PPC to Amazon Live Case Study with Bing/Yahoo ads

This has been a long drawn out search for me, trying to get this to work on the Bing

platform.

I can now honestly say that this works and works well. If you’re looking for long term,

stable, hands off income, this is the holy grail. Through a lot of trials and testing I now

can get close to 80% of the people who land on my landing page to click over to

Amazon and I’m going to show you how I do that.

Here’s proof:

7851 Clicks in Bing Ads

6155 Clicks to the Amazon Account

6155/7851 = .77% Click Through Ratio

For me PPCeither Adwords or Yahoo/Bing are probably the most stable traffic platforms

around. At least until Adwords got really uppity about who they’d let advertise.

For years I ran PPC campaigns to either article pages that had adsense on them or to

mortgage lead generation landing pages. I made a very good living during that time, mid

6 figures net take home.

The beautiful thing about it wasn’t that it was great money, it was, however the best part

was I didn’t have to do anything to make it. With the mortgage leads, I was running

them in the UK.

I’d go to sleep and literally wake up and see how much I made for the day. I’m not

making that up either.

During that period I had the time to cut a 6 foot wide hole in the side of my garage with a

concrete saw and proceeded to build an office in the back which is where I’m at right

now writing this. I spent about 6 weeks full time building it and the income came in

regardless. I’d also go to the driving range and hit golf balls, the batting cage and

practice hitting baseballs as I played in an adult league…in other words goofing off

instead of working.

I’m just relating this stuff so you can see that I did not have to work and had extra

money to fool around with. The PPC campaigns once they were setup just kept running

along like a smooth running engine. If properly setup PPC campaigns are the closest

thing to a money machine that actually exists.

In early 2008 the mortgage heyday was over and Google no longer was happy with

people sending paid traffic to Adsense pages. It can still be done but the content has to

be really good and not some crappy page with someb.s. article on it.

Having not really worked, just coasted with the PPC campaigns for almost 5 years and

my campaigns sort of dead in the water, an opportunity to do something I’d wanted to

do my whole adult life came up and I took off most of 2008…(not smart)

When I went back to work in late 2008 everything had changed. The affiliate space was

now crowded, it was the start of the rebill era which I didn’t get into, Facebook ads, all

that… I never felt comfortable with the whole fake blog thing and selling ripoff acai berry

pills. It’s hard to get excited about digging into something when you know the person on

the other end is going to get burned.

In 2009 I started sending traffic from Adwords to some very simple landing pages that

featured Amazon products. It started slow but quickly built up to about $500 a day in

profit.

Then one day boom! Adwords killed the account.

Since then I’ve tried numerous times to make it work either with Adwords or Yahoo/Bing

but could never get it profitable…till now.

That’s’ what this guide is about. How to make PPC to Amazon work on Yahoo/Bing paid

ads.

There are some things you need to know about this before jumping in.

Amazon pays net 60 meaning that money you make in Jan, they’ll pay you for in March.

Just be aware of that. It’s worth it though. Because of this, there is basically NO

competition whatsoever. None..because it’s a bit of a pain almost all PPC marketers

turn their noses up at Amazon, which is good for us.

The other thing that makes most people who do PPC sort of turned off by Amazon, they

don’t really have a good way to track your keywords, which is one of the key

components of practically any PPC campaign. There are solutions out there but I’m

going to show you that you don’t really need it.

You can do this without any tracking at all. Sounds strange if you’ve ever done any PPC

but it’s true and I’ll show you why.

I think one of the things that’s’ changed that’s made this possible is that Bing has a

completely new ad interface, a new person in charge of their paid ads and the traffic

seems to be much better. It used to be really hard to get any traffic at all. Now it seems

and this may be just me, but it seems like it’s easier to get a decent amount of traffic.

Now that you have some background on this out of the way, and you can see why doing

this might be good for you, let’s get right into how this all works.

Commission Schedule

One of the most important aspects of the Amazon affiliate program is the commission

schedule.

The two we are interested in are electronics which pays out at 4% and the volume

based one that pays out on a sliding scale.

