Today I want to talk about how to run Google ads as an affiliate marketer. I’ve spent nearly 4 million US dollars on Google ads as an affiliate marketer and today I want to show you inside how I set up campaigns and how I set up all of the settings inside and choose offers that will convert for affiliates. Now a lot of people think affiliate. Marketers are not welcome on Google ads, but today I’m going to prove that wrong.
We’re going to talk about Google search ads in particular today, I’m going to show you how I, as an affiliate, marketer, not an agency running ads for other companies locally or anything like that. I am an affiliate, I’m running affiliate offers and I’m going to show you exactly what needs to be done if you want to do the same thing now, if you’re, just starting out, let’s think about that for a second, I’ve ran roughly four million now on US Dollars I quit my job in 2015, thanks to Google search ads, mainly because Google search ads has been one of the major traffic sources for me in addition to Facebook and native ads.
Ok, so at 4 million roughly the profit on that was 60 to 70 percent. So if you think about it, it’s roughly 2 million US dollars just conservatively will say so for me to work in a corporate job for for, however, many years it takes to get that I was it. I was making about 50 thousand a year at my corporate job. When I decided to quit in 2015, it would have taken me roughly 20 years or more to accumulate that type of revenue.
Ok, so Google search ads is an extremely great opportunity for anyone who wants to really focus on paid traffic. I think it’s one of the best traffic sources out there, but there’s really a lot to it. So if you are starting out – and you want to learn how to make money online, I think this article is great for you, because I’m going to go through the steps. Ok, so, first of all, with with Google search ads, you really need to have a high quality website.
That is the secret. Ok, if you’re, just starting out and you have a Google search ads account and you just go in there and you start setting up direct link campaigns to affiliate links, or you start running these shady little offers or shady little strategies that you’re reading from gurus out There who are teaching you these methods that don’t work, it’s not going to work for you, you’re, going to lose your Google Ads account and you do not want to lose your Google Ads account.
So read this entire article. So you understand what you need to know before you lose your Google Ads account as an affiliate marketer. Now, if you like, this type of article, please subscribe below, like my blog click, the little bell icon. So you get notified of all my future articles and you can look at all my past articles where I’ve also gone into my Google ads accounts and other paid traffic sources online.
So now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about the first thing we need to do and I’m going to get into my computer here in a minute. But first let me talk about few of the the basics. Okay. First of all, you need to choose an offer that is compliant with the Google search policies. Okay, you can’t run aggressive diet ads. You can’t run casino loans. Personal loans probably won’t work for you, so it’s try and steer clear of that.
I’ve had most success, running health-related offers as well as financial related offers, software’s business to business software tools. All of that stuff really works well as an affiliate marketer, but you have to do it while you also have a full-blown website. Okay. So if you’re, just starting out, we have a free training course at powerhouse Affiliate that walks you through step-by-step how to build a thority and authority website, so that you have a bunch of content.
First, on your website, it teaches you about the organic traffic, how to get traffic from search engines. So when people are searching for something, your website comes up in the search results for free organically. Once you have that established and you’ve gone through that training, and you have a website in your niche that you’ve chosen and you have an audience and it’s compliant with Google search ads.
Then it’s time to start thinking about paid search ads so that you show up in the search results, no matter what, whether you rank or not you’re going to be in the search results for whatever you’re targeting for a keyword. So we’re going to get into my computer now I’m going to talk about how I pick the keywords that I target, how I set my bidding strategies, the ad group structures and some examples of good websites that you could use as an affiliate marketer, while you’re doing Search ads on Google, okay, welcome to inside of my computer here is inside one of my Google Ads accounts.
I just want to show you that I have in fact spent millions of dollars in search ads. This is one of my Google Ads accounts for those of you out there. Who often ask me if this is real. Yes, it’s real for the purpose of this article though, and the instructional part of it I’m going to use a separate account just so I don’t have to keep blurring out all of the data that is inside this current account, so we’re going to use this account.
I’r going to come in here I’m going to show you basically in this article and talk about the policy for affiliates that you need to follow to talk about strategies for choosing your campaign, we’re going to talk about setup and some of the strategies I use for Finding keywords and other things like that: okay, so first, the first thing we need to consider is the policy itself basically come in to the Google Ads policy.
