expensive, so try to promote products with a fairly high average commission (Ideally over $7).
The cool thing about promoting merchants on Shareaslae or Linkshare, is there are so many to choose from. For that reason, it can be hard to pick something to start with. Don’t overthink this – there isn’t a right/wrong answer here.
Don’t spend too much time debating on what to promote. It’s really a numbers game so just pick some and start testing. Make sure you pay attention to the PPC keyword guidelines if there are any.
Can you direct link as an affiliate on AdWords search? Yes. What can you direct link? Physical product merchants (unless it’s against their terms).
AdWords has a 1 unique display url rule. So, if two people are promoting the same offer direct linking, only one ad will be shown. Whichever ad is shown might have a higher bid, better quality score, or better account history.
I don’t recommend using a tracker like BeMob for AdWords. I know some people use them, but I’ve seen some evidence they can help get you banned. Again, this is one of those things where you very well could run BeMob just fine without issue. It’s not something I do, or recommend though.
Normally, we would just place a pixel but this isn’t easy to do on some of the recommended networks. What I do, is just track everything with sub id’s. It’s not ideal, but I’ve been running successfully for a long time like this.
How to track:
Subids on networks like shareasale are a little different from what you’re used to on CPA networks. I’ll use Shareasale as an example:
Once inside Shareasale, go to links–>create custom link.
Select the merchant you want to promote.
Where it says “Optional – Additional Tracking for your end (afftrack):” enter your sub id value there.
You can leave the destination URL as the default URL. I can be useful to link to specific pages depending on the merchant though.
When you generate your link, it will look something like this
The ‘afftrack’ part is the same thing as a ‘sub id’. Here, we can track keywords. What sucks, is you only get 1 ‘afftrack’. If you’re just sending traffic to the home page, you can remove everything after &afftrack=
In the ‘afftrack’ field, put {keyword} so your link ends up looking like this:
http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?u=xxxxxx&b=xxxxx&m=xxxxx&afftrack={keyword}
That’s all you need for keyword tracking. There is more to say about tracking in the next installment, but this is sufficient for the initial phase.
Keyword research might have its own guide at some point, but for now I’m going to condense the most important elements.
The AdWords keyword planner is a good tool to use for keyword research. Find it from the top menu under tools and analysis –> keyword planner.
There are different strategies to select keywords. The one I present here is a great way to get started. I’m going to use an actual merchant to help illustrate this better.
Say I decide to promote A&E Designs (http://www.buycoolshirts.com/) who is obviously a t-shirt merchant. Most affilaites who promote this might just dump a bunch of keywords like:
t-shirts
funny t-shirts
movie t-shirts
etc
Those are relevant keywords, but too general for our purposes as an affiliate. Go for the most specific keywords you can. You do this by building your keywords off actual product names. Here is a product off the site:
To see if that product gets any searches, go to the google keyword tool and type in a keyword like bazinga t-shirt. You’ll get these results
I usually go for keywords with global monthly searches over 8,000 but that’s not a hard rule.
Notice the related keywords – there are multiple ways to reference a shirt: t-shirt, shirt, shirts, etc.
I would pick 2-5 keywords from this list that had the keyword in it like:
bazinga shirt
sheldon bazinga t shirt
bazinga tshirt
That’s it for keyword research at this stage. The goal here is to use the most relevant keywords possible.
Now that you have your link and keywords, it’s time to set up the campaign.
1. Create a new search campaign
2. Choose search network only, and all features
3. Under the networks section, leave search partners checked for now
4. Switch to legacy campaign settings and target only desktop and laptop computers
5. Pick 1 country to start with. The US is a good option because many of these keywords will be low volume.
6. Language – English, Bidding – Manual.
7. Set your daily budget to $10
8. I usually set my default bid to $0.25-$0.50 to start. I can’t usually pay more than this and be profitable on search (as an affiliate). Again, that’s not a hard rule, but a good starting point.
9. Set the delivery method to standard
10. Skip the ad extensions, and advanced settings
Ads & Adgroups
Next, create 2 text ads. The first ad will feature the keyword in the title only. The second ad will have the keyword in the title and twice in the body.
