Diorex

Just read about how Google is allowing advertisers to exclude different types of traffic such as Error Page or Domain Ads, as well as social networking, tragedy, gross-out and other pages.

I applaud that they are finally allowing advertisers more control over where there ads might show. I am frustrated that the additions are all or nothing.

If Google really wanted to let me have control they would let me run all of this stuff independently with bids and tracking for each. Say I just wanted to bid on error page ads, why not let me. As it is set-up now, I cannot put different bids on error page ads than I have on search ads.

When they let me do this in Content, my spending for that segment went from $0 to several million a year.

I suspect that domain ads convert really well (ok I know they do, but not all of them - negative site match domainsponsor.com and enjoy the increase in conversion) and might even be willing to pay more for them than I do for search…

What about the search network? I want to buy AOL traffic - I am lukewarm about Ask - I want to avoid Iwon and Lycos like the Plague. My search network bids end up being an amalgam of conversion. Say 80% of the traffic and 90% of the conversion comes from Google. I end up bidding less in Google in order to offset the lower conversion elsewhere. So I end up paying Google less for the clicks where they get 100% of the revenue.

Bottom line - the more segmentation and options you give sophisticated buyers, the more they will spend with you. I will spend it in different ways and in different places within the network based upon my conversions, but in the long run it will help Google earn more from me. (A scary thought…)

Ok here is something else I have been playing with that is having mixed results.

I find a page for which I want my ads to appear, but they are not currently. I want to be CPC, but I dont want the ugly site targeting ads that cost a fortune, I just want to show up in the normal adsense ads on that page.

This is probably stupid simple but here is what I do…

Go to the Google Tools page
Click on Keyword Tool
Then click on left tab “Site Related Keywords”
Then I copy and paste the URL where I want to appear
Make sure the checkbox is unchecked
Copy and paste all of the keywords Google suggests into a brand new adgroup

I usually not only show on that site, but on others I had not been aware of previously.

Not full-proof and not always cheap, especially if you are bidding on keywords not related to your site.

PS. Want to know what keywords Google thinks your landing page is about, do the exact same thing with your URL, use that list to massage your quality score for search.

I have been paying attention to content recently and it has really been paying off nicely.

One of the things I have been doing is making sure that my ads are prominently displayed on websites that are getting traffic for the keywords I am bidding on in the major search engines. So I was spending some time clicking the natural listings and then looking for adsense on them.

I was mentioning this to a friend of mine who we can barely talk to me without him suggesting a script or automating stuff. The amount of stuff I do manually drives him up a wall. So a few days later in my inbox I had this nifty little tool that basically allowed me to upload a list of keywords and then the script would automatically check the first few pages of search results on Google, Yahoo and MSN and then tell me which pages ranked for what terms and which pages allowed adsense ads.

I quickly fired it up and ran it for all my best keywords only to find that my crack content team already had us pretty much showing up on these placements. There were a few sites where we went and fine-tuned for better position or to show up on, but for the most part we were on top of things.

Then a few weeks later I was in a training class for some new hires and we were covering a list of words we are not allowed to bid on for competitive or legal reasons and one of the trainees mentioned it was too bad because we were probably losing a lot of profitable volume. A few hours later, back at my desk, I got an IM from my friend asking how his tool had worked out.

That was when I decided I needed to fire up the tool and look at my pretty extensive list of prohibitive keywords. Eureka! I was all of the sudden able to target dozens of websites that ranked for terms I would love to bid on and could not. These clicks came at bargain prices and converted really well.

Moral of the story… Look to the content network to pick up volume on keywords you are not able to bid on for whatever reason. Then doublecheck to make sure you are showing up on the sites that rank for those keywords.

Assuming that you have a somewhat mature PPC lead based (not products) campaign within a vertical that has all appropriate keywords with properly set bids etc. I can think of three simple ways to earn more profit from that campaign.

