Affiliate PPC Bidding Wars: Part 1 - The Background
Always a well guarded secret by affiliates is the art of the PPC bidding wars. Now many people out there won't know what a PPC bidding war is and how it works, well we are here to reveal the underground secrets of affiliate PPC marketing...
What is an affiliate bidding war?
This is when there are two advertisers going after the same keyword to show their PPC ad.
Why the bidding war?
Google doesn't allow advertisers to double serve ad's in Google AdWords...in order to prevent spamming. As a result you can only have one advertiser per keyword showing an ad directing to a website.
What does that mean?
When you are an affiliate and you have a particularly high EPC (earning per click) on a keyword then you want to make sure that your ad is shown instead of any other affiliate...as that way it will be your ad that will get clicked on which will hopefully convert into an affiliate sale.
How do you get your ad to show over another affiliates?
Google's algorithm decides which ad to show based on CPC and Quality Score. So if an affiliate is direct linking on a brand keyword, they will normally get a Quality Score of 10/10. As a result if there are two affiliates with good campaign structure, good account history and good keyword & ad copy relevancy...then they will both get a Quality Score of 10/10.
If you both have the same Quality Score what happens?
If affiliates have the same Quality Score then it will come down to what how much they are willing to pay for their ad to show (also known as the max bid.) So if one affiliate bids more than another, they will have their ad shown over the other affiliates.
How much can you bid?
Here is the secret...you are allowed £70.00 as a maximum bid for any keyword in Google AdWords (in the UK.) So affiliates can bid anything up to £70.00 in order to get their ad to show.
£70.00! Thats a really high CPC!
Dont worry about having to pay £70 for your actual click, the way Google's algorithm works is that it only charges you for what you would pay over the competitor in position number 2. Even if you are bidding at £70, you will only pay what is required to be in position 1, which depending on the competition of the keywords could be as little as £0.05 instead of £70.
What happens if both affiliates are bidding the maximum of £70 and they both have a quality score of 10/10?
This is when an affiliate bidding war begins and to find out how to win an affiliate bidding war check back for the next post...Affiliate PPC Bidding Wars: Part 2 - Winning an Affiliate Bidding War!
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