The first ad should read something like
Keyword
Large selection of items available!
Order items today.
(‘items’ mean whatever you’re promoting)
The second ad, you’ll use dynamic keyword insertion. This is where the searched keyword will be placed in your ad automatically. This ad should read something like:
Keyword
Keyword In Stock Now
Order Keyword Today!
Using our t-shirt example above:
Bazinga T-Shirts
Large Selection of Shirts Available
Order T-Shirts Today.
Bazinga T-Shirts
Bazinga T-Shirts In Stock Now
Order Bazinga T-Shirts Today
Capitalize the first letter of each word.
The first thing you’ll notice is they aren’t very ‘pretty’. Ugly always works right? One of the biggest mistakes I see people make when writing AdWords ads is trying to write out complete sentences, or trying to hard to make the text flow. These don’t make good ads for one simple reason – searchers who are ready to make a purchase are tuned into the keyword they’re searching for. If they really want to buy a Bazinga T-shirt, they’ll go to Google, type it in, and be immediately drawn to the ad that mentions their specific keyword a few times. It doesn’t matter what else the ad says, and in fact they probably won’t even read it.
Just use 2 ads for now. Your display URL needs to be whatever domain you end up on when clicking through your affiliate link. So, click your affiliate link and put the domain (just the www.domain.com – no sub pages) as the display URL.
When you add your keywords, use phrase and exact match. To do this, you place quotes or brackets around your keywords. Phrase match is “keyword”, and exact match is [keyword].
So, when you submit your keywords it would be like this:
“bazinga shirt”
“sheldon bazinga t shirt”
“bazinga tshirt”
[bazinga shirt][sheldon bazinga t shirt][bazinga tshirt]
This is each keyword as phrase and exact match. You can read more about match types in the AdWords training section http://support.google.com/adwords/certification/?hl=en
I normally just add the match type identifiers manually, but you can use a free tool like http://www.adwordswrapper.com/ to add them.
In Shareasale, use the create custom link feature to send traffic to the exact page of the product. This will help with quality score, and also dramatically increase conversions.
This above would be 1 adgroup. You can create multiple adgroups by repeating the process outlined above, with a different product (same merchant). For example, my next adgroup might be a Star Wars T-shirt.
Summary:
Each adgroup will have 2-5 keywords in phrase and exact match and 2 ads. Each adgroup should be focused on a specific product. You can create multiple adgroups. I would suggest starting with 2-5.
For this initial phase, testing is straight forward:
– Spend $25 before making any decisions. This number could be a little lower, or a lot higher. If you’re promoting a product with a $150 potential commission, $25 isn’t enough to give it a fair test.
– Always have 2 ads going like this:
Start with the initial 2 ads you wrote.
After the first $15-$25 spend, see which ad has the lowest CTR and conversions.
If an ad has both the lowest CTR and conversion rate, pause it (don’t delete it) and create a new ad.
Let this new ad and the ad you didn’t pause run for $15-$25 more and repeat the process.
Don’t replace both ads at the same time. Follow the instructions above exactly. The reason we never pause both ads, is because it would completely reset our quality score at the ad level. This method allows your campaign to have a more consistent history. AdWords really seems to like consistency at every level of your account.
If you have an ad with lower CTR, but higher conversions than the other you have a decision to make. If we’re talking about ad 1 having one conversion and ad 2 having 0 conversions, let them run until you have more conversion data. With CPS (cost per sale) merchants, 2-3 conversions is often enough to say it converts. So if I have stats like this:
Ad1 – 1.2% CTR 0 conversions
Ad2 – 0.08% CTR 1 conversion
I would let them run until I got another conversion or two on ad2, OR I got the same number (or more) conversions on ad1. There is no specific CTR to shoot for; it varies too much by niche and keyword to give an accurate idea. Focus on continually increasing your CTR and CVR with the method outlined here.
CTR is important for quality score, but obviously we have to go with what makes us the most net profit. Just a quick note on quality score for now – your quality score might be low to start, but that’s ok. AdWords often starts you out with a lower quality score, and your campaign kind of has to ‘prove itself’ before it will go up.
