Ad Campaign Segmentation Blues
February 22nd, 2007Just some quick updates on my progress to the $5000/mo goal. Recently, a friend of mine told me about the wonders of ad segmentation and how it would improve CTR as well as targeted traffic. For those of you who aren’t aware of what segmentation is, you can either Google it or look at DirectoryVault Chad’s post on the subject here. He doesn’t go into detail, but you’ll get a better grasp on what it’s all about.
Essentially, what you do is break lots of general keywords that match your particular destination page and break them up into very targeted keyword groups that match specific pages on the destination link.
So that’s great and it’s a beautiful concept, except for a novice to advertising, this can be more difficult than it seems. This last week was my trial in segmentation, and to be honest with you, I failed miserably. For three of the seven days, I spent $150/day with next to no returns. This was because I paused my successful campaigns to segment them into several smaller groups, and in doing so I got a ton more clicks and for some reason, way less sales. I will say this — most of the money was going to an industry that is heavily saturated and gets tons of traffic, but that doesn’t account for the other campaigns which were usually more successful.
In fact, if I showed you my current ClickBank screen shot, you would be depressed for me because I lost my momentum I had going before. Luckily, I saved my campaigns that were bringing me success and I enabled those again a couple of hours ago. I have a new strategy now that won’t cost so much, and it might save you a ton as well. In short, it’s:
DON’T BE LAZY.
Yeah, that’s right– I said it. On my previously successful campaigns, I was so lazy upon finding something that worked that I didn’t want to actually research into the success, magical as it seemed. Now, knowing I was so close to my goal before and knowing how easily it was removed from grasp, I have done several things to ensure future success:
- I have reduced campaigns down to the way they were when success was happening
- I am now using software I am developing for public release to make affiliate landing pages easier to manage
- I am using that same software to track keywords from click to payment, thus maximizing keyword efficiency
- Each time I start a new campaign, it will be reasonably capped as to avoid loss on ROI
- I will avoid saturated markets as much as possible and focus on niches
This starts … now! I will keep you updated on my progress as I go along, as I know a few people are keeping track. 
Wish me luck!
In fact, the information we’ve learned is so priceless that we will begin marketing it in the not-too-distant future after we’ve done plenty of testing and make sure the system works like a formula should.