Getting only 4% on electronics may not sound like much however it’s not that

uncommon to sell some pretty expensive stuff, especially cameras. If someone buys a

camera bundle like the Nikon D5200 here

You’re commission is $49.16 which is not bad at all. In all honesty you won’t sell a ton of

them as they are pretty expensive but you will sell stuff like this.

Here’s what came in literally today…

The D7000 bundle on the bottom is $1550 for a commission of $62

We’ll get into it later but you can get clicks for that product for about .25 each.

If just less than 1 in 100 buy something and remember were using super targeted buyer

keywords, you make over 100% profit.

The best reason even in spite of the low 4% commission, electronics sell like crazy. You

just have to get your click prices low enough (which you can on Bing/Yahoo).

The other part of the commission schedule is the sliding scale.

The strategy with the sliding scale is to get the commission rate up to at least 8%, which

is not that hard to do.

If you then sell say a baby stroller for $300 which is a pretty typical price, you’ll make

$24.

I know a lot of people tend to “cloud over” at the mention of math but in this case math

is your friend.

I’ll try and make this as easy to get as possible.

What your strategy should be is to sell things down to around $20 to $25 and up.

The lower priced items you’ll probably break even on. You may make money but it’s not

our concern.

What you’ll find is that the lower the price of the item, if it’s something that sells well.

The conversion rate will go up. So you can expect something at $25 to convert your

clicks into sales roughly at around 6.5% to 8.5%

$25 * .08 (commission rate) = $2 in commission

$2 in commission * .065 (6.5 % conversion rate) = .13 cents

This tells us that we can bid up to .13 cents in order to break even.

If you need an online calculator instead of doing this yourself you can find one here:

http://www.wealthyaffiliaterevolution.com/maximum-cost-per-click-calculator/

To do the calculation above enter

Offer payout = 2 (amazon sales price * .08 commission rate)

Conversion rate 6.5%

Target ROI = 0

Click calculate and you’ll get .13

Of course if you can get the clicks for less than that, you can make a profit.

Sales rank

In order to make sure you’re not wasting your time on a product, make sure and check

the sales rank of it.

If you stick with the top 100 in any given category, that’s a good rule of thumb. After that

you can start working your way down through all the other products.

Another reason not to concern yourself about the products that “just break even”

besides driving up the number of sales and thus the commission schedule… come

Christmas time, you’ll have all these products out there and you’ll absolutely crush it for

about 6 to 8 weeks. You can conceivably make in 6 to 8 weeks during Christmas what

you make during the rest of the year combined!

Amazon Cookie

The Amazon cookie which tracks that you are the affiliate lasts 24 hours. If someone

buys pretty much anything during that period, you get the sale. There are exceptions

like digital downloads and some of their niche sites but 24 hours is what you need to

concern yourself with.

I noticed this on my own one day, I’ve never seen it written anywhere and know of no

reference to it however I believe this to be the way it works…

I’ve tried purchasing products in the past through my own links and I don’t recall ever

getting credit for it. I just assumed they somehow knew it was me and that’s why it didn’t

work.

The other day however I was working on my sites, clicking the links to Amazon to see

they were working properly and later that evening bought something totally unrelated on

Amazon.

The next morning I saw I’d been credited with the sale.

This makes me think that if someone has been to Amazon sometime in the previous 24

hours on their own and later clicks on your link and goes back and purchases

something, you won’t get credit for the sale. If however they haven’t been to Amazon in

24 hours and do click on your link and buy something you will get credited with it.

This is why this is important with PPC.

On just about every product and keyword, you’ll see Amazon bidding on the keywords

you’re also bidding on.

If someone is “looking for the best deal” and clicking on ads, if they click on Amazon’s

first, you won’t get the sale even if they buy something after clicking your link. The

reason is that Amazon was first.

Like I said I’ve never seen this written anywhere but from my own experience I believe it

to be the case.

How to offset this problem

Not getting credited with sales is obviously going to hurt the bottom line so we need to

make up for this somehow.

There are two ways to do this

1. Place a slide in or lightbox opt-in form on the page. You can make these easily in

Aweber and just add them to your landing page. These convert higher than just

having a form on the page. You don’t have to give anything away, just make it a

daily deal sign up thing. Those are very common now days with Groupon and all

the rest doing stuff like that. Then just go to Amazon and click on “daily deals” at

the top of the page. If you’re an affiliate, once you’re logged in you’ll see the

affiliate strip at the top of Amazon. You’ll see a link that says “link to this page”

just click that. You can use it to create a link to the daily deals page.