If you have a really low quality score (under 5), it might be an indication that the offer you’re direct linking to has a page not well optimized for quality score. There isn’t much you can do at this point. Make sure the keywords you’re bidding on are on the page you’re linking to. If quality score doesn’t improve in a week, kill the campaign and start a new one. Don’t let a low QS campaign run for longer or you’ll risk hurting your overall account quality score.
When you pause an ad and write a new one, try to improve on the ad you didn’t pause. That means, take whatever you think is making the first ad have a better CTR/CVR and try a different variation on it. This continual method of split testing will ensure you’re always trying to improve.
Recap of Main Ideas
This was a lot of information, but we’ve only scratched the surface of AdWords. There are many campaign angles to take, and strategies to test. Focus on this strategy to get started.
1. On AdWords search campaigns, promote physical product merchants (like those found on Shareasale) and direct link
2. Select offers to test quickly and don’t over think this part.
3. Don’t use a tracker. Track with sub id’s (afftrack).
4. Choose very specific keywords for the product you’re promoting. Start with 2-5 keywords. Use phrase and exact match.
5. Alwyas have 2 text ads running, and optimize them in the way shown.
6. Spend $25 before making any decisions. If you’re promoting something with a high commission (for example $150), you need to spend more than $25 to give it a sufficient test. If you have 0 conversions after spending at least $25 (but higher if your potential commission is a lot higher), the offer might not convert well. You could pause it, and build other campaigns. After you have more experience, and read through more of our AdWords guides, you’ll be able to know if those are worth working on more.
Expect that most of your campaigns won’t work. Cut the losers, and move on. This is really a numbers game, and you have to test a good number of campaigns. This method is a great way for affiliates to get started on AdWords. Future lessons will include using landing pages, optimization strategies, promoting other types of offers, the content network, and much more. 
Here’s a video showing me choosing merchants/keywords.
AdWords Search Campaign Building - Landing Pages
The term ‘landing page’ here might be misleading to some people. You shouldn’t use a 1 page site, or a LP like you would use on a PPV campaign. The easiest way to sum this up is to say that you need to think like you would be building a site for SEO purposes. Just like you couldn’t expect your screenshot LP from a PPV campaign to do well in organic search, you also can’t expect it to do well as a LP on AdWords.
When I said you can’t expect it to ‘do well’, don’t take that as ‘well, it probably won’t do well…but you could test it’. It means – do not use LP’s like that. Your campaign will get denied, receive a horrible quality score, and possibly hurt your overall account.
When you direct link, as in the previous lessons, you only have so much control over quality score. You don’t control the merchant’s page, so you can’t change anything there. In those campaigns, the only thing you can do to improve quality score is try different ads/keywords. When we add a landing page, you introduce another part of the campaign you can control – ultimately, a good thing!
There are different quality scores, and different factors that go into each one and your account as a whole. Sounds confusing, but it’s not too bad. Here are the areas of quality score you should be focusing on:
Account history – how long your account has been open, and running. The quality of campaigns you’ve ran. This is one you can’t do a quick fix for. Focus on running quality campaigns, and give your account enough time. Having a seasoned account will let you run niches or landing pages you might have trouble with on a new account.
Campaign level quality score. There is an overall campaign quality score. This doesn’t seem to play heavily into the different adgroups though. You can have one adgroup with a bad quality score, and another with a good quality score.

Ad level quality score. This is what we talked about in part one of this series. The ad level quality score is something that has ‘history’ so if you pause or delete all your ads to write new ones, you completely reset the ad level quality score for your campaign. I believe this also can hurt your overall campaign level history/quality score.

Keyword level quality score. You can see this number in your AdWords stats. Keyword quality score will often increase the longer they’ve been running.
The above is what we covered previously, and what you need to focus on for direct linking campaigns. When you introduce landing pages, you have to also ensure your LP quality score is good.
