In online marketing, finding the right strategy can mean the difference between success and failure; therefore, in this case study, we will be discussing how a professional online marketer made a lot of profits using a single keyword strategy with Google Ads and CPA affiliate marketing.
Joey Babineau is an entrepreneur who went from having $40 000 in student loan debt, and working 2 full-time jobs — to building a 7 figure Performance Marketing business online using paid and free traffic sources. He has a YouTube channel focused on several ways of making money online, including SEO, CPA marketing, affiliate marketing, content marketing, link and list building, website monetization methods, etc.
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Let's dive into this article...
Above is a screenshot of Joey Babineau's Google ads dashboard that shows how he has spent over $6 million on running ads, a lot of which are aimed at specific keywords. There are many reasons to choose Google ads over social media promotion like Tiktok, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc, but the main reasons are it is very fast to achieve results and one does not get banned and frustrated easily. While expressing this, Joey Babineau said
"Since Facebook is just banning everybody, especially affiliates, and Tiktok is getting tough with their rules. Google ads have some ways that you can get around the rules, or you can at least follow the rules and make some decent profits as an affiliate marketer."
Before we continue, let's see the results of some of these keywords.
As can be seen from the screenshot, he has already spent $80 000 on one keyword, but this keyword has provided him a conversion rate of around $105 000. This is a profit of nearly $24 000 from one keyword of a CPA offer. According to Joey Babineau,
"The possibility of running Google search ads is probably one of the easiest ways for affiliates to get targeted traffic. This is because you know what people are searching for, you know what their intent is, and you can fill in the gaps for these people by giving them the information they need to decide before they buy something."
Recommended Offers
To get your desired results from an affiliate marketing campaign, you should always consider the type of offers you want to promote, and the kind of offers Joey Babineau recommends are the CPAs- Cost per Action offers. Many affiliate networks specialized in these types of offers, some of them are:
Comparing the offers on these two platforms to the offers on other networks such as Clickbank, Joey Babineau said:
"Offers on these networks convert well compared to affiliate networks like ClickBank, and I have found that ClickBank has a very terrible conversion rate, especially for cold traffic."
Take note that Joey did not say Clickbank is a terrible network, but it is not good for cold traffic.
Things to Consider When Choosing an Offer
The first thing to look out for in an offer is decent earnings per click or a reasonable conversion rate. Ideally, the target offer should have a conversion rate of 5% and above. Let's consider Joey Babineau's CPV Lab pro account taking his conversion rate as an example. CPV Lab Pro is an affiliate marketing tool that helps affiliate marketers track their affiliate offer link engagement and the rate of conversion of the offer.
It can be seen from the screenshot that the conversion rate was 7.82. In addition to the conversion rate, you should also pay attention to the standard offer payout which is not less than $30. Promoting offers with a $2 or $3 payout will only lead to an unprofitable campaign, and you will only be enriching the ad platform without a significant reward for you.
However, in choosing offers based on the payout, Joey Babineau sounded a note of warning that:
"You need to be careful that you're not breaking the rules. A lot of these CPA offers do break the rules, so be sure you do pick the right offers and that you check the rules of Google first."
The second element to give attention to when dealing with offers is the landing page click-through rate. When running affiliate offers on Google search ads, it is mandatory to use a landing page. Joey Babineau constantly tests landing pages for every campaign he intends to run on a large scale. If you try to channel the traffic from Google search ads directly to the affiliate offer, your ad account will most likely get banned from Google search ads, as Google might see this as spamming.
So from the screenshot, we can see that one landing page has converted at 3.91 while the other is at 1.88. To make things simple and comprehensible, a formula can be used to calculate the profitability of a campaign, but most marketers need help to get it.
Looking at the above Excel page, there are a lot of things going on, but it's a simple calculation.
The first column you see from the left is the number of clicks, which is 1000. Following that is the average cost per click, which is $1.00. These two metrics point out that for this particular campaign to run, it will require $1 000. The number of clicks to offer was 250 clicks because 25% of 1 000 clicks will give 250. Assuming the offer has a 5% conversion rate and a payout of $30 per conversion, it means the person running the ads will eventually make a loss of $625.
It is good to know that all these variables can be controlled, and of all the variables, the most important is the landing page click-through rate. It needs to be monitored and adjusted as the campaign grows and changes. For example, to make the cost per click right, you will have to improve the click-through rate. Let's say the cost per click is about 1.49, a higher click-through rate will result in a better cost per click. You can lower this cost by increasing the ad relevance if you choose to.
Let's say we have control over the landing page click-through rate, improving it to over 45% will bring us closer to profitability. The following are some ways to improve the landing page click-through rate:
- Testing with different headlines
- Testing with different calls to action, Joey uses Jasper AI to generate the copy he usually uses for his landing page.
- Testing with different images.
Unfortunately, not all affiliates know that it is possible to get a higher conversion rate and to do this you have to generate more traffic to the offer. If you have tried everything we have explained and your conversion rate does not improve, you may need to contact the manager of the CPA offer you are promoting and ask for an evaluation of your account if their algorithm has missed anything. Usually, if you provide your CPA network proof of your effort, you may likely see your conversion rate shoot up afterward. Most times, this leads to a 10% or 15% increase in the conversion rate.
The baseline for the profitability of any CPA offer campaign is testing with many variables until you get the perfect spot to make the campaign profitable. Let's assume that the example in the Excel sheet has the conversion rate increased to 7.82, you will see that the entire campaign setup becomes profitable.
Types of Traffic for Offers
There are mainly three types of traffic:
- Cold traffic
- Warm traffic
- Hot traffic.
Cold Traffic: Many users click on the ads purely on the promise made in the ad copy. Most likely, they’ve searched for generic keywords and are more interested in learning more about the problem than the available solutions. Their decision to visit the landing page, therefore, wasn’t rooted in any prior knowledge or experience with the offer. This is referred to as "cold traffic." We can think of them as casual browsers who are researching potential solutions or looking for information online. These people might have the problem that the offer aims to overcome, but since they know nothing about it, it’s highly unlikely that they would click on those offers. As a result, they are the least likely to be susceptible to any sales message.
Marketing to these users gives you the ability to connect with them and start building a business relationship that might result in a sale at some point in the future.
Warm Traffic: It consists of people who already know about the offer and might have seen the ads before. They’ve gone through your landing page, but so far, they have not indicated an interest in taking up the offer. Although they like the offer, so far, they haven’t purchased whatever it is that was offered to them.
Hot Traffic: Hot traffic is made up of people who are ready to pay for the offer or trust the offer in some way.
Joey Babineau advised that the warm and hot options are the ones to use. According to him:
"You can really increase your odds of success if you start out focusing on the warm and hot traffic. They are easy to convert because people are already searching for the keywords."
All that is needed is for you to push your ads to these people who are willing to buy. Therefore, researching for warm and hot keywords is vital when using paid ads like Google ads.
Income
- Revenue from 1 keyword: $105 000
- Ad spend: $81 000
- Income: $24 000
Conclusion
In this post, we've considered how using specific keywords with various offers can be very profitable. By using CPA affiliate marketing networks, such as MaxBounty, to get CPA offers to promote through Google ads, you are surely on the path to making a success out of your affiliate marketing campaign. It is important to pay attention to the click-through rate, which we've stipulated must be at least 5%.
Equally, it is important to have a landing page for CPA affiliate offers as this will avert the risk of getting your Google ad banned by Google. By testing calls to action through an AI writing tool such as Jasper AI, landing pages can be optimized for more profit. In all of this process, however, you should be careful so as not to break any of Google's rules.