Just write a quick email telling your subscribers what the deals of the day are and

add your affiliate link and send one out each morning. It takes all of about 5

minutes. And it will snowball into larger and larger commissions as your list

grows…while your making money at the same time.

2. You can also use a redirect script The redirect script looks pretty seamless and

does not seem to be an issue with Bing/Yahoo ads. What it does is when they

click on a link it takes them to Amazon in a new page or tab. The page they were

on redirects to an article or any other thing you’d like it to be. It’s best though if

it’s clearly related to what the original page was about. On this page you can

place adsense, banners for clickbank related products, put your lightbox opt-in

etc.. I suggest using a “magazine style” wordpress theme and use quality

articles.

Here is the code:

<a href="http:yourwebsite.com/adsense_page.html/" onclick="window

.open(http://www.amazon.com/dp/ASIN_GOES_HERE/?tag=YOURAFFILIATEID_GOES_HERE,'newwin'

</a>

Use this in place of your direct product links. It will now open two windows, one to

Amazon which the person clicking a link on your page will go to in a new window. The

original page with all our links on it will go to the adsense page.

Click through rate from your landing page to Amazon

In order to make this work you need to get the highest click through rate as possible

from your landing page over to amazon.

I usually get about 80% to 85% which is really high for most products. That’s what

makes it work however. Without a high ctr from your landing page to Amazon, it’s going

to be tough to make a profit.

This is how I do thatHere’s a picture of one of my pages

As you can see they are nothing but a little text, a bunch of related products and links to

them. The pictures at least on mine anyway are also links.

I take mine a bit further and add reviews from Amazon at the bottom like this:

By the way if you think this will hurt your quality score for your ads, your wrong. Mine

are typically quality scores of 8 to 10.

If you do or have ever done email zip submit cpa offers, you’ve probably heard of an

“offer wall”. It’s the exact same concept.

In picking products to place on your “Amazon Offer Wall” what has worked well for me

but of course you might get better results testing something else, what I do is put related

stuff on the page.

Like if the page is about the Nikon D5200 camera, the main image in the upper left

corner will be that product.

Below that I”ll fill it in with bundles if there are any, batteries, cases, flashes, lenses

etc…

I think it works as well as it does because you don’t really know exactly why the person

who’s clicked on your ad, what he’s exactly searching for.

You can guess and that’s what keyword research is, an educated guess, but for that

one individual, you really don’t exactly know.

For that reason, give them a bunch of choices.

If they already have the camera, hey there’s a good deal on extra batteries or a case or

new lens. If they are looking to buy it, that link is there too.

Having reviews also is a good idea. People love reviews, I usually pick one that comes

across as genuine and a little amateurish. Some of the reviews sound like a

professional reviewer who writes for a magazine. I just pick the ones that sound like

your neighbor making a recommendation.

Using screen caps of videos on the Amazon product page

This is an old trick which works very well. If there is a video on an Amazon product

page, take a screen capture of it using something like jing and use that as one of your

pictures like this:

When the click on it, it will take them to the Amazon page where the video is located.

These can get really high ctr’s over to Amazon as people will click the “play” button to

see what the video is.

Having a link just below and just above the video will also help drive clicks.

Wordpress VS. HTML Templates

There are advantages to both. You just need to decide what’s going to work for you.

With an html template you have the advantage of easily changing the layout however

you want. This is what I personally use. To me getting the highest click throughs to

Amazon are what’s most important.

However it has it’s downsides, you don’t have the luxury of using the different plugins

available that make making pages automatic. You have to build them yourself, one by

one.

With Wordpress, there are numerous plugins that allow you to build posts automatically.

You can make thousands of pages in seconds. Then all you have to do is make your

ads in the Bing Ads editor and upload them. It’s very, very fast.

The downside is that you don’t have complete control over the layout. I’ve looked high

and low for a wordpress theme that will allow me to make my pages like I’ve showed

you above and just couldn’t find one.

