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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

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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?

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Amazon Associates hasn’t always played nice with social media.  Rather, it has NEVER played nice with social media, at least publicly.

You might remember a couple months ago when Joshua from SearchEngineJournal posted about Amazon denying commissions from sales coming from Twitter.  Amazon, citing their Associates Agreement, stated that affiliates could only make commission on referrals that originate from “your site”.  The debate about whether a user “owns” their Twitter domain ensued, and Amazon continued to hang its affiliates out to dry on this policy…until today.

Today, Amazon Associates announced the integration of Twitter with the Amazon Site Stripe, which includes 2-click posting of links to specific products on Twitter (once logged into Twitter), including URL shortening via bit.ly.  Amazon also posted a Social Media FAQ for Amazon Associates which lays out its new policies with decent clarity.

Some users have reported that the “Share on Twitter” functionality is intermittently not including the affiliate tracking ID in the shortened URL, so be sure to test your links!

After a quick test, it appears that Twitter randomly chooses a “Just saw this on Amazon” or “Check this out” message, along with the shortened bit.ly link.  Here’s what it looks like:

To summarize, Amazon’s Social Media Policies are as follows:

1. URL Shorteners: You may now post links via URL shortening services, as long as page does not get framed by the service.  If the address bar shows Amazon.com, you’re probably okay.
2. Twitter: You may now post shortened links via Twitter.
3. Social Media Usernames: Your social media username may NOT contain any Amazon copyrighted terms like “amazon” or “kindle”.
4. Product Advertising API: You may use the Product Advertising API on social media properties, however, they must still abide by the previously established Product Advertising API Policies (which bar the use of the API on mobile devices!)
5. How to Best Use Social Media: Amazon ain’t gonna tell you!  Why they had to include that in the FAQ, I don’t know (see question #6 here)

All in all, I’d say this is a good step for Amazon.  I know that personally, it will alleviate many hassles for me in getting around Amazon’s formerly nay-saying social media policy (let’s just say that all URL shorteners aren’t equal…especially when you build your own and use “fancy” META tags).

Kudos to Amazon for addressing this issue in a less-than-outrageous amount of time.

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

Did you go for a .CM Domain in the recent .CM domain landrush? Let’s hope you made out better than I did.

I was skeptical of the process at first, especially after the repeated delays in opening up the registration.  After all, Cameroon is a rather obscure place and who knows what their intentions are (aside from huge profits on domain names, that is).

So I put in my landrush application for a domain and plunked down my $150.  While I won’t tell you the exact domain, I will say that it was a misspelling of a large retailer’s domain, and it was probably one that will get a TON of accidental traffic.  I was actually fairly hopeful that I would get the domain as I didn’t think there would be much competition.

I was wrong.  I got a call from my registrar telling me they were charging my card, and I assumed that meant I had the domain.  Days later, I check the domain and it was occupied by a lackluster ad-placeholder page.  What a waste!  I don’t doubt that I could have generated $20k plus a month in referral fees had I gotten the domain, but alas:

“Regret is a wasted emotion.”

After a partial month in July, I was very satisfied with my results in August.  As it seems many new affiliate marketers do, I spent WAY more on Adwords than I had anticipated, but the investment still payed off with a 73.94% ROI, which I didn’t find to be too bad for my first full month.

For the month, I built a specialized website for Sony Bravia V Series LCD tv’s, which was built to drive traffic through Amazon.  While expensive to advertise, I was able to make a decent return on the site (with fairly good conversion rates).  I spent $556 on Adwords promoting this site, mostly because it was a brand new domain and I knew it wouldn’t rank organically for many months.  Luckily, its ranking #3 on Bing for the term “sony bravia v series“, which is the phrase I was going for.  Google is going to be harder (as usual) thanks to the numerous dashes in the domain name…Bing doesn’t seem to mind them.

Along with the Sony Bravia V Series site, I built an almost identical Sony Bravia Z Series site as well.  This site has struggled mostly and I’m pretty sure I’ve spent more money on ads than I’ve earned.  Lesson learned: find the right products before you spend time building a site for them.  I’ve found that keeping a sharp eye on Amazon’s Top Sellers lists is a great way to find products that will sell like hotcakes.  These items are usually priced very competitively in the market, and given Amazon’s trust factor, they are usually winners.

On top of that, I had my existing Amazon Gift Cards business running, which has been a hit since day one.  I can usually count on this campaign to average around $25/day on an average of $12/day budget (100% ROI ain’t bad!).

Here’s the breakdown:

Adsense Revenue (7 sites): $17.81
Amazon Affiliates Revenue: $1869.43
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: $0 (nothing done with this account yet)
(Minus) Adwords PPC Spend: $981.79
(Minus) Adcenter PPC Spend: $95.45

Total Net Affiliate Revenue: $812.50

Not a horrible month, though I know I can increase the ROI to well above 100% in the coming months.  I’ll have to be selective about which campaigns I keep going, and as always: TEST, TEST, and TEST!