As I am going through the necessary steps of starting a home business, I am on the lookout for opportunities for growth. One of my targeted income streams defined in my 2010 SMART Goals is to create an online store. In order to maximize my earnings potential and save time, I need to start thinking about how I plan to advertise this new venture.
While there are plenty of opportunities to advertise and promote your products online, one of the more successful strategies is through Cost Per Click (CPC) campaigns. I have always been on the opposite side of the CPC spectrum. Until now, I have been the one who tries to get readers and customers to click on an ad. If I want to run a successful business, I need to start learning the other side of this advertisement opportunity.
MySpace MyAds
I decided to finally test out setting up a CPC campaign in order to drive targeted traffic to my online sites. Eventually, I plan to use CPC advertising to send prospective customers to my online store that I am setting up. Since I don’t know anything about creating these types of advertisements, I needed some practice.
A few days ago I saw the most recent MySpace MyAds promotion of $50 Free dollars for signing up (offer code: Valentine). I have seen these types of promotions in the past, but had ignored them until now. What a perfect opportunity to start testing out CPC campaigns with a $50 credit that I can experiment with!
Creating a Cost Per Click Campaign
Since I don’t have my online store up and running yet, I decided to try out creating an advertisement for one of the niche sites that I am working on. My campaign details and results are as follows.
Campaign Details
Since this was my first ad that I have created, I decided to go with the suggested defaults provided by the myAds tool. Here are a few of the details.
- Campaign Type – CPC
- CPC Bid – $0.54
- Daily Budget – No Daily Budget
- Lifetime Budget – $50.00
The minimum bid is $0.25 per click when you setup an ad campaign. However, the suggested bid was $0.54 so I decided to go with it. Since I was using the promotional code, I figured I would still get at least 90 clicks which seemed to be a good first test.
Campaign Results
I was a little surprised that my campaign lasted less than one day. I was very happy that I had put the cap of $50.00 on the campaign, as I was not monitoring my status throughout the day. Without the cap, I would have continued to receive clicks and would have to pay some money out of pocket.
Here are my campaign results -
- Impressions – 275,172
- Clicks – 93
- Click-hrough Rate – .03%
- Total Cost – $50.00
Since I put a cap on my total campaign of $50.00, as soon as I hit that mark, it ended.
Incidentally, I ended up earning a little over $3.00 from AdSense as a result of sending traffic to my niche site.
Final Thoughts
After my little one day CPC campaign, I have come to the conclusion that I still don’t really know a lot about creating advertisements. That is why it is important for me to take advantage of these types of opportunities and learn along the way. Since I am working on a fixed budget and don’t have a lot of extra capital to test these things out, I am trying to make the best use of promotional codes and FREE offers when they become available.
Have you ever created a MySpace MyAds for any of your online businesses? How would you rate their service compared with AdSense?
