Nature Cleanse wrap-up: 60 days, what happened?

Hi all, thanks for reading. I kind of fell off the CPA bandwagon on 7/23 and turned off my google campaigns. My initial plan was to let it run for 60 days, but I didn't have enough time to watch every day and do proper analysis (work, life & family got a little chaotic for a bit).

During the period of 6/12 and 7/23 or 42 days, I conducted an experiment in CPA with a product called Nature Cleanse. There was a lot of tweaking work the first week, but for most of the campaign it was just sit back and watch. I did try to use yahoo keywords mid-campaign, and spent far too much money with them for no results. For this product, google adwords seemed to be the right choice.

So here is the summary report:

Earnings	Google	Yahoo	GoDaddy	Profit	ROI	Daily Profit
$256	$116.09	$65.49	$11.17	$63.25	32.8%	$1.50

If I wouldn't have blow so much at yahoo (in fact, one day was over $34, for nothing!!) this would have been a much better ROI campaign.

Will I do it again you ask? Oh heck yea, I just want to make sure Copeac is actually going to pay me. They have a $100/mo minimum, so my first month I didn't get paid since I only earned $96, but month two should be rolling around here so and I should have enough for a paycheck. I can't wait to see what happens.

Did I learn a lot? Oh heck yea! I'll definitely do things slightly differently next time.

Is this a legit biz? I'm still on the fence. None of my sells ever came from a click through, however click through volume from google definitely affected the number of products I sold. Does that sound strange? All my sells came from someone typing in "Nature Cleanse Trial" into google and finding my landing page, and buying from there. Once I turned off my google ads, people ironically stopped typing Nature Cleanse Trial into google. One IP address actually signed up 2 times!! I just don't get it. My only guesses are that someone saw my add, and then searched on the landing page name keywords to look for reviews or something similar and bought based on a good google page rank. This is a little discouraging because I'd really like them to trust the click and drive them that way. I need to work on how I phrase my ads maybe.

7/1 Update on Nature Cleanse

Right after I posted that last blog entry, I ended up with 2 more sales on Nature Cleanse, wow! I think I may just leave this campaign alone (google seems to have stopped slapping me) and see what it can do. I've done no more work on it since my last report, only watch the money go in (commissions) and out (adwords).

Date	Commissions	PPC Costs	Godaddy Costs	Landing Page?
06/30/2009		$2.44		Yes
07/01/2009	$64.00	$1.77		Yes

To date (including all my mistakes) on this campaign, I'm at $160 revenue, $85.57 expense, $74.43 profit (46.5%). My target profit should be around 50% (from what I've read), and I'm getting pretty close even with some serious mistakes.

If I could just figure out how to get more clicks!! Maybe it's time to start playing with Yahoo and Bing and other traffic sources.

Update on Nature Cleanse

So the Nature Cleanse Trial through Copeac has been going well. I am making a slight profit with it, and quite happy with my lessons learned. The big thing I learned was to have a landing page!! I was able to get my click costs cut in half, unfortunately I'm having a hard time getting traffic on the keywords I can afford (some are priced way to high in the $2-10 per click range). The cheapest keyword ironically is just a simple plain "colon", unfortunately I get a lot of unrelated traffic there and it's hard to filter out just those looking for the body part colon and some health product to use with it.

Here are my up to date stats on this campaign:

Date	Commissions	PPC Costs	Godaddy Costs	Landing Page?
06/12/2009	$32.00	$49.03 (sale was in the first $20)		No
06/13/2009			11.17	Yes
06/14/2009		$2.09		Yes
06/15/2009		$.27		Yes
06/16/2009		$1.13		Yes
06/20/2009		$1.05		Yes
06/21/2009		$1.18		Yes
06/22/2009		$0.90		Yes
06/23/2009		$3.69		Yes
06/24/2009	$32.00	$3.69		Yes
06/27/2009		$5.29		Yes
06/28/2009		$1.85		Yes
06/29/2009	$32.00	$2.02		Yes

So far, I'm at a net profit of $14.64, however you can tell that I'm doing much better between click 2 and click 3, where the cost to convert was $9.16 and commission was $32.

Also, something important to notice here is how drastically my PPC costs changed after I spent the $11.17 at godaddy to get a landing page (and that costs covers 2 months worth of hosting!!). I can't emphasis enough, if you're serious about marketing a product, get your own landing page!

Lessons Learned:
Spending a few bucks on a landing page is worth it's weight in gold. You have to keep an eye on google, I did have a couple of google "slaps" where they basically made my keyword costs way to high and I had to re-start my campaign by tweaking it a bit. That's what explains the few dead dates with no clicks. And probably the last tip I learned, when you buy a landing page, make it a little generic. I named mine NatureCleanseTrial.com which means I basically can only market Nature Cleanse on there. I probably should have considered getting something more generic like ColonCleanseCentral.com or something along those lines (this example is already registered, and setup basically how I should have set it up).

For those keeping track, I've probably put about 10 hours into the nature cleanse promotion, leaving me making around $1.40/hr. Not all that exciting, and I'm not quitting my day job anytime soon, but I like to think the education I'm getting while doing this experiment has been amazing. I can't believe how much I know about this little known world now.