AdWords uses the term ‘landing page experience’ which basically means the quality score of your LP. AdWords sums up the landing page experience like this:
The landing page experience status describes whether your landing page is likely to provide a good experience to customers who click your ad and land on your website.
What they’re looking for is a landing page that is relevant to your keywords and ads, gives the user what they were looking for, and is clear and easy to navigate. In other words, they want a user searching for ‘blue shoes’ to click on your ad and be taken to a site with useful information about blue shoes, etc.
There are several pages often mentioned for improving landing page experience such as:
– Privacy policy
– About us
– Contact
– Terms
These pages are important, but slapping those on a 1 page site isn’t enough. You can’t take a landing page you used for a PPV campaign, slap those pages on it and expect to get a good score. You still should include those pages, I just want to note that you can’t add those and expect to raise your score.
So to get a good user experience you have to look at what would make the site useful to a visitor in terms of navigation and content. Below is what I suggest for the best chances of a good landing page experience. Some of these are more important than others, but they’re all relatively easy to implement so I suggest doing all of them.
1. A sitemap
2. Proper meta tags – more info here
3. Good header navigation
Or sidebar, depending on how your site is laid out. The navigation should lay out important pages and categories. Don’t think of this like a bot…think of this like a user. If you landed (no pun intended) on your site, how could you get to the information you needed quickly? For example – if you were shopping for ‘colorful curtains’ and came to your site, would you be able to find different categories of colorful curtains easily?
4. Proper, descriptive page titles
5. Fast load times
Don’t go crazy here and set your stuff up on a CDN, or get a more expensive server than you need. Just do some simple optimization to make sure your page loads quickly. One of the easiest things is to is optimize your images to a smaller file size. Some good tips on that can be found in this thread. You can also make sure your site has clean code, and nothing else that would make it load slowly. Here is a tool that will give you suggestions on what you might need to fix https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/
6. No ads, pop ups, or anything annoying
I would suggest keeping ads to a minimum. Obviously, we are trying to get a commission here but your LP shouldn’t look like Times Square at night. Don’t use pop ups (or pop unders), or anything else that could potentially annoy the user.
7. A clear representation of your business
What I mean is building your site like a business would want to be represented. This includes having basic, easy to find pages like about us, contact, & privacy policy. Make this pages easy to find. If you need help or ideas here, visit some sites you see advertised on AdWords. I would suggest looking at the ‘about us’ type pages and see how a ‘real business’ represents themselves there.
8. The site content should be relevant to your ads and keywords
This doesn’t mean you need to feature the keyword 100 times on your LP. It simply means the flow from Keyword–>Ad–>LP should be logically relevant. For example, if I searched for ’50 watt guitar amps’ and I see an appealing AdWords saying I can get more information and purchase ’50 watt guitar amps’. Clicking on that ad takes me to a page where I can easily find information about ’50 watt guitar amps’.
9. Content
Notice I didn’t say 100% original, never seen before content? I am not convinced you need 100% original content. From my experience, it seems to be more important that the content is relevant to the keywords/ads. I don’t suggest slapping some PLR material on your site, but you could probably re-purpose some content and be ok. Case in point – I often use datafeed sites as LP’s for AdWords campaigns. Aside from a few articles I might have posted on the site, the majority of content is just descriptions from the feed.
10. Don’t worry about a specific number of pages
I get this question a lot – ‘how many pages should my site be’. I probably (although I see it done) wouldn’t have 1 page (not counting about us, contact, etc.), but I don’t think you need 500 either. Again, this comes back to the question of how many pages do you need to provide a good user experience and deliver what the person is searching for.

Something else that seems to help is an aged domain. This is hard to measure because there are many different things going on here. Don’t stress about this too much, but if you have some older sites you can use, this might be helpful.
What types of sites make good landing pages? I mentioned this before, but I find that datafeed sites make for good landing pages. These are fairly easy to create and you get the added benefit of organic traffic.
WordPress (independent of datafeed sites) is also a good choice here because it’s easy to build sites, update content, and do basic SEO. WordPress is fairly well optimized for SEO right out of the box, which means a lot of what you should do for your AdWords LP’s is already done.
