Calculating Profitable Ads – PPC Bully

In Affiliate Marketing, if someone is making money in a niche using PPC, You can too (Most of the time)!

See... It's really all just a matter of fine tuning everything to be a well oiled machine that pumps out more dollars than you're putting in.

When someone else has figured a way to make this "machine" work, chances are, you can too as long as you optimize (oil it) enough.

I had my own formula for calculating profitable ads... Basically, I would watch major keywords for a period of around 30-90 days (usually a quick check during the "I don't want to do anything" times). Next I would make a mark of what sites I remember / are actually affiliates like myself. During the period of even just a week, you can begin to tell which are the bigger players and which ones are not. The bigger players have consistent higher positions and show for almost all inquiries. Smaller guys however probably show less frequently and in lower positions.

The thinking behind this is that the bigger guys have a much better optimized campaign. Therefore profits are higher so they can bid more to get a larger percentage of the market.

This is how I generally find what sites are what I consider profitable.

I've always wondered how sites such as PPC Bully calculated this type of thing for you.

If you don't know about PPC Bully, it's a site that basically does all the work above by checking the ad some 20 odd times a day. You can do this for up to 25 keywords.

After researching how they figured out if a keyword is profitable, I realized it was much like the way I try to calculate profitability but with even more accuracy and more importantly... automation.

How PPC Bully Calculates Profitability
Here is a little snippet from the PPC Bully page showing their algorithm.

Profitability-Indictor (PI)

How the PI is being calculated?

Ad PI = (Number of Days Seen * Percentage Seen) / Number of Days since Last Seen

Example:

Ad "Birthday Flowers" was seen 12 days out of 18. The Ad was last seen 2 days ago.

Number of Days Seen: 12 days
Percentage Seen: 12/18 = 66.6%
Number of Days since Last Seen: 2 days
P-Index = (12 * 66.6%) / 2 = 4
Profitable Ad is an ad whose PI is at least 7. You can change this default threshold (7) in the Account page.

Now, with anything, you could do this yourself like I USED to be doing, or you can sign up for PPC Bully and start doing the whole automated thing.

Personally, I like to automate as much as possible.

I think of it like this... I have so much going on right now affiliate wise, that I couldn't afford the time to take on another project right now. Let's say that I hear about a HOT campaign or keep seeing it all over. What do I do?

I throw in the top keywords into google... maybe some long tail keywords... and then continue working. Now... thirty days later, I have a complete data set of research material ready for whenever I am ready to enter that niche! And thus... more money is made.

To me, that's worth the 45 bucks.