Turning PPC Affiliate Headaches Into Your Advantages

When I first started getting into PPC Affiliate Marketing a few months ago I had this nagging question in the back of my mind.  If this line of business is so easy, why aren’t the "Super Affiliates" completely dominating the playing field?  Even if they don’t have time personally to see to every campaign, if these crazy margins of profit are out there for the taking, why isn’t everyone taking them?

What I’ve discovered is that there are a lot of headaches out there, especially if you’re a PPC Affiliate.  For example, as a PPC Affiliate, one of the most important parts to running a successful business is being able to track everything.  You need to thoroughly study your numbers all the way accross from Impressions to Sales and always be split testing and tweaking your campaigns.

The challenge with all of this is that full testing and tracking is not always available at your fingertips.  For example, some affiliate networks offer the ability to place tracking pixels on the sales pages of the offers you are promoting automatically as part of the toolset you have access to in the back end of their systems.  However, those networks are in the minority.  Most of them don’t give you that option unless you specifically ask for it, which can be a pain in the ass.  It would be nice to be able to place a pixel on the sales page even before you launch a campaign, but that doesn’t work with everyone out there so that is a headache you have to put up with.

Another major headache is when you find offers that you’d like to promote that are not part of any network out there, but simply just use something like 1Shopping Cart to do their affiliate sales.  Most of these types of "private" offers don’t even give you the ability to track "SubIDs" which means you can’t even track your keyword stats properly, let alone get a tracking pixel on the sales page.

The three major headaches I run into as a PPC Affiliate Marketer are:

1. Lack of offers that allow search marketing.  Yes you can login to affiliate networks and see thousands of offers, but if you remove all offers that don’t support "Search", and then you remove all offers that are not part of "Diet Offers", "Payday Loans", "Ringtones" and "Zip Submits", what are you left with?  Not much.  Even with all the networks already out there, finding good offers out there to promote, is still a major headache in my opinion.
2. When you do find "private" offers that have implemented their own "affiliate system", most of them just slap something together that has bare minimum functionality but offers no easy way to do "SubID" tracking, not realizing that without "SubID" tracking most PPC affiliate marketers will just move onto something else.
3. Sometimes you will find "private" offers with SubID tracking or even good offers on the networks which already have SubID support, but they don’t have a simple and easy way (I’m talking 20seconds of setup), to place tracking pixels on the sales pages of the offers you’re promoting.

Turning Headaches Into Advantages?

Because of these three headaches, most PPC marketers will simply ignore any offers that don’t give you the ability to track SubID’s and put pixels on the sales pages.  For example, lets say you find a product on the Internet that you’re very interested in personally so you purchase it and love it.  You find out they have no affiliate program already setup, so you move on.  Or, lets say they do have an affiliate program setup, but they are using a system that doesn’t support SubID’s and tracking pixels, so you move on.

It’s too hard to be a profitable PPC Affiliate Marketer without these things in place, right?

Well, I think this is where we can seperate ourselves from everyone else.  See, as a PPC Affiliate Marketer you pretty much know that most people who do PPC will just stay away from these kinds of things.  They’ll move onto "Easier Waters".  But what if we could turn these "disadvantages" around for ourselves and figure out ways around them, and then use that fact as an advantage for ourselves.

Meaning, what if you could figure out an easy way to help the vendor install SubID tracking for you?  Or they could place a tracking pixel for you?  You know that most people will be way too lazy to do that.  If these types of things are not handed to them on a silver platter, they won’t bother.  They’ll move onto the other offers that already support things like that.

That’s all I’m going to say about that.  Something to think about.

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