You could even just build a simple HTML site, but unless you have a specific reason for doing this, I would opt for WordPress.
This is a basic mockup of what one of my LP’s might look like:
Really nothing special going on here. Building landing pages for AdWords will take more time than a simple LP for a PPV campaign, but it’s not a difficult task. It’s really just about building a good site. A cool benefit of building sites this way is that you can get organic traffic and conversions without much, if any, link building.
What I’m giving here is just a starting point for testing your LP’s. Some general ideas:
– Don’t get too hung up on CTR. Yes, it’s important but what you really want to measure is how well the LP is converting. A “good” CTR on your LP’s can be all over the place. It depends on the niche, keywords, and position of your ads. Just understand that you can’t say ‘well, I should be getting a 5% CTR on this LP’. I would say on the search network anything over 2% could be considered ‘good’. Again just take this as a general recommendation.
– Look at the whole picture: keyword–>ad–>lp–>offer–>conversion. You might have an LP that is doing well with a specific keyword and ad, but not on everything else. If you just look at the overall stats, you might cut a LP that’s working well with a specific keyword/ad.
– Don’t just send traffic to the home page. Take a datafeed site for example – on the homepage there are probably multiple products, but if you click on each category or product you get to a more specific (and potentially relevant) page for a keyword/ad. Send traffic to the most relevant page for your keyword/ad. You should have a specific page on your site for each adgroup you make (refer to the first lesson in this series to learn how to structure your adgroups). You don’t have to get so granular that you have a specific page for every single product. I often send traffic to category pages to make things a little easier. If I find a single product converting really good, I will often test sending traffic to a product specific page.
– I don’t recommend split testing landing pages initially. I would run one LP for several weeks before introducing another one into the mix. This is just personal preference based on letting my first LP build up some history/quality score (experience) before introducing another. It also makes it easier to analyze new campaigns since you are already introducing 1 new variable (the landing page) in this phase of the lessons.
– I like to run landing pages for at least 100 clicks, but preferably 500 before declaring a winner.
AdWords Search Campaign Building - Intermediate Phase
In phase one, we said run a campaign until you’ve spent $25 before deciding anything. After you’ve spent about this much you can start to make some decisions.
First, I look at the dollar amount of each conversion I’ve got (if any). I like to spend at least 5x the average commission amount when it’s $5-$10 before I change anything. If you don’t have any commissions you can look at the average commission on Shareasale to see what it might be.
On merchants with a high average commission, it takes more money to test. If the average commission is $100, then spending $100 on traffic is probably the bare minimum you could spend before deciding anything. Realistically though, you would probably need to spend $200+. I wouldn’t spend 5x the average commission on these merchants, or it would get real expensive real quick. High commission merchants can definitely work, it’s just more expensive to test. People don’t purchase higher priced items as often, so spending $200 on traffic isn’t much when you could get 2-3 commissions.
Let’s use an example where the average commission is $5 and I’ve spent $25. At this point a couple things could have happened:
This wouldn’t be that uncommon, and I might not kill it right away. In the PPV guides, it’s easier to say ‘spend $25’ because most people will get enough traffic for that amount. With a PPC campaign, you have more variable bid prices so ‘spend $25’ is only part of the equation here.
Take into account the amount you’re paying per click. If you’re paying $1 per click (in which case you need new keywords!) then you’ve only received 25 clicks to your merchant which isn’t enough.
Whats the magic number of clicks? If I had to give a number, I would say 100. Neither the $25 or the 100 clicks is a hard rule so don’t take those that literally. These are just to give you a rough idea on what to look for before you change anything.
If I have no conversions at this point you can do the following:
1. Spend $10-$15 more. Remember $25 is really the minimum so it’s not a bad idea to send a little more traffic.
2. Try some new keywords (covered more later in this post). If you do this, you’ll probably have to start over with quality score.
3. Look at your quality score and decide if the campaign can be saved.
More on quality score:
In the previous lesson we talked about quality score a little bit regarding not pausing every ad when creating a new one. AdWords has several areas of quality score going on:
Account history – how long your account has been open, and running. The quality of campaigns you’ve ran.