Read them all over here before you even start running ads. It’s very important. If you spend more than say 25 to 30 thousand dollars, these policies still are in effect, however, you get assigned a Account Manager which will help you to determine if your new policy or your new ads that you want to set up or your new campaigns are In fact, compliant it helps to have somebody on the inside, but usually that doesn’t come until you spend several thousand dollars with Google one of the biggest policies we as affiliates have a challenge with.
Is this one rate here that we talked about destinations that are solely designed to send users elsewhere? That is what affiliate marketing is. That is why people think Google hates affiliates it’s basically, because we send people to a landing page. We send them to an offer that we do not own, and that is basically breaking the rules. So how do we fix this? How do we as affiliates run paid search ads? Well, it’s actually not that hard.
The first strategy is, you can simply do a lead generation style campaign which is actually the best way to go. In my opinion, you’re building yourself an email list. We go through a lot of this inside one of our courses inside power hose Affiliate. Where we talk about email, marketing, setting up your your freebie, that you want to give somebody and then they sign up to your email list and then you can email them whatever you want after and I’m going to show you an example of that here.
In a second, the other option is to actually partner directly with the offer owner and have them set up a specific domain only for you, okay, so that means they will set up the domain. You really need to have a good relationship with your partner. They will set up a domain, they’ll put their product on there, they’ll put the sales check out and all of that in that domain. So now you can run ads specifically for you and every time you get a conversion or sale.
It will be tracked on that site. Okay. That is the only two ways I can think of. If you have other ways that you can get past these policies, please comment below share your experience and tell us what you’re doing, because I’m sure a lot of people would benefit from that information. But these two basic strategies do work. So, let’s go through a little bit more now and talk about some examples, so what I would do first, if I was an affiliate marketer and I wanted to start an affiliate campaign and the first thing you do is obviously find an offer that is compliant.
So you don’t want to be running any gambling. You don’t want to run anything in terms of loans. You can read all of this stuff here and you’ll, get more information as to what you can run. But if you come in to Clickbank Clickbank is a big marketplace. I’ve done articles on it before check out my youtube blog. What you can do is you can come into the marketplace, so I figured for an example. I would talk about business and investing.
I don’t recommend you go into how to make money online trust me it. Even though I do that myself and I my niche is around affiliate marketing. I highly recommend you do not start with how to make money online and run it on Google Ads you’re. Just going to get banned, it’s the same as Facebook. You go in with these big niches that everyone is running and basically they’ve already been so beaten down that they these big ad, these big ad Giants, just don’t like it anymore, so don’t even bother until you have a lot of spend and you’ve talked to an Actual rep and you’ve been assigned a rep so that you can start doing things that are a little more risky, but at the same time you have someone on the inside who can help you get stuff approved.
So let’s just talk. Let’s say you find an offer. You come into the marketplace here. There are tons of categories you can select here. So whatever your niche is, I’m sure you’ll find something on here. There’s tons of good ones. You can do stuff on parenting, fishing, home and garden health and wellness green products, a whole bunch of different things. You can run here and you can build your own website around.
You can build a niche specific website check out the free training at powerhouse affiliate com, where we show you exactly every single step along the way to build a niche website, because I said before you need to have your website with a of good content, or else Face or Google here is just going to wipe you out so make sure you have a lot of good content on your site. Related to your niche now come into yours category here and let’s say I have a website around investing I’m going to sort the results by gravity and, as you can see, one of the top offers here being promoted by affiliates is paying out about three hundred and Sixty nine dollars per sale.
Now, let’s assume I only get a one percent conversion rate. That means a hundred people that I send to this offer. I get a conversion, let’s just say that that’s a good conservative number. That means I make three hundred sixty nine dollars for every one hundred clicks, which is a 369 three dollars or sixty nine cents, earnings per click. So now what I need to do is figure out how many subscribers it’s going to take for me to get that hundred clicks.
Usually, if you have a list of subscribers, let’s say 50 subscribers, I can send them as many messages as I want over weeks and months and years as long as I’m sending them good content, they’re going to click on this offer. So really, let’s just say I get a hundred leads and out of those hundred leads, I get three people to sign up to this, I’m going to make a thousand bucks, roughly just forgetting three people to sign up to this training program that is, training people on How to invest so really, if I’m, if I’m spending say even ten or twenty dollars per lead on Google, it’s still going to work out profitable for me because I would say, spend six hundred dollars for my hundred leads, which is super expensive for leads.
Okay, I’m just telling you an example here: if I’m buying leads for 20 bucks, that’s super expensive. You can get them so much cheaper. In fact, you can get leads for $ 1. A piece in somebody says you can get them even less than a dollar depending on what country you’re in. Even you can go down to pennies per lead and now you’ve got this big email list. You’re building and now you can send them these offers compliantly.