If you know how to do it or know of a theme that will allow you to make pages like the

ones I’ve showed you then you might be able to use an automatic amazon wordpress

plugin builder.

You can build pages for your campaigns automatically. This is an example of that.

The entire site was built automatically using the reviewazon plugin.

I just have personally found that I get higher click throughs to Amazon using an html

landing page which is highly customized to get clicks.

Another advantage of though of using wordpress is that you can use various SEO

plugins. One thing that works really well and is included in the upgrade package is

product name and model number misspellings.

I have a custom built plugin that allows you to add misspellings to any page without

them making your page look ugly and cluttered. With misspellings you really don’t need

to do any SEO other than just having them on the pages and making sure they are

spidered and in the Google index.

Model numbers work especially well. There usually isn’t any competition whatsoever for

them so if someone mistypes a model number, you’re likely to show up number one.

If this is something you’re interested in you can either get the upgrade package here or

purchase it directly here.

To use it you just click the little typewriter key button at the top (the one next to the

Amazon “a” button)

Fill in what your want misspelled, click generate and insert. That’s it. You’re now in a

position to get free traffic from misspells on that product.

Bing Demographics

It’s important to understand Bing and Yahoo’s audience. With that you can pick

products that are more likely to do well over others. This is very general but some

products just do very well on Google and totally flop on Bing/Yahoo. The reason is the

demographics.

Here are the demographics for Bing and Yahoo

Yahoo

As you can see both Bing and Yahoo have a larger part of their audience as people age

45 and older. Yahoo is over 65.

This isn’t to say there aren’t a lot of searchers in the other age brackets, there are, it’s

just there is a higher percentage of older people.

Older people aren’t quite as tech savvy as younger people are. That’s why it helps to

have really simple “Click Here” landing pages.

Make everything as straightforward and simple looking as you can.

A lot of these people are those that bought their computer, use internet explorer and

use the default Bing search settings.

Older folks as a rule though have more money to spend on “stuff” especially stuff they

are really into. Like golf, cameras, lenses…if they are into hiking they’ll probably buy the

more expensive hiking boots or the full on kitchenaid professional mixer if they are into

cooking. Knowing this information can give you a heads up and get you profitable

quicker.

Using lower priced items to find hot niches

Because our strategy is to get the non-electronic items commissions up to 8% to 8.5%

and it involves breaking even on smaller ticket items. You can use this information to

find hot niches.

A lot of times when someone buys from Amazon, they will buy more than one item. So if

you are targeting things like kitchen tools and small appliances and see people picking

up accessories for a big ticket item or the odd big ticket kitchen appliance showing up

multiple times over a period of time, you can bet it sells well.

Setting up your campaigns

Now that you have the basic theory on making PPC work with Amazon I’m going to walk

you through setting up campaign

1.Go to Amazon and pick a category. For this I’m going to use sports and fitness and

sort by best sellers

First item up is Insanity Workout. I actually almost bought this while writing this seeing it

and reading the reviews, all 1400 of them. Since only a super small percentage of

buyers will leave reviews…this must be a great selling product.

First step is to open our landing page templateor wordpress theme and insert the

picture of the item in the first slot. I just go to Google images and under search tools >

any size, choose 300 X300. Save one of the images to your hard drive and insert it into

your template

This code is the easiest way to make a link in Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/ASIN number goes here/?tag=[insert your affiliate id here]

If you’re not familiar with Amazon the part after the /dp/ is called the ASIN number. It’s

Amazon’s product id number for that product.

You can find it for any product by looking here under product details:

So this link would for this product would be:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002QZ1RS6/?tag=californiawei-20 the part after tag=

being my affiliate id.

Add the product description from the Amazon page and some links and below that write

two paragraphs, the first with the product name twice and once in the second. I’ve found

this to be enough believe it or not to rank for products in the search engines.

Below this we’ll add related products and use Amazon to tell us what to put there.

We’ll add two products from the Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought section.

First one is the Harbinger exercise mat and the second one is the fast and furious

workout DVD

For the bottom two related products we’ll scroll down to the Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed section and add the tony Horton extreme program and the insanity deluxe program.