Campaign level quality score. There is an overall campaign quality score. This doesn’t seem to play heavily into the different adgroups though. You can have one adgroup with a bad quality score, and another with a good quality score.

Ad level quality score. This is what we talked about in part one of this series. The ad level quality score is something that has ‘history’ so if you pause or delete all your ads to write new ones, you completely reset the ad level quality score for your campaign. I believe this also can hurt your overall campaign level history/quality score.

Keyword level quality score. You can see this number in your AdWords stats. Keyword quality score will often increase the longer they’ve been running.
AdWords doesn’t like big changes. I try to never make big changes like deleting all my ads, etc.
If your quality score is under 5, it’s going to be tough to raise it. It can start off that low and get higher, but it will usually be within the first $50 spend or so. *This isn’t always the case, just something I’ve observed.
Since we’re direct linking, we can’t control the merchant’s page. A big reason for a low quality score, if you’re building campaigns with this strategy, is the merchant’s page. If you have a low (5 or under) quality score, you’re going to pay higher click costs. You might still be profitable, but there’s another potential issue – lowering your overall account quality score.
Normally if I have a campaign with a QS under 5, I’ll stop it regardless of if it’s profitable or not. If you leave a low QS campaign running for too long, it can actually hurt your overall account.
Now, if you’re making $1k per day or something it might be worth it to you , but the campaigns in this strategy are going mostly going to be lower volume. Because of that, I don’t really worry about pausing a profitable campaign.
Remember, it’s ok if you start out with a low QS. When it stays low after spending $25-$50 is when you need to start worrying.
You might not need to pause your campaign at this point though. Other keywords could get a better QS. Look at the page you’re sending traffic to, and see if it’s actually a good fit for your keywords. Are your keywords (not all, just some) on the page? Is the page actually about the subject of your keywords?
If I were going to pause and replace all my keywords, I would go through the same process above with spending $25 or so. If your quality score is still low, it’s probably the merchant page and there’s nothing you can do. Drop the campaign and move on. * You don’t necessarily need to spend $25 more. I’ve often found that if I add a new set of keywords and they immediately get a low QS again it’s often doomed.

4. If your quality score is great, but you have no conversions after spending $25 you have a couple options.
  1. You can run a little more traffic to see if you get conversions
  2. You can try new keywords
  3. You can try a new merchant
Usually one of those will produce results. You’ll often have to repeat #3 (trying a new merchant) until you find one that converts.
If you have conversions great, you’re rich! Ok maybe not, but at least richer than you were. Ok still maybe not, because you might not be profitable, sorry.
Conversions are a good sign though! I don’t get too excited about 1 conversion but anything over that is a good sign. This is in contrast to what we look for when promoting CPA offers. In CPA offers (lead based) it’s easy to get a few people to fill out the form, but it means nothing for future performance. When promoting physical products however, a couple sales mean people are actually pulling out their credit card and buying stuff through this merchant.
If You’re Not Profitable…
Can you cut any keywords?
It’s very difficult to give an exact number for when to stop a keyword. This is generally what I do:
Look at the average commission you’re getting. If you’ve spent much more than 1 commission you can think about killing it. For example, if I’m promoting a merchant where I’m getting $5 per conversion, I might kill a keyword where I spend more than $5. Usually on lower commissions like this, I’ll often let it run closer to 2x the average commission. I’ve seen too many instances when (sticking with the $5 commission example) I’ll spend $9-$10 then get 2 conversions. It’s also helpful to let it run more like 2x the offer payout because you get a longer period of time to analyze. Keywords/merchant’s won’t ever convert consistently (this applies to any type of marketing, not just this!) so you could spend $5 one day and get no conversions, but spend $5 the next day and get 3 conversions.
If you can’t cut any keywords yet, you need to let it run longer to get more data.
You might think I would suggest trying new ads too, but I don’t. I used to do this, and never found other ads to convert when the first one’s didn’t. That’s not to say I didn’t make better converting ads at some point. I just mean that when my first 2 ads don’t convert, the second batch usually won’t either. That’s why I put most of my focus on keywords and merchants.
