A Funny Affiliate Marketing Story

I had something happen a while back I want to share with everyone.

I was making a Camtasia screen capture video about how to set up an AdWords campaign. I was in my Adwords account while making the video. I went over to my list of affiliate links to grab a link I could use for the example campaign.

For no special reason I picked my GoDaddy affiliate link to make the example campaign with.

While creating the AdWords campaign I made sure to say that the ad was not a good one; I was just teaching the nuts and bolts and not worried about the copy.

I set the daily budget for $20.00 as an example of how to do it. I added a few keywords like “godaddy”, “hosting”, etc. I had every intention of deleting the campaign after the video

I forgot to delete it.

The next morning I checked my AdWords account and saw that I had forgotten to delete the GoDaddy example campaign. Worse yet, the clicks had maxed out my $20.00 overnight. I figured I just lost 20 bucks.

It did produce a MASSIVE 16% CTR though…that was very interesting. Plus my clicks were only averaging 13 cents each.

For the heck of it, I checked my Commission Junction account (they handle GoDaddy’s affiliates).

I about fell out of my chair!! I had earned $68 dollars from my $20 worth of clicks!

What do you think my first thought was? “I wish I had set the budget at $200 instead of just $20!!

Holy Cow! …spend $20 to make $68!! I like that!

Now for the not so good news:

A little later I checked my email. GoDaddy sent me a very serious email about how I was violating their affiliate TOS; they do not allow affiliates to bid on “godaddy” for PPC campaigns. They said I had better stop… or else! I deleted the campaign.

I would have checked this had I intended to actually run the campaign. Some companies allow you to use their trademarked names as keywords…others do not. Always check!

Anyway, I just wanted to share with you how I stumbled upon 48 AdWords' dollars.

Too bad it’s not always that easy.