So, let’s assume I want to run this offer. The next thing you need to do is: do some research. What are other people doing? How are they running offers like this in this niche? So the first thing I would do is simply just go to Google itself and do a search for whatever you you want to promote. So in this case I went to Google and I searched investing guide. Okay, I want to learn how to buy investments.
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Right now is a great time for that, because the caught the economy is really down it’s time to buy okay, a lot of people who think the economy is going to go back to normal, which it will eventually it’s now’s the time to look at doing stock Market investing – and this is probably where I would start if I was anyone in the world – I would come to Google and search for maybe an investing guide or something like that.
So whoever it bid on this keyword on their ads is now going to be able to show their ad and, as you can see here, you can see there’s a beginner’s guide here by udemy and there’s one here by fool dot CA. So if I click on this – and it goes to their landing page as you can see, it’s sent directly to their landing page, and this is a it’s more like a listicle style page and i’ve done a article on listicles and why they are so effective.
And why you should really consider doing a listicle, especially for google, as you can see they’re talking here and it comes down to an email capture, form they’re, doing exactly what I just said: okay, it’s the same exact thing, they’re collecting leads and now, in the back End they are either going to try and sell you their membership program or they’re going to send you affiliate links all the time related to guides different things you can get in the investment community, they’re, probably going to get you to sign up to a bank somewhere That has you know great trading software and they’re going to get paid commissions every single time, so they are in fact a product owner.
I know this is a fact, but at the same time they’re going to be sending you content they’re going to be sending you links out to affiliate products and everything else along the way. So you are in fact joining their list if you do that. So this is the strategy they use and it’s the strategy I use, and this is how affiliate marketers can run on Google now, let’s talk quickly about how to set up your campaign for maximum results and how to use the actual tools inside Google to make this Super easy for yourself, so another thing you should do also once you’ve done this initial research and you found a few competitors you’re going to want to take those competitor domains likes a fool, dot, CA and go into a tool like SEM rush.
If you go to day job hacks comm, slash SEM rush, you can get this for free for seven days and what you’re going to want to do is use this spy tool to see all of the ads that are currently being ran by this competitor. It’ll show you everything. This is perfect for you to come in and see what is actually happening. So just have a look here at what I can see now, just by looking at this domain. I can now see all of their ads everything.
This is amazing. That’s a great tool: now I can see everything that’s happening. I can go in and see their landing pages. I can go see how they’re beating at the policy how they’re actually not beating it they’re, actually adhering to the policy, and then I can even join their list and see all the messages they’re sending to people. So this is basically how you do it, and this tool is great, so I highly recommend you join the SEM rush free trial again go to day job hacks comm slash SEM rush for that trial.
I am an affiliate for SEM rush. I use it all the time you will be getting a great product. You can try it for free, so check it out, support my blog go to that link and, let’s, let’s carry on here so now that I know what everyone else is doing now. I have a great product. I built my website that is fully compliant with Google. I have a ton of great content now. It’s time I build my squeeze page or listicle or whatever it is that we’re going to use for technically a landing page.
But it’s not really a landing page in terms of how generally affiliates would set up a landing page to link out to some offer. That is not what we’re doing here, we’re going to delay that gratification for later so coming in, to your account, one great way to find keywords again is with this tool. If you come in here, you can see positions tab and it’s going to show you all of the keywords they are bidding on in their in their ad campaigns.
So really a great tool again to show you all of those keywords. It’s just starting to populate now and, as you can see, I can see all of what they’re bidding on they’re bidding on fool fool dossier: how to buy stocks in Canada, stocks to buy, how to invest blah-blah-blah-blah-blah right, there’s just so many keywords that I could steal Right here, just by exporting them into a file and adding them to my campaign, here’s the export button – and I could just do that if I wanted another great way to find keywords – is to come directly into the Google tool and click on keyword planner.
Now, what I’ll generally do is, I will discover new keywords and I’ll start with the website, so I’m going to take the offer that I’m actually promoting. So in this case, I will click on this link to see where I’m going and I’m going to take this domain right here and I’m going to plug it into Google so that I can get some great results. So here we go. I’r going to paste that in start with a website go here, click get results and now it’s going to show me a bunch of keywords.