Can You Lower or Raise Your Bid?
If you have conversions, but aren’t profitable, you can start trying to lower your bid. Lower your bid slowly – by $0.05-$0.10 for at least a day or two (preferably a week) before lowering it again. This is a delicate balancing act. If you lower your bid and drop position, your CTR will likely drop which can hurt your quality score and/or make you end up paying more per click.
What you want to happen is lowering your bid and staying in the same position. You canhave good conversions in almost any position on the first page but this doesn’t mean you will. Pay attention to the position your ads are in. If you lower your bid and drop position does your conversion rate go up or down? Either one can happen.
Most people don’t think of raising their bid if they aren’t profitable, but this is absolutely something you should try. On AdWords, I’ll sometimes see dramatic increases in conversion rate by bidding into a higher position. This doesn’t always mean it will be profitable, since you might be paying more per click, but it can actually increase the conversion rate enough to make you profitable.
Just like with lowering your bid, raise your bid slowly too. Raise by $0.05-$0.10 every few days. Don’t get impatient here! Remember, everything with AdWords should be slow and steady.
If You Are Profitable
If you are profitable, that’s great! You can try to scale your campaign, but must decide if you should. Remember, these are mostly going to be low volume campaigns. Should you spend your time, money and energy squeezing $10/day more out of 1 campaign, or using that time to build 5 new campaigns? I suggest doing both!
Obviously, every one of us has some kind of limit of time/energy/money so what we have to do is be efficient at scaling so we can do that while building more campaigns.
These are the things I do to scale my own AdWords search campaigns. Based on what I’ve tested, these will give you the biggest payoff for least amount of time spent.
1. Scaling to More Countries
This is, without a doubt, the easiest and most effective way to scale an AdWords search campaign. First, you need to find out what countries the merchant you’re promoting sells to. If this isn’t readily available, don’t hesitate to contact them and ask.
This literally takes 20 seconds to do if you use the AdWords Editor. You simply make a copy of your campaign and paste it into a new campaign, change the country targeting, and upload. I keep everything the same (ads, keywords, bids, etc.). No, I don’t translate my ads. I’m sending them to an English page so it makes sense to use an English ad (both for quality score, and user experience reasons). I haven’t done a lesson on AdWords editor yet, so let me know if you want the steps on how to do this.
I went through most of my campaigns and found the best performing countries overall (averaged out across all campaigns). This took a while! I would recommend scaling out to these countries if your merchant accepts orders from them (in no particular order):
UK
Brazil
Spain
Netherlands
Greece
Italy
France
Canada
Germany
Ireland
Sweden
Australia
Malaysia
Mexico
Not every merchant will accept those countries, so be sure you check! This is by no means an exhaustive list. Two people could run identical campaigns and convert totally differently (just an odd fact about affiliate marketing!) so be sure and test each country for yourself.
If I have a profitable campaign in the US, I scale it out to all the countries I can. Depending on your budget, you can add 1 country at a time or a bunch.
2. Raise or Lower Bids
As I was writing, I realized this point could be for campaigns with conversions that we’re profitable or not. Raising or lowering your bids is another way to scale/optimize because it can mean more money in your pocket. So, what I said in the section above about this applies here too!
This is an easy optimization strategy. It takes a few seconds to change your bids, then you just have to wait a few days to get more data, do a quick analysis and decide if you raise, lower back down, or stay.
3. Keyword Tricks
This is one of my favorites. If you have a profitable keyword, try bidding on similar keywords, variations and misspellings of it.
Similar Keywords
Finding similar keywords involves looking other ways to say something. For example, if my keyword was
St. Patricks Day Socks
Some variations I could come up with would be:
Irish socks
Leprechaun socks
Shamrock socks
Four leaf clover socks
Those are all different keywords, but describe roughly the same thing. That example was off the top of my head. When doing this for real keywords, it’s not always easy. This is especially true if you don’t know much about the main keyword. In my example above, if I knew nothing about St. Patricks Day, but knew that my keyword ‘St. Patricks day socks’ was converting good, I would simply go to Google and read about St Patricks day for a few min. I would also research ‘St Patricks day socks’ on Google and Amazon to see how other people were describing them.