1. Pay less for each visitor - most people attempt this by lowering bids dramatically - this seems to be the most common and least profitable, since you typically also sacrifice volume. You can also improve your quality score (think SEO on landing pages) hoping to get a reduction, but this is sometimes problematic and certainly not a slam dunk process. Another idea is to find areas where your max bid is significantly higher than your actual CPC. Say you are bidding $3.00 and the CPC is $1.75 - try lowering the bid to $2.50. 9 times out of 10 your CPC will go down without a change in position.

2. Convert more of the existing visitors you have - Optimize your landing page to convert at a higher pace. Change things subtly (button text to “order now”, or “Continue” or “next”) or dramatically (New hero shots, totally different layouts etc) and take the same pool of visitors you have now and convert more of them into sales. If you control the form, be sure to optimize that as well. Since you have already paid for the visitors each additional sale is 100% pure profit. Small tweaks can result in huge gains.

3. Get paid more for each sale - Go directly to the vendor and ask for higher payouts. Cut out affiliate network middlemen. Do not allow others to profit off of your work. If they will pay $25 a lead, they will probably pay $30, especially if you turn the faucet off for a day or two.

Simple Numbers to illustrate this point (totally made up…)
Assume 1000 visitors a day at a $1.00 CPC with $2.00 max bids.
5% of those visitors convert = 50 sales.
Payout per sale/lead = $35

So you are making $750 per day from this campaign (($35*50)-($1*1000))

Now assume you:
+decrease CPC by $.10 a click without losing position by reducing bids to $1.50 for a CPC of $.90
+Increase Conversion rate to 6% = 60 sales
+Increase Payout to $40

You are now earning $1500 a day (($40*60)-($.9*1000))

3 relatively small improvements doubled your daily profit.

Once you get something that is modestly successful, really small tweaks have dramatic consequences.

****There is a 4th lever which many fail to consider which is that you can increase your bids, move up in position, get more clicks and earn less per click, but probably improve conversion rate as well, for more total profit. This is risky and not for the feint of heart.****

First in a series responding to readers requests (if you have any requests/suggestions for discussion topics, please say so), lets talk about keywords.

First off, my philosophy on keywords is that anything can be valid as long as it converts at an appropriate rate to be profitable. So test even things that are just tangentially related to your field, who knows there might be a goldmine you have not yet discovered. If you are not tracking to the keyword level, then you are not paying very close attention. Tracking should be a major focus.

Second - match types. I start just about everything on broad match and then move the stuff that works to [Exact] match. I dont use “phrase” matching at all. I used to, but found it typically did not add incremental revenues. I set-up a report in Google to be sent at the first day of every month to show me all the match types from the previous month. I typically take the top 20-50 (depending on click volume) and make those exact match keywords.

Third - Number of keywords - I dont really care about many more than my top 30-50 keywords. Over time that number has grown steadily but it still relatively small. With spreadsheets and Adwords Editor there is almost no incremental cost to have 10,000 keywords vs just a few dozen. Keep the ones that work and kill the ones that do not work.

Fourth - negative keywords - use the monthly report from above to filter out things you dont want or that do not convert. I cannot sell my product anywhere other than the US. So searches for UK or Canadian or Austrailian “keyword” are wasted and I dont want to pay for them. Same thing with credit cards - you have to have one for me to get paid, so I negative match keywords like “no credit card” etc. Lastly there are some search terms that just will not ever convert regularly like “customer service” and “scam”. Get rid of what does not work for your over time. Save just a few dollars a day and that will add up to money in your pocket.

Five - iterations - dont forget plurals, misspellings, competitors brand names, URL’s and other things that will have lots of different ways to be searched for. (think www keyword com vs keyword.com vs keyword com and about 20 other URL variations some are obvious some will be seen through the monthly report)

Six - new keywords - I no longer pay for any keyword tools, they all pretty much were some variant of the overture tool or otherwise flawed in data provided. The overture tool is no longer anywhere as near as useful as it used to be. lately, the way I get keywords is to type in the premium keywords in a vertical and see the top 5-10 URL’s. I then go into the Google keyword suggestion tool and click on site-related keywords. Type in the URL’s of the big guys and be sure to check the box Include other pages linked from this site. Then just scroll to the bottom select all, rinse and repeat and save into a CSV. then wash against the keywords I already have in Adwords Editor and then hand check to make sure to eliminate the obviously wrong keywords. I can usually add 500-1000 keywords every time I do this. As Google’s tool learns it produces better results, so be sure to come back once a month. One account earns $500 a day from my Google Suggestions AdGroup and that excludes the keywords I have graduated out of there into other adgroups. Ignore Google’s volume, CPC and position guesses they are not even close both high and low.