Look at this there’s just so many keywords I think there’s two hundred and ninety five keyword ideas. So how many keywords would you actually use in your campaign depending on what your budget is? Really it really matters? So if you have a budget of say a hundred dollars per day, I would start with say: 50 keywords maximum, so you’re going to come in here and you’re going to look for keywords that you think are going to be keywords that people would search if they’re, Actually going to be trying to buy your product, so this one in this case, Google suggests that these are the types of keywords related to this website.
So it only makes sense to kind of pick keywords from this list. Say: 50 keywords that you think you can find you can. You can arrange these based on the top bid or the lowest bid. So three bucks Canadian, is the highest bid and if you, if you sort it the other way and then 46 cents, I think it was 46 cents, here’s the low bid. These are Canadian figures. So it’s going to be about half that almost or like a little more than half so about 70 %, so in this case for 46 cents, in probably around 33 cents, we’ll say 32 cents.
So really the cost per click here is is working. So if I had to spend say $ 100, I should get roughly 50 clicks of those 50 clicks. I want about a five to ten percent subscriber rate, so I would get about 10 subscribers for 50 bucks, safe five bucks per subscriber – that’s a realistic number here. So let’s say I’m paying $ 5 per subscriber and I’m getting 369 dollar payout on the offer. Then really it’s the math here works out.
Well, so I think it’s it’s a potential winner. If you just do the math and you do the research and bald first so that you can understand exactly what’s going on first, because you have all of this information available to you, you have the ads. You have the positions of the keywords, the keywords they’re, focusing on really that’s how easy it is, and this can be done in any single niche. Now, let’s assume you have your keywords: let’s just go through a couple settings: I’m not going to go through setting up an entire campaign on Google, it’s really or step by step walkthrough, but there are a couple of things that are really important when you’re setting up Your campaign for the first time, so, let’s have a look, let’s create a new campaign here and look at some of the things.
So what I generally focus on is leads. You can also do sales if you’re, if you’re, actually selling a product that you own that works well website. Traffic is okay, you’re going to get a bunch of traffic, but it doesn’t necessarily convert. My goal here is to get leads, so I’m going to collect leads and I’m going to select search. There are other ads, obviously that you can choose, but let’s just focus on search today, we’re going to go for website visits and here’s where you’re going to put your actual website.
This is where you’re sending traffic to this is where they’re going to subscribe, and the Thank You page after they’ve subscribed is going to be fully compliant and it’s going to be on this domain as well, so make sure everything matches so that you do not break The rules of Google and start sending people to an offer page continue. You can, you can install your tracking code. This is important if you wanted to track leads, you have to track your leads.
This is a very important piece of code and you want to put that on your thank-you page, so it tells Google every time you get a conversion. Every time you get a lead, it’s going to tell Google where that lead came from. So you need to put that code on the Thank You page, that’s important as well continuing on a couple more features that are important here. When setting up your first campaign, you want to turn off Google search partners on your initial test.
Google search partners is basically not Google site. It’s not coming directly from Google is coming from partner sites who have the search feature included and they feed their results with Google. It’s just not good quality traffic compared to people who would literally go to Google and search. So turn that off, unless you want to use it later, SEP separate this into a different campaign altogether do not run Google search partners at the same time as just plain search network traffic from Google.
Okay, turn off your Display Network run that separately as well. Never combined, in my opinion, it doesn’t work. You want to keep each campaign separate and you can duplicate your campaigns for each of these. After coming in select your location, it’s going to spread your budget across many countries. If you don’t change this, you want this. One people in or regularly in your target location. So if you’re running an offer that only accepts US traffic, then you want to select this okay.
If you’re running an offer on Clickbank which usually takes any country, you can always leave this open and just kind of take people from anywhere, but I like to select and know where my traffic is coming from directly English. Leave that nothing major here. So here’s the important stuff about bidding and budget and then I’m going to show you one more thing after this and then that’s it. Okay, if you have any questions or comments, please just post them below budget.
Let’s say we have $ 100 per day. A budget here is where the bidding really matters. Now, when you’re first starting out your campaign, you don’t want to start with a target CPA. You don’t want to start with automated bidding. In my opinion, I’ve done a complete article on how I lost ten thousand dollars on Google. You can check it out I’ll pop it up here. It talks about this bid strategy. What happens when you switch your budget and switch your bidding on the fly? Okay, yeah? I made a big mistake, one time and learn my lesson, but basically what I would do here start with a conservative bit, but you want to select a different bid strategy here right now.
