Affiliate marketing through pay per click seems quite handy for most people who know a thing or two about Adwords and Facebook ads. And it really is! The major perk is that you don’t have to build up a website of your own and you can easily test advertisers and niches.

However, you need to consider that monitoring the results can only be done through the the Adwords and Facebook ads platforms by comparing the results in your 2Performant affiliate account. Besides, you will have to cover and optimize the costs yourself so that the commission amount can cover and exceed all the expenses owed to the two advertising platforms.

When you do affiliate marketing through pay per click, you need to achieve the lowest cost per click possible, while your ads and the landing pages you send have to be as relevant as they can, for a higher conversion rate. In order to minimize costs, it’s advisable you look for keywords or niches with a low competition.

Another important thing to remember is that you should not bid on the advertisers’ brands, as this is breaking the 2Performant Terms and Conditions and could lead to your affiliate account suspension. Also, you need to add as negatives keywords that name their brands and other brand derived terms.

Because we wanted to get into more details on what does it really mean to do affiliate marketing through pay per click, including technical details, we talked to three of our top affiliates that already have a lot of experience with this and can show off their very good results. We spoke with Octav Jomir, Gabriel Nica and New Agency.

They were really nice and revealed some of their secrets that help them achieve very good result – high conversion number and low cost per click. We have gathered them for you here:

Affiliate marketing through pay per click – Adwords

• campaign structure
  • campaigns can be structured by product category/brands/specific keywords/general keywords or by specific products, when you need a higher control.
  • most affiliates would rather not take the risk of investing big budgest in PPC campaigns for affiliate marketing, fearing unprofitable results. Another way would be for them to pick a niche, an advertiser’s specific product category and assign a lower budget, thus raising the campaigns’s eficiency and efectiveness. It’s also good to give yourself some time to get used to the Adwords platform and the way it works for affiliate marketing.
• campaign types
  • each advertiser works best with certain types of campaigns, mostly depending on the niche. But you can successfully use Search campaigns, Display ones, as well as Search with Display Select.
• bidding strategies 
  • if you are looking for a higher control, you should go for manual bidding, preferably CPC.
  • in some cases, Maximize Clicks strategy can deliver good results, but manual bidding allows you to control the bids at a keyword level. Google Keyword Planner works very well in offering a starting bid, depending on the region you advertise in.
• keywords: match type and longtail, keyword research 
  • for the initial research, Google Keyword Planner is a good enough tool, together with Google Trends. The keyword match type can also vary, depending on the niche. You can start with broad match or broad match modifier, as long as you provide as many negative keywords as possible. You can later on add the keywords found in the Search Terms Report.
• Dimensions tab and campaign level segmentation
  • one of the most importants Adwords features is the Dimensions tab. Here you can find important information about your results and optimize them. For instance, if you notice that you had a lower CTR during a certain time, which can affect your Quality Score, you can restrict the display of your ad in this interval. Other types of data you can find in the Dimensions tab are the ones regarding the regions your traffic comes from , days of the week, etc.
• experiments
  • experiments are mandatory. Without them you will never discover what works and what doesn’t work.
• display ads 
  • display ads are not very popular in affiliate marketing, due to their high cost per click and low conversion rate.  Besides, you don’t always find a lot of banners in the affiliate programs and even if you decide to create them yourself, you still need their approval and it can take time. You can use display ads on products that have previously had a good conversion rate on Search.

Affiliate marketing through pay per click – Facebook ads:

• campaign types
  • the most efficient campaign are the traffic objective ones.
• types of ads
  • single ad images could be a better, simpler option with a higher control. They need a short and clear message and a Call to Action. You should also test several ads to find the one with the lowest cpc.
  • some advertisers work better with multiple image ads, but this can only be seen with an A/B test.
• automatic/manual bidding
  • you can give it a try with automatic bidding, after you first tested the cpc level you can obtain.
• Facebook audiences
  • one option would be to create large audiences you can use for ad testing. If one audience works well with an ad, you can also create and use a Lookalike audience.

We hope these tips will help you either start or optimize your pay per click campaigns for affiliate marketing.

So login HERE or CREATE AN AFFILIATE ACCOUNT if you don’t have one yet.

2Performant is a self-service affiliate platform where e-shops work easily with digital marketing natives at a cost per sale model. 

We tracked more than 3,000,000 sales since 2009 for more than 550 clients and 57,000 affiliates. Come on board, we have cookies!

Good luck! 🙂