In early September John McCain announced his running mate for presidency – Sarah Palin. I was doing a lot of PPC campaigns to polls with email submits and zip submit offers at that time and immediately jumped onto this topic. It was a hot election season ahead of us and I was hoping to cash in on that a little bit.
I looked around how other people were doing polls at that time and then stumbled on a poll/survey that was different. This was from a real research institute and not from an affiliate marketer. The poll was 10 pages long with about 20 questions. Nothing was promised to me. Out of curiosity I did the survey and then decided to give it a try.
I setup a 5 page survey with a total of 10 questions. These were on topic questions that would stir up people’s tensions a little bit. The reason I did that is that people are very passionate about certain topics. Start talking about “gay marriage”, “abortion” or other topics and it will get a heated discussion. I made up questions not in these areas, but with enough twist to it that people would love to have their voice heard. The reason for 5 pages and 10 questions was to get the visitors into clicking mode. If they would click so many times on radio buttons and check boxes, they are “in clicking mode” and that helps to make them convert.
The final page showed 2 offers to choose from for them. A grocery giftcard (zip submit) and a gas card (email submit). Underneath I was rotating links from several affiliate networks to spread the load across.
Keywords. You will not always need thousands of keywords for your campaigns. This campaign only had 43 keywords. I ran the campaign on Google’s content network starting with a bid of $0.25. Every 12 hours I lowered the bid prices by 3-5 Cents. When I reached 6 Cents the results changed from good (lots of traffic and converting) to bad (less traffic and therefore less conversions). So, I bumped the price back up to $0.07 and let it sit. On average the campaign made about $30 per day net profit. In the middle between start date and election day the competition got more up to speed, but I was able to fight it off successfully and pretty much maintained my position. Overall I’d say I spend maybe 4 hours on this campaign building the pages, getting keywords and fine-tuning. So, that turned out to be a nice ROI. Barrack Obama did not work as well for me, but still came in with over $750 USD net profit using a similar approach. John McCain, like in real life, did not “convert” very well at all and I dumped him early in the process (like in real life 
).
Conclusions: Polls work when promoted with PPC traffic, but mainly on the content network. Usually 1 out of 20 polls works and makes money. I did not know too much about really tuning a PPC campaign until I joined PPC Coach. There is an entire sub-forum dedicated to easy to setup PPC campaigns + free software (that comes with the subscription) that allows you to throw out PPC Campaigns in the matter of minutes if you want to. But PPC Coach does not do the work for you – you have to do it yourself. However, from the knowledge hidden in the forums I learned how to make different kind of PPC campaigns work, what caveats to expect and how to make them profitable. I think this result described here is pretty good proof.
List of Keywords used:
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