Variations
Creating variations of your keyword means modifying the keyword. For example, if my keyword was:
Big Bang Theory Shirt
I could make a keyword plural (or make it singular if it was already) like so:
Big Bang Theory Shirts
Making a keyword plural or not doesn’t make sense for every keyword so use your best judgement.
I could also use a different word to say the same thing like:
Big Bang Theory t-Shirt (or tshirt or t shirt)
Big Bang Theory tee
This again might involve a little bit of research to find other words to say the same thing. Most people shy away from this. Don’t be one of them! This is easy, and you aren’t expected to know a bunch of ways to say something off the top of your head 
Use the AdWords keyword tool by putting in your main keyword, and seeing what ideas it gives you for related keywords. This will often give you some ideas to explore more.
Misspellings
The best way to come up with misspellings is to think how a word could potentially be misspelled. For example, if my keyword was:
Peanut Butter Sandwich (not sure why you’d be bidding on that..just go with it..)
I could see people typing in:
Peanut Budder Sandwhich
Peanut Butter Sanwhich
Peanut Butter Samwhich
Kind of a funny example, but it illustrates how people often type the way they hear words and not the way they’re actually spelled.
Adding or Removing Spaces
I guess this could technically be a ‘misspelling’ or a ‘variation’, but depending on the word it could fall somewhere in between. For example, if my keyword was:
Big Bang Theory t-shirt
I could add or remove spaces to make:
Big Bang Theory t shirt
Big Bang Theory tshirt
Depending on if there was any search volume for it, any words in the keyword phrase could be combined or separated:
bigbangtheory, etc.
It’s a good idea to type any potential misspelling into the AdWords keyword tool, just to see if it gets any search volume.
I’ll usually start off by bidding on one of these keyword trick ideas (1 misspelling, etc.) and see how it does, then try another. This is my favorite kind of keyword research – I like finding the hidden gems, and there’s plenty of them!
These keyword strategies shouldn’t take long at all. Again, it’s just find a variation/similar/misspelling to test and wait a few days to get data.

This is important – make sure to test 1 thing at a time.Don’t raise your bid, add keyword variations, and scale to new countries all at once. You won’t know what changes had what effect. I know I keep saying this, but AdWords search campaigns are a game of patience. Make one change, then wait to see what effect it has.
I would recommend the scaling strategies in the order they are written. Scaling to other countries is easy because it’s 1 change. It either works in the next country you test, or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, cut that country and move on. Don’t spend a lot of time wondering why a country didn’t convert, or a keyword variation bombed. This is an all to common pitfall for affiliates on any traffic source. They spend so much time analyzing and worrying about things that either don’t matter, or can’t be changed. 99.9% of the time I have no idea why something didn’t work, it just didn’t. It doesn’t always matter why it didn’t work. What matters is sucking it up and moving on.
All the optimization and scaling strategies I presented here should take very minimal time. This is what I mean by both scaling, and taking time to build other campaigns. I’ll admit that I often don’t even get to all the strategies I presented here on every campaign. I’m not going to spend 5 hours researching keyword variations on a campaign to squeeze another $5/day out of when I could build quite a few new campaigns in that time and potentially make $50/day more from them combined.
These AdWords campaigns are slower, steadier, high ROI campaigns (usually!) so don’t look for that 1 magical campaign that’s going to make $500/day. Look for 25 campaigns making $20/day. I said this before, but want to make sure people know what to expect – campaigns won’t be steady day in and day out. The ’25 campaigns making $20/day’ was just to illustrate a point about building more campaigns and not focusing on just one. Expect to have conversions be up one day, down the next, etc. You might even hit a time of year where conversions are higher and lower. The longer your campaign runs, the more you’ll know what to expect. If your campaign converted great for a week, but isn’t doing so hot the next, don’t rush to ‘fix’ anything. Things will likely pick back up and average out over time.




















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