A representative for Google Adwords recently approached me and asked if I’d be willing to let them tinker with one of my ad campaigns to see if they could improve my Adwords performance (I do a bit of paid advertising in addition to organic traffic generation for my affiliate business).

In a nutshell, it’s been a successful campaign that’s been running more or less on auto-pilot for the past 12 months.  I’ve been too lazy to get around to making a proper landing page, so it’s just a direct link to the merchant site.   Been pretty hands-off since I initially set it up, which is really nice, but would definitely be interested to see if Google can help improve on it.

The only stipulation is that they want me to let the optimized campaign run for two full weeks before reverting back to my original campaign (if I want to).  I’m a gambling woman, so I’ll suck it up and see what’s dished out over the next couple of weeks.  In order to establish a benchmark, here are some BEFORE stats for the past 10 days for this particular campaign:

Commissions (10 Day Period):

Total Number of Profiles Created For Dating Site:  249

Number of Sales (Upgraded Profiles):  47

Commissions Earned = 47 x $30 = $1,410.00

Advertising (10 Day Period):

Total Ad Spend:  $ 824.10

Impressions:  27,198

Clicks:  4,480

Click Through Rate (CTR):  16.47%

Overall Average Ad Position:  2.2

Bottom Line For Benchmark:

Net Income From Campaign over 10 Days ($1,410 Commissions - $824.10 Ad Spend) = $ 585.90

Return on Investment (ROI) = 71%

Average Cost per Click = $ 0.18

Number of Clicks It Takes Before Someone Creates a Free Profile (On Average):  18

Cost to Generate Each Profile = 18 clicks * 0 .18/click average = $3.24

Background Info and Notes about this Campaign:

- Campaign is for a niche dating site.  Over the past 6 months, for every 5.33 free dating profiles that are created through my affiliate link 1 member will uprade to a paid membership, which = $30 commission each time that happens.

- This campaign is not running on the content network - just the Google (and partners) search network.

- The last major change I did was 10 days ago (stopped running ads on the Yahoo network temporarily), so this is why I’m using a period fo 10 days as the benchmark - in order to compare apples to apples.

- The holiday season may have an impact this experiment in some way.  Things have definitely seemed to be slowing down since November, although I’m not sure if it’s due to the poor economy, the upcoming holidays, or a bit of both.

- Will update blog again after December 28 with stats for optimized campaign.

To be continued………………..