Oh and one more thing. I just did some new calculations on my advertiisng with some new numbers I realised I could use, and these new numbers give a different story for how many downloads I need for my pay per action campaign where I pay 25 cents per download.
My previous calculations showed that I was getting 1 sale for every 40 downloads on that campaign. At my previous price of $24.95, with profits of about $21 a copy, I could spend about $10 on avertising per sale, so 10/40 = 0.25.
But I calcualted that based on my total sales during that time period. I just remembered though that I also tracked the sales that resulted from those same clicks during that period, paying $2 for each of those. But when I divide the tracked sales from those impressions, which are less than the actual number of sales I did, I come to a quite different conclusion, and that is that I have to have around 200 downloads to make one sale.
The reason for this descrepancy is likely because my pay-per-download campaign doesn't target the same sort of demographic as my other advertising campaigns. I might make one sale for every 5 downloads from users of cgtextures.com, but some site called photoshoptutorials would have users which might not need a texture generator as much and are just trying it out of curiosity.
Whatever the reason, at my current price of $34.95 for the texture generator I make $30 in profit on each one, so I can spend $15 on avertising, but if I divide that by 200, then I come to a budget of only 7.5 cents per download.
The true number of sales I make per download for that ad campaign is likely somewhere between those numbers since I doubt the sales tracking system is perfect, but I suspect it's closer to 200 than to 40. Which means that I've been spending a lot of money on sales which may only have been breaking even, and at worst have been eating into my legitimate sales.
But I'm not entirely convinced of that yet. I'll have to do more adjusting of my avertising to determine the real effect those impressions have on my sales.
One test I'm doing right now is instead of paying per download, I'm paying $15 per sale. I was getting 500,000 impressions a day with the pay per download. With this new setup, I'm only getting 60,000. And that number may drop. I don't know how google assigns impressions for the pay per ads, but I do know they don't neccessarily adjust you down immediately if you start paying less for those impressions, as I learned when my impressions dropped slowly to nothing over the course of January.
If this setup works though, it will be ideal. I will be paying exaclty how much I want to be spending on avertising, and it will be impossible for any fraudulent clicks to occur with this sort of campaign. Some advertisers may choose not to run my ads because they're not resulting in profits for them, but those same campaigns wouldn't result in profits for me either, and I'd actually be taking a loss running in those places.
So I'll let this new setup run a couple weeks and see how it works. Hopefully sales improve as a result. Or at least, my profits.
My previous calculations showed that I was getting 1 sale for every 40 downloads on that campaign. At my previous price of $24.95, with profits of about $21 a copy, I could spend about $10 on avertising per sale, so 10/40 = 0.25.
But I calcualted that based on my total sales during that time period. I just remembered though that I also tracked the sales that resulted from those same clicks during that period, paying $2 for each of those. But when I divide the tracked sales from those impressions, which are less than the actual number of sales I did, I come to a quite different conclusion, and that is that I have to have around 200 downloads to make one sale.
The reason for this descrepancy is likely because my pay-per-download campaign doesn't target the same sort of demographic as my other advertising campaigns. I might make one sale for every 5 downloads from users of cgtextures.com, but some site called photoshoptutorials would have users which might not need a texture generator as much and are just trying it out of curiosity.
Whatever the reason, at my current price of $34.95 for the texture generator I make $30 in profit on each one, so I can spend $15 on avertising, but if I divide that by 200, then I come to a budget of only 7.5 cents per download.
The true number of sales I make per download for that ad campaign is likely somewhere between those numbers since I doubt the sales tracking system is perfect, but I suspect it's closer to 200 than to 40. Which means that I've been spending a lot of money on sales which may only have been breaking even, and at worst have been eating into my legitimate sales.
But I'm not entirely convinced of that yet. I'll have to do more adjusting of my avertising to determine the real effect those impressions have on my sales.
One test I'm doing right now is instead of paying per download, I'm paying $15 per sale. I was getting 500,000 impressions a day with the pay per download. With this new setup, I'm only getting 60,000. And that number may drop. I don't know how google assigns impressions for the pay per ads, but I do know they don't neccessarily adjust you down immediately if you start paying less for those impressions, as I learned when my impressions dropped slowly to nothing over the course of January.
If this setup works though, it will be ideal. I will be paying exaclty how much I want to be spending on avertising, and it will be impossible for any fraudulent clicks to occur with this sort of campaign. Some advertisers may choose not to run my ads because they're not resulting in profits for them, but those same campaigns wouldn't result in profits for me either, and I'd actually be taking a loss running in those places.
So I'll let this new setup run a couple weeks and see how it works. Hopefully sales improve as a result. Or at least, my profits.