On the 6th November 2009, I bid on and won a domain in the Godaddy expiring domain auctions. The domain name was the name of a well known downloadable product and that product was listed in Commission Junction. Naturally I wanted to use the domain to create a site promoting this product.
I had to wait 7 days before Godaddy finally gave me control of the domain and on 15/11/2009 I had a one page site up with affiliate links pointing to the merchant's sales page. I soon noticed that most of the traffic to my new site was coming from a page on an external site that had already sold the visitor on buying the product. They arrived at my site with credit card in hand so I thought I would employ a PHP redirect only for visitors from that site. That saves them sitting through the same sales pitch twice.
To cut a long story short, in 3 months this one page site has made £233 with no promotion and only a small amount of time and effort invested. That's $365 if you're a Murrcan. The only work I've put in has been to:
- create one page (3 hours)
- get affiliate links and place on page (30 mins)
- do the PHP redirect magic (1 hour - I'm a bit slow with technical wizardry)
My good fortune is in having bought a site whose inbound links have already sold the customer. They arrive wanting to buy.
But that's not the extent of my good fortune. I was checking my Google Analytics statistics this morning and saw the following shocker:
What's this, what's this? Google (cpc)? I know nothing about PPC but isn't that traffic from an Adwords campaign? It ain't my campaign, that's for sure, so it must have been set up by the previous owner.
How fortuitous!
My question to you, and this is your homework: how can I find out what terms the Adwords campaign is targeting? Is there a way to find out how successful the campaign is?
Have you used the secondary filter to look at the keywords being used? sorry without looking back in GA I am not sure on the actual field names
You have pretty good numbers for a site with one page – how old is the actual domain?
Hi Cemil
The domain was registered in Oct 2007. It’s PR4 and was boasting 7,000 visitors / month, so I’m amazed there wasn’t more interest in it in the auction. I thought the final price would go way higher than I bid.
I’ve looked all over GA, but I can’t find any details that link the ppc campaign to any keywords. Someone suggested that I use KeyCompete, though, and using it I found that someone is targeting misspellings of “the product” and sending traffic my way.