A Real Live PPC Campaign

I’m so proud. I’m actually making a little money. That is, I’ve spent about 60 bucks and there’s $112 in my market leverage account.

First, thanks and props to the cakes. He’s keepin it real.

First go over to Market Leverage and sign up there. Sure, you can use my affiliate link, or just type it in your self: marketleverage.com. Or use Nicky’s affiliate link. Whatever you want, it’s a free country, you know? You need an ad before you can join MySpace Advertising.

Logging into your Market Leverage account, click on “find offers;” it’s in the top row of the menu, white on blue. Click on that and then you’ll get a filtering sort of page. If you look down a little bit to “search by category,” use the drop down box and display “$ Current top performers” (it’s the top option). Javascript will submit it and you’ll get a list.

Ok, scan down these and find an offer. You’re looking for something you can imagine a demographic for, and something that allows web media types (the blue box in the “short description” column). I picked “TriSlim.” You can too.

Look. Most people are gonna hide their creatives, their programs, their niches, and their bids. With good reason. But I don’t have a lot of expendable cash, and I’ve already spent my allotment. So it’s dead to me. Ok, if you click on the second column link, it’ll take you to a page where you can see the banners. You’re gonna have to go t hrough them page by page; there’s eight pages for the trislim offer.

You need a graphic that’s either 728×90 or 300×250. Just find one. You don’t want one with animation, it has to be .gif or .jpg or whatever. The graphic I picked was an animated gif but when it imported, it was static. So you’ll want something that won’t lose anything if it’s staticized. ( ie, if your graphic flashes “lose weight” and then “free trial” and then “click here” your targets won’t know it’s a free trial, kwim? )

Save the graphic to your local machine. Write a webpage that looks like this

That location should match the href of the link in the advertising you’re pushing.

So if the text box beneath the offer you’ve decided on looks like this

then take out the “allybranding” piece, from http to the empty subids at the end; &s= and put it in your little php page. Save the image source to your hard drive. (right click, durrr ). Upload the php page somewhere so you can access it.

Ok, sign up to MySpace Advertising with your ad. I have to use MS Windows and Internet Explorer to view this page. It sucks ( it’s their flash thing). Anyway, when it asks for your image, upload your image. When it asks for the destination, put in the location of that little php page you wrote (http://somedomain.com/offers/trislim.php for example ). It’ll ask you to save that information. Walk through their little wizard. When it comes to “demographics” you’ll want to look at who would buy it. Since I was selling TriSlim, a diet product, I went with women from 30 to 40. You have to go American, but you can pick either gender ( or both ) and a range of ages. The advertising wizard hung a moment while it checked everything and then asked me how much I wanted to spend.

You can go with the minimum suggested bid. You can go lower, you can go higher. I started higher. My original suggested minimum was $0.36. I went with $0.40 to drive a little traffic. As MySpace figured out that people would actually click on it, the minimum went down. My current minimum is $0.34 and my bid is sitting at $ 0.35. Then you set a limit as to how much you want to spend. Because I was chicken, I set that to $40; 100 clicks. I expected at least one purchase ( that’s a 1 percent success rate. ).

The ad took three business days to be approved. I don’t know why. Maybe they were busy. I submitted it on Friday and it was approved on Wednesday. Thursday morning I had one sale. I dropped my bid by a penny and increased my budget a little. To do this, you have to suspend your campaign and make the changes and re-submit, but approval was automatic ( probably because I didn’t modify the advertisement ).

I got a second sale with my budget capped at 60, so that was $56. My income was slowly catching up to my outlay. I figured I’d boost it to $80 and call it done, so I dropped my bid again, lowered my bid and went to bed. Today, it’s up to four sales, for a total of $112, and I’m done. ( I don’t have any more money to put in ).

You, on the other hand, knock yourself out; go put in a bunch of money and make some dough!

Written by russ on October 3rd, 2008 with 2 comments.
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