We don’t have any conversion data, so Google can’t set bids based on conversions. Yet because we haven’t given Google any conversions yet so if you set up target CPA right now, the automated bid strategy just won’t, have any data. Google will tell you later when it’s time to turn it on in your recommendations. It’ll tell you, it’ll have a little pop-up here you can see. I have a red bar across the top here.
That says, I’m not running any ads. Well, that would say something like hey you’re ready to turn on target CPA, but don’t turn on yet I usually start with a manual cost per click, and I might set this to help increase conversions later once a conversion comes in, but right now manual, cost per Click is what I will start with, and you’re also going to want to add sitelink extensions, call-outs and call extensions if you can, because this increases your click-through rates on your Google ads, and you can find all of these simply by going back into seeing what their Ads look like, and you can see, basically what their extensions look like, and what you’re going to be looking for here is stuff like this.
These little last pieces of their ads top-rated stock pickers 25-year history, new stock picks top stock picks to buy. These are little snippets that they’re putting in right inside their Google ads setting under sitelink extensions or call-outs. These are, like you know, click here to get act. You know click here to get your free guide. If you’re giving away a free guide, then you need to you need to put that here.
Download for free get instant access, learn from the pros or whatever you want to put here, for your extensions and that’ll increase your click-through rates again, bringing your cost per click down, and these are a few strategies I use when setting up my ads. Ok, so once your ad is actually running you’re, going to start seeing conversions in the conversion column assuming you’ve set up conversions if you want to set up other conversions, I’ve come back into the other account by the way, because I want to show you some actual Data, but if you come in and you click on tools, you can create conversions right up here and you can create anything as a conversion and whenever somebody lands on a particular page on your website, you can fire that conversion pixel to tell Google you got that Conversion, so you can optimize your campaigns to whatever you want in this case, as you can see, I have several ad groups in this one.
I have seven ad groups all catered around specific keywords in my niche. Each of the ads in those ad groups focuses on the keyword bunch or whatever you want to call it. That’s a a group or cluster of keywords in each side, in each one of these ad groups and they’re catered around the specific ads now the landing pages. As well can you can go as a step further and each of your landing pages can be specific to the ads and AD group.
So this is how you do it eventually you’re going to see conversions now, one last trick before I leave this article. I want to show you how to find super highly profitable keywords. If you come into your keywords over on the left side and you click on search terms, it’s going to show you all of the keywords that people actually searched, not the keywords that you bid on. So if you have a broad match selection ad group, which I do have, I have one of my ad groups, which I call the Discovery ad group.
It’s set to broad match. All of my keywords in there are set to broad meaning. Now Google is going to show my ad to people if it even relates closely to the keyword that I’m bidding on now. I can come in to my search terms, report and see all of the keywords that people are searching and I’m not bidding on, because in this added / excluded column you can see. I have some that say added. That means I do have that keyword in my campaign, but then this one says none, which means this keyword got a hundred and twenty two conversions, and I don’t even have it added in to my campaign.
So I need to add these immediately into my campaign so that Google starts to optimize towards those specific keywords and then later I’ll I’ll be able to come in here and see that it’ll be added to my campaign. So there’s a ton of them up here that have conversions and this I do every single week or month I’ll come in here, depending on how much time I have – and I will come here and change it so that it’s added to my campaign – and it’s not Just being picked up through a bawd broad match, identifier, okay, so that is important here, because I want to have it in my campaign.
I don’t want it just to be triggered on a broad match, so that is a key trick to finding more keywords for your campaign. So hopefully this article has given you a guide into how to start setting up campaigns. If you want to see a full case. Study on us setting up a full search campaign from start to finish running paid traffic to e-commerce offers then come in and check out powerhouse affiliate com inside here we have a free starter package, but at the same time, if you’re a Premium Member, you get access To all of our case studies, we’ve done one on Google, we’ve done one on Facebook.
We have many on native and push and we have more coming. We are constantly doing live, trainings or live examples of campaigns. We are running. So if you want to come in here and join the premium Club for 19 bucks, you can see an actual Google ads campaign set up from scratch running two ecommerce offers and you’re going to see all of the set up as well. Alright, I hope you liked that article, if you did please again like subscribe or click the bell icon down below, so you get notified of all my future articles.
Please share this. If you think it’s a article that will help anyone else that is running Google Ads. Maybe for your team or maybe another affiliate, you know please share it with them. Thank you for reading and I hope to see you in the next articles.
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