Data from your search campaigns should be available

Data from your search campaigns should be available within a matter of hours, but as I’ve said before, until your commission data catches up, this information is not much use. Do make sure, however, that you are spending at a reasonable rate and that you can afford to keep this campaign running until you have some commission data to work with. If you are spending more than you are comfortable with, not yet knowing your return, pause the campaign and wait until the end of the referral period for all the commission data to come in; that way you can be certain about whether or not this campaign is making more than it spends.

In order to see how much you have spent on the search marketing campaign promoting an affiliate program in a given period of time, you must run a report on the search engine or engines where you are advertising that program. In this example, I will find out how much I spent on Google to promote Monster.com in the month of October 2005.

Google AdWords Reporting

First, you must log on to the AdWords interface using the e-mail address and password you used when you set up your Google account. Once you are logged on, you should click on the Campaign in question to display the ad group, or groups, used to promote the campaign. AdWords has a reporting page, but frankly, I almost never use it. It simply isn’t necessary most of the time to get the information I need. The AdWords interface is designed to give me quick access to the data I need. Simply select the dates for which you want to see the numbers and click Go.

Report Totals. For this simple exercise, you may simply note that the total amount spent for my Monster campaign in October was only $359.99. This is all we need to know from Google to determine whether our campaign is a success or not.

COMPARING THE RESULTS

After running two simple reports, we know that my total commissions for my Monster campaign were $841.50 and that I spent only $359.99 to generate those commissions. My profit for the month is a cool $481.51, more than double my money. You can see how building just a small number of campaigns that reach this modest level of success can help you reach financial independence, and this is only one of my most modest successes, believe me.

By the way, my per-click return (net profit) in this case was almost 13 cents per click based on the 3,675 total clicks it took to generate this profit of $481.51. So you see, everything you need to evaluate the profitability of your campaigns can be found in these simple reports.