Welcome to our Google Ads Affiliate Marketing series!
There’s a myth out there that you can’t promote affiliate offers on Google Ads.
However, as I’ve proven over and over again, Google Ads affiliate marketing is not only possible but can be highly profitable.
So much that I’ve spent over six million dollars on Google Ads myself since becoming an affiliate marketer back in 2015:
This is the first article of a six-post series on how to make $1,000 a day with Google Ads affiliate marketing.
In this series, I’ll break down the exact step-by-step process I’ve followed to achieve this, from the basics, like choosing keywords and setting up landing pages, to running successful campaigns.
In today’s post, I’ll show you how to choose the right offers and target audience.
Getting those two right is extremely important.
Because choosing the wrong offers can not only prevent you from making a profit but also get you banned from Google Ads for breaking its policies.
And if you don’t know your target audience, there’s a high risk that you’ll advertise to the wrong people and waste a lot of precious time and money.
Before we begin
If you’re new to affiliate marketing and want to learn everything quicker from one place, check out our 30-day challenge course!.
This is a course we’ve created, assuming you know nothing about Google Ads affiliate marketing, which breaks down all the steps involved in launching and running successful campaigns.
It includes a live campaign example, step-by-step instructions on setting up compliant landing pages, and much more that we can’t cover in this post.
If you want to speed things up and enjoy learning from step-by-step formats, I highly recommend checking that out.
Google Ads Affiliate Marketing – Can you really promote affiliate offers on Google?
The short answer? Yes, you can.
That said, there are a few policies that affiliate marketers should beware of, especially when it comes to the landing pages you’re using and the product categories you’re promoting.
In the video below, I go deeper into this and talk about what you should know to avoid getting banned when working with Google Ads affiliate marketing.
Google Ads affiliate marketing – How to pick the right offers
Step #1: Choose an affiliate network
The first step is to find affiliate networks with the types of products and offers you want to promote.
I typically run CPA offers, in which we get paid whenever someone completes a specific action, like starting a free trial or making a purchase.
I’ve described why I prefer them on the Powerhouse Affiliate forum, which is free to join and is full of more valuable advice about affiliate marketing.
So, searching for the top CPA networks is a great place to start. There are many CPA affiliate networks, such as Affiliati Network, Maxbounty and Perform CB.
To go over this step-by-step, let’s focus on Affiliati:
Step #2: Filter by media type
You’ll likely come across thousands of offers when browsing affiliate networks. In Affiliati alone, there are over 2,800.
With so many offers, we must add filters to narrow our search.
Since not all affiliate programs allow you to use search ads, the media type is the first filter we must add.
On Affiliati, we’d select Google – PPC.
Step #3: Filter by the payout
Search ads are perhaps the easiest way to find targeted traffic.
When someone searches for a keyword we’re targeting, we can get our ads to display above the organic results. That allows us to beat others who’ve spent years doing search engine optimization to try and rank.
But since many people know that, the competition is high, and the cost for each click can be really expensive.
From my experience, if you’re working with CPA offers, you should aim for a payout of at least $5, ideally $15-45.
If you’re making less than that, you’ll have difficulty making the math work on search ads, especially on Google.
On Affiliati, after setting $5 as the minimum payout, we’re left with 1,600 offers.
Many people will tell you to focus on the earnings per click. But when it comes to Google Ads affiliate marketing, the click costs could be higher than a low payout CPA offer which will make it impossible to turn a profit. So a higher payout is necessary.
Step #4: Avoid high-risk verticals
There are certain verticals that we need to avoid when running search ads.
In Google’s words, those that pose an unreasonable risk to user safety or experience.
Essentially, avoid any vertical that might have too much misleading copy or scammy products.
Some examples include crypto, gambling, credit, and dating.
Many people don’t pay attention to this and choose offers that could get them banned. And when that happens, it’s really hard to fix it.
So make sure to work with safer verticals, especially in the beginning.
One vertical I particularly enjoy on Affiliati is ecom trials. Those are actual physical products that get shipped to people, and you can get paid the commission without them having to pay the total price of the product.
I’ve done a complete case study on how to get conversions on e-commerce offers on Google Ads, which you can find in the Powerhouse Affiliate training platform.
But to follow our example, let’s say I go with health & wellness. On Affiliati, that leaves us well below 200 offers. Now, I can start looking at each more closely.
