I started working on this post exactly two months ago today. I set out to use some of my earnings to drive traffic to one of my affiliate landing pages and see if I can rake in some sweet moolah without the help of Uncle Rico (props if you got the Napoleon Dynamite reference). The landing page is pitching an E-Book that I purchased (selling for $29.95), Adsense, and Amazon affiliate program. The results weren’t exactly what I had imagined, but were good nonetheless. Let’s break down the results.

First of all, I should let you know that this was my first attempt at PPC (pay-per-click) marketing. The results might have been better for someone a bit more experienced, but I didn’t go into it completely blind. I ordered and studied a total of six books that I had bought on Amazon, and a couple of the gems were from Perry Marshall, the Adwords God himself. You can order those here, and here.

The sources I used for traffic generation were - Google Adwords, A StumbleUpon Campaign, YPN (Yahoo Publishers Network), and Adbrite. The results were quite interesting, and profitable. And just to be thorough, I split tested 4 different ads, 2 at a time, and the same landing page for all results. I wanted to take a scientific approach, and therefore used the same text on all the ads (minus StumbleUpon, in which it’s not truly PPC).

So I set out on my journey with a 3k budget, and I wanted to spend 1k with each source to see where I get the best bang for my buck. I’ll break it down for you by my total spent on serving the ads, average CPC, clicks, conversions, gross profit (includes e-book sales, adsense, and amazon), and net profit.

Google Adwords

Well, after reading Perry Marshall’s books that I had ordered from Amazon, I felt that Adwords was the PPC company that I had the most knowledge in, so I dove in and created my campaing here first. Here is what I found…

• Total Spent - $979.63
• Average Cost-Per-Click - $0.18
• Total Clicks - 5,432
• Conversions -49
• Gross Profit - $1,771.44
• Net Profit - $791.87

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon interested me when I found out about their “campaign” options. Essentially, you give them a budget, and they send visitors to your site for 5 cents each. There is no need to create an ad, split test, or budget… StumbleUpon sends you exactly what you pay for. People usually don’t even know that they are being sent to a site that is paying for the campaign. It seems natural, they push the stumble button, and are taken to my landing page. I think this traffic would be great for a blog, but it’s terrible (as I had guessed) for selling things. The great part about the Stumble Campaign is that it has a potential to net you more visitors than you pay for, if your visitors are clicking the thumbs up.

• Total Spent - $500.00 (I stopped this short due to terrible results)
• Total Visitors - 11,481
• Conversions - 21
• Gross Profit - $371.48
• Net Profit - $128.52-

Now, let’s be honest here. I took a loss on this one, but I expected to. I didn’t think that something like StumbleUpon would work because people wouldn’t like seeing landing pages. I was correct.

Yahoo Publishers Network (YPN)

This one is a bit strange. I got fewer clicks, and impressions than I did with Adwords, and yet I had more conversions. I’ll take it, but was it luck?

• Total Spent - $843.12
• Average Cost-Per-Click - $0.29
• Total Clicks - 2,907
• Conversions - 52
• Gross Profit - $1,816.73
• Net Profit - $973.61

Final Thoughts
This experiment would have been pretty profitable had I left StumbleUpon out of the mix. But with a flat rate of 5 cents per visitor I just had to give it a try. So my results are as follows…

• You’ll get the most clicks and impressions with Google Adwords, yet it doesn’t convert as well as YPN.
• StumbleUpon is a wash for your Marketing Campaign, yet it would be a great source of extra traffic for a blog. At 5 cents a visitor, it doesn’t get much cheaper.
• YPN offered the best bang for the buck. Although the cost per click was higher than Google Adwords, I still managed to make more cash with less clicks, and impressions.
• Although I was using the same ad on the two PPC sources, YPN was the higher converter.

So the obvious winner in my little triangle here is YPN. It made me the most cash, simple mathematics!

Here are the final results across all three sources.

• Money Spent - $2,322.75
• Gross Profit - $3,959.65
• Net Profit - $1,636.96
• Expenses (turn key site from Sitepoint) - $80.00

TOTAL PROFIT - $1,556.96

Not a bad experiment. I got a blog post out of it, and made a bit of extra cash. I’ll take that! I’ve done these three, now I’m working on doing some of the smaller companies like Adbrite and Bidvertiser. I’ve got campaigns running on them now, and I’ll report the results as soon as they use up their budgets.

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