Case Study | First Sale | End of Project
I made my first sale today through the site I have been writing about in this case study. From the click ref in Affiliate Window it appears the user who made the sale arrived at the site via the PPC advert. They bought the item via the ECU and picked the lowest priced merchant which was Dixons.
So far so good but what I failed to check was how much commission Dixons were paying on this type of item. I wrongly assumed their maximum amount of 2.5% was paid on all items but after seeing this sale listed in Affiliate Window I saw I would only get 39p for selling a £39 item. This works out at 1% and not the 2.5% I was expecting. I had a quick check of the Dixons commission scale and found that only 1% commission is paid on slow cookers.
Due to this I have now stopped the AdWords campaign for this site and will leave the site alone, therefore ending the case study.
In total I have spent £6.88 on the domain and £1 in clicks from the Adwords campaign and have earned a grand total of 39p commission. Making a grand loss of £7.49. Without the traffic from Adwords I doubt the site will get any more traffic or make any more sales so I will just chalk this up to experience and move on to the next project.
Lessons learnt: always check the exact comission paid by the merchant for the type of item you are promoting. Pretty obvious really but something that caught me out this time!
Definitely not an encouraging start to a Monday morning! My first sale (ever) was from a direct to merchant PPC campaign – where I hadn’t properly considered the ROI, the commission for the product ended up being £0.20 – but cost about £2.00 to get that sale! Chalked this one up to experience too, was helpful to realise just how much planning is needed to make these successful!
At least I have learnt something from this experiment.
Tonight I am going to find the right product and then tomorrow make the site and then Wednesday start PPC on it.
I want £5 per sale so will be looking at items in the £100-200 price range – preferably where Amazon is the cheapest merchant.
Hey,
We’re looking for affiliates for our new UK Publisher program if you’d be interested?
You can also follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ShopzillaUK
The program is free to sign up to and if you want to have a look at our blog for more info, here’s the link:
http://shopzilla-publisher-blog.co.uk/category/welcome/
Let me know if you like the sound of it
Emma
The site made another sale yesterday so that’s another 39p to add to the grand total. The user came via the SERPs as I am no longer running a PPC campaign for this site.