Giving Amazon £11,000 for Christmas

When is a successful campaign actually a profitable failure?

In a month of affiliate marketing for Amazon.co.uk I have sold more than 500 units, totalling more than £11000 in sales. I made 26% return on my advertising costs, built a daily Click Through Rate (CTR) of 2-6% (1% is considered good news), and unearthed some mighty keywords that cost fewer pennies than I have fingers.

And today I pulled the plug.

My AdWords campaigns had been driving thousands of eager shoppers to Amazon, and 13% of them converted to buyers. So what went wrong?

Each morning I'd wake up earlier and earlier, excited to see how my AdWords clicks from the previous day had converted to orders. I'd run an Orders Report, check the price of each item, work out my earnings according to the Amazon PPC commission structure, subtract costs, and enter everything into Excel, all while drinking my coffee. It took some time, but it was the *only* way to connect the AdWords stats to Amazon.co.uk performance.

Briefly, Amazon waits to pay commission until their products are dispatched. The 'Earnings Report' for any one day is nearly useless for working out how you're converting, as it includes items ordered days ago and excludes items yet to be dispatched. It is possible to wait until everything is dispatched to calculate your ROI, but this introduces an intolerable delay going forward between adjusting your campaigns and seeing the results, leaving your advertising powerboat as slow and unresponsive as a tanker but with none of the volume.

Assuming you, like me, are happy to add up the orders every morning, there is still a fatal problem: Amazon only tells you which item has been ordered, not the price. Click the link and you'll be shown their product page, but up to 30% of my sales were from third party merchants. Who could be 50% cheaper or more expensive. Bang goes accurate reporting.

There's a second layer of confusion. Heard of conversion tracking? If you run the 'back end', ie an Amazon-style sales site, you can use cookies to track exactly which clicks converted and thus calculate the various strengths of your ads and keywords. Amazon has a decent substitute: tracking ids, which can be incorporated into your links and then used to produce individual orders and earnings reports. But aside from adding another 30 minutes of arithmetic to your routine, this means a) you are limited to 100 distinct ids and b) every time you want to change or reallocate an id you need to delete and rewrite your ad or keyword.

This cannot be as good as it gets.

Over the next few days and weeks I'll be reviewing the books and resources which allowed me to create successful AdWords campaigns, as well as going into detail about the advice which made the most difference to my bottom line.

I won't make the same mistakes again - and neither will you.

- Joe