Yesterday, I reviewed Jay Simpson’s Dominating Amazon ebook and mentioned that after reading the ebook I started promoting Amazon products as an affiliate. My first month has been a steep learning curve and I must say that I lost some money promoting Amazon products. I started the campaign around the last week of August and managed to spend $361.23 all together on my Google Adwords campaigns and made £20.21 in commissions on £443.78 sales in my first month as shown in the pic below.

So Amazon paid me 4.55% in commission which is just about right. I had 500 clicks and 7 Ordered items. 4 Items were dispatched and I am guessing the other 3 ordered items might have been cancelled. Not sure to be honest but the items haven’t showed up on my stats for this month.

You might be wondering why I spent so much in Google Adwords. Well I was promoting a brand new Xbox 360 product that came out on the last Thursday of the month and my ad got clicked on so many times. To make matters worse my campaign got nuked by another affiliate. This basically means another affiliate used sneaky techniques to find out what I was bidding on, then copied my ad and changed it a bit and outbid me in the process.

As Google only allows 1 ad to show from any one merchant, in this case Amazon, my ad disappeared because I was outbid. I then stupidly decide to go into a bidding war with the fellow culprit and your guess in as good as mine as to what happened next. We were both bidding crazy amounts to get a good spot in the sponsored listings and my ad costs just skyrocked. I have since got rid of the campaign because it was just costing me money. I managed to sell 2 Xbox 360 consoles even though only one was dispatched. You only get commissions on any items that are dispatched. So what did I learn from this expensive experiment? Never go into a bidding war with a fellow advertiser because there is only one winner and that is Google.

Has my expensive mistake put my off Adwords? Not really. I have a few more campaigns running and I am tracking my daily spend on each campaign down to which keywords are making me money. Most importantly, I am checking what is being ordered and also what’s be dispatched to see if I can cull back some of those mega loses.

Watch this space for an update.

PS Here is the link to Jay Simpson’s Dominating Amazon ebook if you fancy making some money with the Amazon UK affiliate program.

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