Promoting weight loss offers was the easiest way for affiliates to get strong ROIs at scale back in the day. However, as the traffic sources started banning the niche, many affiliates shifted from it and the ones that remained have had to get very creative to have their campaigns approved. Once they are approved, they blow up so fast.
Today, we are sharing with you a case study elaborating how the media buying team at CMaffiliates was able to generate a revenue of $63 900 in May this year by promoting a grey hat campaign for a Keto Diet offer on Google Ads.
We are going to break down how they were able to tweak the system to launch the campaign.
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Let's dive into this article...
Campaign Details
- Traffic Source: Google Shopping
- Affiliate Network: CMaffiliates
- Offer: Keto Diet — PPS
- Campaign running: 15.04 – 19.05 (2021)
- Geo: US
- Cost: $40 033
- Revenue: $63 894
- Gross Profit: $23 860
- ROI: 60%
With this campaign, they decided to promote it on Google Ads, specifically on the Google Shopping Network using its trade campaigns. These are the types of Google Ads that show up below the Google search bar with thumbnail, price, title, and description, especially on mobile browsers. This placement receives tons of good-quality traffic.
From their experience, Straight-Sale Nutra offers usually perform better than trials. The reason being that people regularly buy from Google Shopping and a big part of trust has been built with fully legitimate products.
They took the following steps to set up the campaign:
- сreated an online store;
- created a Google Ads account;
- created a Merchant by Google Ads account, set it up, and created the product’s feed.
Online Store
They built their online store using WordPress with the help of the Woo-commerce plugin. Since the offer was for a weight loss product, the store was masked to look like a sports products store. They added pull-up bars, push-up bars, kettlebells, etc. They also created a Shipping page, Payment page, Privacy Policy page.
To pass the Google moderation, the site should have a real flow. Starting from the product page to adding to the cart, to checking out. For this case, they used a demo version of Merchant. The Google moderator could see the page with the ability to submit CC details, but whenever the user tries to pay, no payment would go through.
The product page looked like this:
The key details are:
- name of the product;
- price;
- thumbnail;
- product description.
So basically, the moderator would think that they are selling a pull-up bar called Ultra-Fast Keto Boost.
Google Ads Account
For the Google Ads account, everything was straightforward. No magic or hidden tricks. They just made a simple Google account.
Setting up Their Merchant by Google Ads Account and Creating the Product Feed
To verify their Google merchant account, they had to prove that they own and operate the website — which they did.
They also had to fill in the shipping details and the taxes section (flat rate, free shipping, no taxes). All this is required to get the store approved by Google.
They then went ahead to set up the product feed (a spreadsheet file that is used to upload product details/ data to a Google Merchant account) with steps elaborated in the screenshots below.
- Accessing the Google Sheet to download and add details to the product feed
After getting the Google sheet, they went on to fill in the product’s details:
- product id (just a random id);
- product title (same as on the website);
- product description (same as on the website);
- product page link;
- price;
- thumbnail link;
- global Trade Item Number (GTIN) — they generated this online.
After filling in the product’s information, they returned to the "Data Feeds" tab and uploaded it.
Once the file was uploaded, they sent it for moderation by clicking the "Fetch Now" button.
They then linked the Merchant to their Google Ads account and waited for feed moderation. It usually takes up to 3 days.
As the feed was up for review, they immediately went on to switch the pull-up bar image to the Keto product’s image on the website. The image shouldn’t be changed within the Google sheets feed as a second moderation will be required.
To make the changes, they just switched the thumbnail on the online store with considerations to keep the name and image format unchanged to make the changes. At this point, if someone clicked the image link in the feed, it opens a new image (with Keto bottle).
Cloaking
On the product page, they used a cloaking tool to manipulate the links by sending the real visitors to the offer’s pre-lander, and the Google moderator to the product page.
After making all these manipulations, the Google Shopping was expected to look like a proper white-hat ad, in the format below:
Creating the Campaign
They created the campaign on Google Ads and set up the targeting, GEOs, and CPC. No keywords were used as the Google algorithm’s AI gets the keywords from the title and description set in the product feed.
Once the campaign was set, they launched it and made optimizations.
The Results
Here are the statistics from the tracker:
Conclusion
The results from this campaign speak for themselves. The two CMaffiliates media buyers were able to generate a profit of $28 360 in just the first 30 days of running the Keto offer.
A lot of unsupported offers like CBD, Male enhancement, Nutra, Skin, and others can be promoted using this gray-hat strategy. Google is always an evergreen traffic source if approached with an out-of-the-box mindset.
