Here’s a follow up to my post a few days ago.

(Whoa! Just had two big honking wild turkeys walk just outside my window. We’ve never seen turkeys here. But back to the topic at hand…)

I had taken the two keyword phrase matches that triggered my two sales and used the Google Adwords sales query report for those two days to try to figure out exactly what the person typed. Then I took both phrase match and exact matches of the actual keywords the person typed, phrase and exact matches of my original phrase, and a couple other phrase/exacts of very similar words, and put them all into their own campaign. I made the daily budget be $50.00 instead of $25.00 that it had been.

The result?

Day 1: no sale.
Day 2: no sale.
Day 3 (yesterday): A sale!

Using my Google Cash Automator tool, I could see that for just those few keywords in my new campaign:

cost: $2.43
Impressions: 361
Clicks: 5
Revenue: $22.62

That’s a profit of $20.19. Ok, I’m pretty happy about that.

It’s interesting that all 3 sales of this product have been to women. That’s not what I would have expected.

So now what? Crank that baby up. I’m going to set the daily budget as high as I dare so that my ad shows more often.

It is interesting too that I still got the sale on a phrase match even though I used the sales query report to add more exact matches to the campaign.

Posted by susb8383 under Google Cash Detective | No Comments »

Well, I got another sale yesterday! That makes three total! Yippee!!

The last two sales (in two consecutive days) were both for the same Clickbank product. (The other products never had a single sale).

I’m going to try a new strategy.

In my Adwords account, I have each different Clickbank product in a separate campaign, and I’ve set the daily budget at $25.00 for the campaign, per the recommendations in the Cash Detecitive training video.

I was able to take advantage of the keyword tracking functionality of the Cash Detective tool. Actually it’s part of the sister tool, the Google Cash Automator.

For that particular Clickbank product I had about 500 keywords. From the keyword tracking, I could see that my two sales came from almost the same keyword. The only difference was a plural. (Actually it was a phrase match, so I don’t know what the exact keyword was that they searched for).

As of this writing, I spent a total of $71.03 on Google ads for that product and I made two sales ($45.24 revenue). Pretty bad.

BUT…for just those two keywords I only spent $13.66.

So for just those keywords, I actually made a profit. But my ad didn’t run very much because I had a $25.00 daily budget for the entire campaign.

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to peel just those two keywords (well, maybe a couple more that are extremely similar) and put them into their own campaign. Not just their own adgroup; their own campaign. Then I’m going to crank the daily budget for the campaign up higher.

In theory I should be able to keep making a profit on those two words, and increase the profit as I increase the daily budget for the campaign.

Makes logical sense, right?

We’ll see how this works….stay tuned.

Posted by susb8383 under Google Cash Detective | 1 Comment »

Well, the forum is finally back up. It looks like it went up two days ago.

But as I suspected would happen, all of the previous posts are gone, most of which were from some very disgruntled people complaining (justifiably) about the lack of customer service, support, and communication from Chris Carpenter.

Now I really think that the whole “our forums were messing up the performance of the tool” was a total farce and it was just an excuse to delete all the negative threads.

But the good news is that I made a second sale!

Today someone bought one of the Clickbank products I’m promoting.

Here are my stats so far:

Product 1: 20 impressions, 0 clicks.
Product 2: 4,960 impressions, 211 clicks, ad cost: 86.47, 1 sale (16.61)
Product 3: 14,410 impressions, 110 clicks, ad cost: 68.27, 0 sales
Product 4: 12,121 impresssions, 95 clicks, cost: 64.84, 1 sale (22.62)

So here’s the depressing summary:

I spent $219.58 to make $39.23.

Well, I say ‘make’ but that isn’t really even true. Clickbank has this policy that they won’t give you a dime of your commission until you get 4 or 5 different sales. They say it is because they want to make sure you aren’t just using your Clickbank account to buy products for yourself at a reduced rate, but I think that’s a bunch of bonk.

They could easily compare the name on the credit card or Paypal account with the name they’re sending checks to.

But anyway…I still have a couple of weeks to decide if I’m going to keep my Cash Detective membership. Unless I make a few hundred dollars **profit** in that time, it is extremely doubtful.

What I’m going to do next it try to figure out how to see what keyword my sale came from using the Google Cash Automator.

Addendum: Here’s an interesting fact about their forum. Now they have moderators approving every post before it shows up. If you write anything negative about the product, it doesn’t make it past the gatekeepers.

Here is a post I made in the forum in response to a poster who noticed the old posts are all missing.

My post:
The day the forum went down I had a sneaky suspicion that all the posts would mysteriously vanish. I really wonder if their ‘reason’ for taking down the forum was a farce and it was really to delete all the negative threads. Which is a bummer because I really did find some useful training info from fellow members.

==== Moderator’s Reply
"Hmmm. You are entitled to your opinion. But this sort of post will just cause negativity. It has been removed. If you don’t like our moderation, and you are unhappy with the way things are going, please open a support ticket and your concerns will be addressed.

We hired a person full time to manually cut and paste the best content from the old forums. This is an on-going process. It is real. I hurt my hand cutting and pasting over 90 entire posts. They are distributed around the forum.

The old forum broke, and we are now using a totally different piece of software now. It is much newer, and has been heavily customized. So – concerning your allegations that it “was a farce” - I would like to set the record straight with you, and I don’t think GCD staff should have to prove our claims in public, in an open debate.

Thanks,
Jonathan
P.S. – It is nothing personal, but I’m not all that keen to fight opinions, lies and allegations in the forums. The moderators have too many important tasks to attend to …"

It’s probably true that they really did have problems with the forum software, I’ll admit that. But censoring every post that is negative just doesn’t seem right.

In fact, someone started a thread that the Google Cash Detective posts should not have to pass through a moderator first. They said they haven’t seen any other forum that requires this, and since everyone on the forum is a paid member anyway, free speech should be allowed. After a few posts of people who agreed, the moderator posted the following. And then he locked the forum so no one else could comment on it:

"We understand all of the advantages, and the disadvantages to this approach. There are many other forums online, that offer an unmoderated, “free place” to learn and share. In our quest to offer the best information possible, we have decided to moderate each and every forum post at GCD. This decision will certainly irritate many of you, but we believe it’s for the best … We hope you will see the wisdom of this approach in the future, as our forum continues to grow with high quality content. The GCD forums will continue to be moderated."

Posted by susb8383 under Google Cash Detective | No Comments »