A cool tip here: if you have a relationship with your affiliate manager, reach out to them and ask them for the top 20 offers or so that are running on search right now. They’ll usually tell you that, saving you a lot of time.
Let’s say we chose a product that helps with back pain. Now, we must find out who to target our ads to.
Google Ads Affiliate Marketing – How to define your target audience
The key to marketing is understanding who your ideal customer is and how your product can solve their particular problems.
If you don’t understand that, how will you give them the right messaging that shows you understand them and can help them achieve their desired outcomes?
Creating your buyer persona
If you’ve been in the digital marketing world for some time, you might’ve heard of this term.
A buyer persona, or customer avatar, represents a product’s ideal customer, a.k.a. those facing the problems it solves and willing to pay for it.
It includes data such as demographic traits, behavior, and personal interests. And most importantly, their pains and how that product can solve them.
To simplify things, we’ve created a 100% free customer avatar worksheet with all the questions you must answer to create your persona.
As you’ll see, we’ve split it into six sections:
- Demographics
- Personal Background
- Traits & Attributes
- Goals & Pain points
- Objections & Buying behavior
- Where/How are they consuming info?
For instance, in the Traits & Attributes section, you’ll find questions about their personality, values and opinions, interests, and lifestyle choices.
And the Goals & Pain Points part should include information about their family, financial, health, and lifestyle aspirations.
By answering those questions, you’ll be focusing on what matters to determine your ideal target audience.
How to answer those questions
Now, you may be wondering how long it’ll take to answer all of that. And, most importantly, how you can answer those questions accurately, especially if you’re not an expert in the niche you’re targeting.
Luckily, that’s become easy these days thanks to the power of AI.
More specifically, thanks to a tool called Jasper, one of the best tools for marketing that I’ve found.
Jasper is an AI copywriting tool that can generate copy for landing pages, ads, video descriptions, and more.
Check out some of its templates:
And it has recently implemented a chat function similar to ChatGPT, which will be extremely helpful when filling out our worksheet.
So, in our example, we’re working with a product that helps with back pain.
To start filling out our worksheet, let’s ask, who is the target audience for a back pain product?
And after a couple of seconds, here’s what it came up with:
One of the first things we can notice is that it provides many target audiences for this type of product, such as pregnant women and people with certain existing conditions.
It also provides some great keywords I could target in my ads, such as chronic back pain.
Those are things you must know that you can only come up with if you know your niche really well. You can try and guess, but this tool saves a ton of time by providing information that normally takes hours of research to find.
And that’s what we’ve gotten from a single input. Imagine what we could get by asking other questions as we fill out the worksheet.
By the end of this exercise, you’ll likely have thoughts like wow, I never thought of that. You’ll end up with incredible insights for your ads, keywords, and all the other important stuff regarding Google Ads affiliate marketing campaigns.
If you’re an affiliate that has failed at search ads, be honest with yourself and ask whether you have ever taken these steps.
Have you truly gone deep into who your customer avatar is and understand things like their problems, age, location, and occupation?
All those things are crucial. And you can find them just by using a couple of worksheets and tools.
I personally prefer Jasper over ChatGPT. It’s never overloaded, and most importantly, it offers far more powerful features for what we do as marketers.
And by using this promotional link, you can get 10,000 free credits and start trying it for free.
Yes, that is an affiliate link that helps me support this blog and motivates me to continue creating more great content. But after trying several AI writing tools, Jasper is the one I’ve chosen, so I definitely recommend checking it out.
To learn more about Jasper, also check this Jasper AI Review.
Another place to check for more information about your target audience is SimilarWeb. It’s expensive, but the free version can also give you many valuable insights.
Focus on the metrics
The last thing I want to cover in the first part of this series was shared inside the Powerhouse Affiliate forum: the media calculation spreadsheet.
That’s a spreadsheet containing all the key information of each affiliate offer, such as their payout, average conversion rates, and number of clicks.
You can get that information from your affiliate manager and networks and through your own tests.
Creating that spreadsheet will help you determine which offers will likely become the most profitable for you and can help you start planning your budget.
In the next post of this series, we’ll go deeper into how to plan your campaigns and run tests to optimize them. We’ll also cover how to choose which keywords to target.
If you want to learn how to make over $1,000 a day on Google Ads affiliate marketing, stay tuned and be sure to join our newsletter below to be notified of all our new posts!