At the bottom of the page we’ll just choose a genuine, amateur sounding review and

copy/paste it into the bottom of the page.

Here’s the result:

Everything closely related to our main product the Insanity Workout has been added.

The page is as close to one big link as you could make it but still make it attractive.

Next step is to add it to Bing ads.

Click Create Campaign (note the high quality scores)

Fill out the campaign settings (note: the budget is set high but in my experience never

comes anywhere close to the amount you set)

Create an ad

Your job with the ad is to do two things.

1. Sell the click

2. Put it in the persons mind what they will expect to see when they get there. In

this case a great deal on the Insanity Workout. Our web page is all about that

thus resulting in high clicks to Amazon.

Display URL is what is displayed such as:

Fitness.MyDealsWebsite.com

Destination URL is the actual URL such as:

http://mydealswebsite.com/fitness/insanityworkout.html

Next Keywords

1. Add the main product keyword. In this case it would be insanity workout. Select

all 3 match types.

2. Select the find keywords containing word or phrase and enter the product name.

Only select the ones that have the actual product name in the keyword.

3. [conditional] This product (which is rare but I get to show you what to do when a

problem arises) does not allow us to bid on the product name in this case we

need to get the keywords that the main website is using to target keywords.

4. Choose find keywords on a website and enter the actual product website and

click search.

5. Filter any odd keywords and add them. In this case it had the word “insanity”

which has more than one meaning. You don’t want a bunch of searches for

insanity meaning and insane person.

Click Save

This doesn’t happen very often but there was a problem with the ads that I made which

is good as I can show you how to fix this. The term “insanity workout” is restricted as the

seller does not want others bidding on their product name or using it in ads.

The company name is beach body so I changed the ad to this:

Now I was able to click save.

Set your bids.

To set your bids without having to wade through each one go to campaigns > the

adgroup which for this is fitness > click on the adgroup> keywords and select all of them

by clicking in the keyword box at the top

Select make bulk changes > edit keyword bids > choose keywords and enter your bid

Use this formula to determine your bid price.

For non-electronic products under $200 I start at 6.5% conversion rate, if it’s over $200

I’ll start working my way down to about 1% when it gets to around $1000 for the

product. I don’t have an exact science on that, it’s sort of a feel you get after a while. If

you want a good place to start, choose 3% up to $500, 2% up to 1000 and 1% for

anything over that.

Sometimes you’ll have to adjust up or down later but it’s a good place to start.

$149 product price * .08 commission = $11.92

$11.92 * .065 = .77 cents to break even.

I like to shoot for 100% profit on each item so take .77 cents per click to break even and

divided by 2 = .38

I’ll bid .38 cents per click to start

Optimizing Campaigns

Most campaigns will have just the product name and model number (see step two of

adding keywords).

Because of this we know that the only words people are using to trigger our ads are

ones directly related to buying the product. For this reason we are not going to need to

use any keyword tracking.

The way we optimize these campaigns are once every two weeks (each product

generally does not get a lot of searches, this whole strategy is about multiple products).

Once every two weeks run an earnings report on Amazon and see how much each

product has made. Adjust each adgroups keyword bids up or down to either get more

traffic due to it being profitable or down because it’s either not selling or it’s breaking

even or slightly losing money.

In most cases I’ve found they will either break even or make money. Only the very

expensive stuff like high end cameras won’t sell and you have to take your bids way

down.

Just compare this with your adgroups with the dates set to two weeks

One last final note: you can see in this earnings report that there is a ton of stuff that I’m

probably not bidding on and you’re right. Stuff like batteries, lens hoods, diffusers etc…

even when you’re just “breaking even” on a product, you’re probably actually making

money. You’ll see that you’ll get a ton of orders for stuff that you aren’t bidding on at all.

Stuff that isn’t even related.

That’s the beauty of Amazon. Just send them over to the site and they’ll usually buy at

least something!

This is a great long term system. It’s even something you can just work on part time in

the evenings. Over the course of a year just adding these simple campaigns, they add

up and when Christmas comes around…WHAM! It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen

before.

Cast a wide net and you’ll have a super stable, long term income for a long time.

Thanks for ordering and good luck and great success!

Paul Nagel