Stop Losing Money With PPC!

August 25, 2008

I have been doing PPC advertising on the Big 3 Networks (Google, MSN & Yahoo) for over a year now. On an average I have spent $10,000 per month in PPC and have tested several campaigns but only 1 out of 10 have been converting to profitable ones.

I had developed a cumbersome process to track and evaluate my campaigns, adgroups, keywords, referrers & conversions on MS Excel sheets. Most of the time, I was not able to get the statistics right since I had to work manually to figure out and it takes time to do that. I usually review my statistics once a week and stop the campaigns that are in negative without investigating deeper on keyword levels.

I know that this is not the best practice and that the real goldmine lies inside my keyword list. There is a 20/80 rule in PPC – 20% of your keywords bring in 80% of traffic & conversions. If tested & tracked correctly, we can weed out the non performing keywords & bid higher on performing keywords to make any campaign – even more successful. But, all through – I have been viewing my campaigns in macro level and have decided to scrap the campaigns which were in negative, on the whole. With little more research on my keywords, I could have stopped losing money with the non performing keywords and made it a successful campaign by running it with the performing keywords.

What was stopping me from doing my keyword study?

The poor tracking and the poor analytical system I had in place to find the ROI for my campaigns was the major hurdle that prevented me from making my campaigns, into super profitable ones.

For quite sometime, I have been exploring the options to create an automated application to track my ROI drilling down to the levels of keyword & refferer from campaign level – by which I can take my PPC marketing efforts to the next level of profitability. It would help me in analyzing my data instantly and with minimal manual work from my side.

At this juncture, I have come across a PPC affiliate tracking solution and it’s called – Prosper202.

Prosper202 is a self hosted application from the stable of 202 group. It seems to be an excellent tracking tool for affiliate marketers since it will enable marketers to view performance of campaigns, keywords & ads – all in real time!

Prosper202 calculates & displays EPC values instantly for campaigns, keywords, ads & referrers. This information will be a boon to any affiliate marketer, since he will have a bird’s view of the essential statistics to stop non performers and give a boost to performers. I have decided to give it a try and test the application at once. I will post a review on the product, after giving it a good run.

And, do you know how much it costs? It’s absolutely free!

As always, your comments are appreciated on this subject and if, you too – are looking to stop losing money with PPC, it makes sense to try Prosper202, because it has already helped stop losing money by providing the application for $0!