Seven - Organization - I have Campaigns for broad match, exact match, misspelling, and Misc (google suggestions etc). In this way I can easily locate what I am looking for. Content always goes into its own Campaign. I dont mind putting related words in the same ad group, but anything getting any traction in the way of clicks gets put into a 1 keyword adgroup.

Eight - Match ad copy and landing pages to key ad groups - you can make subtle changes to landing pages that will barely touch conversion but that might significantly improve quality score and thus CPC. Try putting the keyword in the landing page title (not dynamically) or in the URL (either subdomains or interior URLs), or work it into the ad copy, even paying attention to plurals can make huge differences. Anymore, the little details are becoming more and more important.

That is everything I can think of in relation to keywords - a lot of rehashing and my personal opinion - your results may vary.

Read through the Google Patent applications that Bill at SEO by the Sea found.

Other than being great reading material for insomniacs, this is the perfect example of a patent that should not be granted. Not being a patent attorney or even very familiar with any of this stuff other than Google’s PPC models.

To my reading this basically says that Google can rate something on any of 44 different factors and then determine if it is “good” or not. It can use those factors unevenly and the ultimate arbiter of good is its human staff.

So what I get from this is that Google can rate one of your competitors sites a score of 88 (factors can include everything from bid to history to user bias to what the rater ate for lunch) and another one of your competitors sites a 55. They then look for ways to algorithmically arrive at those numbers and then use that algorithm to arrive at your ranking.

The best way for Google to arrive at that algorithm may be entirely unknown, perhaps it is the number of obscure punctuation marks on a page or the use of latin words or perhaps a URL that can spell a Google dog’s name when the letter are rearranged.

In other words, nothing is clear about how Google arrives at this ranking. It is completely and totally arbitrary. Trust me - when it is arbitrary big spenders and big brands are going to get human review and the benefit of the doubt and the little guy is gonna get the bag.

With my limited understanding of the patent system, it was designed to foster the sharing of knowledge in return for offering protection for the person who developed and shared that knowledge. Google just took the kitchen sink and threw it into a patent application with the realistic hope the patent inspector would be clueless and grant google a license to regulate all future attempts at an intelligent ad ranking system.

Under the spirit of the patent process, I would read this disclosure and be able to say these are the 3 most important things to focus on, and here are 5 more that are of lesser importance. That is not in any way done. It is not even till like item 41 of 44 where I even saw words like bid or CTR or anything having to do with what is historically Google’s model. I did not read it that close, but many of the other 41 items were things I was not even sure what they were, other than the fact that I cleared the cookies on every computer I owned after I read it.

Read an article about Google being sued over facilitating trademark infringement through their Adsense for Domains service.

I am not normally very concerned about trademark infringement as I don’t own any real brands, but I do have at least 2 sights that are huge in PPC where others have jumped in and bought variations of my domain name. Everytime I run a Performance Placement Report and see that i am paying for traffic from these domains it drives me nuts.

This is yet another area where Google is facilitating evil. The Yellow Pages would never have allowed me to advertise Capitol One (O not A in Capital) or Banks Of America and then just redirect the phone number to my own bank. Why is Google willing to allow this. I can somewhat understand the domain service (as much as I hate paying for those low converting clicks) if someone is smart enough to register a common search term as a domain name good for them, that would be the Yellow Page equivalent of calling your law firm DUI Lawyers or Emergency Plumbing Repair. But when someone comes along and just blatantly steals from a brand or even a non-brand like mine by registering a misspelled version of a brand then that is wrong.

