Nextebizguy » Amazon

Preparing for the Holiday Shopping Season

Nextebizguy — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 06:11:25 +0000

The catalogs are starting to show up in my mail. The holiday shopping season is starting and it’s time to start preparing your Adwords campaigns for the coming season. Here is an example of the type of traffic patterns you’ll find for various electronic items.

Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
0.35	0.36	0.62	1
0.39	0.37	0.56	1
0.36	0.42	0.52	1

I’m getting these numbers from the Google Adwords keyword research tool. I’m running numbers on a particular DVD player and you can see the spike in traffic volume coming in November and December. Now is the time to find the products you want to promote!

I’m starting to go through the catalogs, looking for niche products for an affiliate Adwords campaign. I’m also redesigning one of my websites to take this traffic and sell it. The basics remain the same. You have to do your homework and make sure that what you are going to pay for the traffic is acceptable at a 1 – 2% traffic conversion rate. If you can’t turn a profit off the affiliate commission, don’t run the campaign. There is no need to donate to Google this Holiday season.

Let’s examine being an Amazon affiliate. Currently, the basic payout for electronics is 4%. If you want to run an Adwords campaign, you’re going to need a fairly expensive item in order to make a profit at the typical 2% conversion rate. If you have to pay 20 cents a click, you will need to promote a product that sells for > 250 dollars. The higher your pay per click goes, the more expensive the item must be.

Stay tuned for more…

Amazon.com Buyer Percentage

Nextebizguy — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 18:20:00 +0000

This feature may have been around for some time, but I recently noticed it on Amazon.com. When you pull up certain items, Amazon displays the following:

What do customers ultimately buy after viewing items like this?
31% buy the item featured on this page

They also list the percentage of other items purchased. Spending a little time searching through these items will yield gems. What will you do with this type of knowledge? The DVD player that I do my amazon affiliate testing on sells at 50%!

Obviously that is good news, but I’m not yet seeing that type of conversion from the adwords traffic I’m sending over. If you’re having success, let me know!

Amazon Affiliate Update

Nextebizguy — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 01:53:00 +0000

Quarter 1 2006 is over and here are my totals for one product that I advertised through an Adwords campaign:

Total Amazon.com Items Shipped
12, $614.77, $29.25
Total Third Party Items Shipped

4, $182.46, $10.37

Total Items Shipped

16, $797.23, $39.62

Total Items Returned

-1, -$11.5, -$0.58

Total Refunds

0, $0.00, $0.00

TOTAL REFERRAL FEES
15, $785.67, $39.04

My income is the 39.04.

Adwords Landing Page Update 2

Nextebizguy — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 12:54:00 +0000

Quick update: Invariably, if you post saying something like “it didn’t work” that the next week things will change. This week the landing page experiment turned in sales of a DVD player, books, a DVD, and a watch. Amazon numbers are 17 clicks and 5 items ordered.

Adwords Landing Page Update

Nextebizguy — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 18:09:00 +0000

It’s been one week since I switched from direct affiliate links in Adwords to a website landing page. The results are:

28 Adword clicks (to landing page)
15 Click-thrus to Amazon.com
0 Sales

With my stats tracking as well I learned that nobody checked the rest of the site out either. So my thoughts of potential sales through other products didn’t work.

Another interesting thing I learned is that the Adword ads clicks are not just coming from Google.com. I got clicks from sites like www.buy.com, www2.shopping.com, www.nexttag.com, www.epinions.com, and www.become.com.

I checked these sites and they display Adword ads when visitors do a search. I received most clicks from www.nexttag.com. I was happy with the placement of the ad on the sites and think it’s not a bad thing.

More lessons learned this week. The more you try, the more you learn. I wish I had feedback from the customer as to why they didn’t buy.

Adwords and Big Name Affiliates

Nextebizguy — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 23:24:00 +0000

Since optimizing my Adwords ad for product X, my conversion rate has dramatically increased. Take heed that your ad copy is important in drawing customers that are willing to buy, not just look.

Another happy benefit is that using a big name affiliate like Amazon, Buy.com, Walmart, etc., is that people will continue to shop and buy other products. So far I have seen the following with Amazon:

1. Someone upgraded and purchased a more expensive product
2. Someone purchased multiple DVDs and books
3. Someone downgraded and purchased a lesser model (but hey, I still got the sale)
4. Someone purchased kitchenware!

I think you’re getting the point. Get customers to a big named affiliate with a diverse array of products and you will reap the rewards.