.
While perusing my Adwords campaign today, I started playing around with the graphing options.  I normally let the numbers speak for themselves and ignore the graph, but today I found a particularly interesting tidbit.

Adwords CTR vs COST

.

.
.
What I found is this:

DAILY CTR appears to be closely correlated to DAILY COST

How can this be?  By this hypothesis, the more I spend on ads each day, the higher my click-through-rate would be.   While this sounds like something I shouldn’t complain about, I don’t understand why these two items would be proportional.

Has anyone else experienced this type of oddity?

October was a fairly average affiliate marketing month for me with a few exceptions.  Revenue was up about 15% from just over $900, which I don’t consider to be a significant jump by any means.

Improvements

What IS encouraging is that last month I had 9 days with negative ROI’s (only amounting to about $50), whereas this month that number dropped to 2 days and only $20.  This tells me I’m polishing my current campaigns and plugging the holes.  This is even more apparent when you tally my negative days in the month of August (10 days for a loss of $215)!

Even MORE encouraging is that my affiliate marketing ROI is up from 247% in September to 277% for the month of October.  I attribute this to thinning out my herd of campaigns and terminating paid ads for any that weren’t performing well (or performing at all).

Underachievers

One of the under-performing sites was my Sony Bravia V Series website, which didn’t convert well enough to be a good CPC campaign.  My focus for it now is simply organic traffic, as sparse as it may be.  It does, however, rank fairly well on bing for several terms (#7 on Bing for “sony bravia v series” and #5 for “sony bravia v series reviews”), and I’m seeing several hundred uniques each month.  This month, the site converted 1 46″ Bravia V Series LCD hdtv for a commission of about $45.  Nothing to complain about, but I definitely wouldn’t mind some more conversions.

Non-Affiliate Earnings

My Adsense campaigns are struggling, but I haven’t really given them much attention lately.  I did start blogging more often, but the site is still climbing its way up the search engines at this point.  Time and more quality content should help increase that revenue trickle into a revenue stream (or even better, a revenue river?)

I still plan to start marketing within some ClickBank niches, but I haven’t had time to start that endeavor quite yet (the 9-to-5 is keeping me really busy lately).

Break it Down (dancing optional)

Here’s the breakdown of revenue for this month:

Adsense Revenue (7 sites): $19.18
Amazon Affiliates Revenue: $1,437.14
ClickBank Affiliate Revenue: $0 (nothing done with this account yet)
Shareasale Affiliate Revenue: $0 (nothing done with this account yet)
Commission Junction Revenue: $0 (nothing done with this account yet)
TOTAL Gross Affiliate Revenue: $1,456.32
(Minus) Adwords PPC Spend: $367.75
(Minus) Adcenter PPC Spend: $13.16

Total Net Affiliate Revenue: $1074.24