I even know of an instance where we are not allowed to bid on competitors brand names, yet we show up on misspellings of their domain name through the parked pages program. I am not allowed to opt out of the program and I cannot see where my ads are showing up through that program and I cannot filter that page through negative sites options. Basically I am stuck violating a term a term of my affiliate agreement. Was a huge hassle and headache, that Google could easily have resolved by not allowing this junk in the first place.

The fact that Google is willing to help these domainer’s monetize this stuff is the reason the problem exists. If they had no ability to monetize the traffic, then they would not be willing to spend money buying domains to capitalize on this - the bad spelling idiots of the world would then Google the misspelled keyword and likely find the right place, I dont buy the argument that Google is facilitating people finding the site they were looking for by serving ads, because if I type in a misspelled domain name into Google I am very unlikely to get search results for the competition as is common on the misspelling domains.

I feel Google (which has very aggressively protected its own TradeMarks) is clearly on the wrong side and I hope this case helps to increase the quality of the Search Network by removing some of the junk. Best case scenario some judge says “You are serving Search Only ads in an environment where no search has been done?” but I very much doubt that.

Recently launched a new campaign in Google for search only. A brand new URL that was recently purchased and being used in Google only with Content network turned off.

I did a search for the URL string in the Google results to see if the page had been indexed yet.

Strangely, there were 2 results. One for my domain and another for the domain ChamberofCommerce.com (slimeball is good anchor text methinks) which has nothing to do with the US Chamber of Commerce or any other local COC for that matter.

So I went to the page (I am not showing up on the page I linked to…) and found a long list of sponsored results for which my ad was showing up amongst them. No Ads by Google link or anything. Just some scraped content (everything I copied and pasted from the site I found on other scraper type sites…) and then a huge list of sponsored results…

I had never seen a Google Ad group with 10 ads so this immediately got my attention, since not only are my ads only running on the Google network, but they are not running on content..So I investigated further…

I right clicked on the ad and clicked properties:

hotkeys.com/leadtracking?id=…ask.com (appended so it fits on the scree) which was then followed by a huge string of numbers….

Ask.com…I don’t advertise on Ask and never plan too after several experiences where they were distributing my ads outside of the search traffic, through Clicksor ads. I am a little pissed at Google that they will syndicate my ads and then allow that entity to re-syndicate them.

I immediately contacted my Google rep and explained the situation. They investigated and responded that this ad was not being served by Google, rather that it was being served by Akamai, which was not at all affiliated with Google.

Google was adamant that this was not a Google ad despite the fact that it landed on the proper URL, even going so far as saying it was possible someone was running this and not charging me….

What I had not told Google was that since I had rotating ad copy, that my ad was showing up differently each time I hit the refresh button. I asked the rep to hit refresh and the response was “we are not serving this ad, but we will see if there is some way that someone could know to rotate your ads.”

Even with pretty convincing proof of Ask.com serving my Search Only ad in a content setting, Google was unable to accept it. Now Ask is probably more important to their business than I am (and who am I kidding, I am not gonna quit Google…) but even when shown a blatant example of them intentionally re-syndicating ads in an improper manner they just do not seem to care.

Overture feeds are the single biggest problem at Yahoo. Google’s largest issue is the parked pages and that they seem to think the quality of traffic from excite, ask, & myway is the same quality as you see from AOL or even the Google network itself. Yes, I know you can go Google only, but I have tested it and even with all the fraud and junk clicks I am still better off than otherwise.

Google - you recently gave us insight into Content, but I think you need to follow that up and give us insight into the search network. Let me know where my ads show, give me a way to track it without having to use Google Analytics, and allow me to opt out of anything in your network, or set proper bids for individual traffic sources and I will pay you far more than I do now, because I will be able to weed out what does not work and concentrate on getting as much of what does work as possible.

Unfortunately, search engines seem to be in a race to the bottom, and quality suffers. They are falling all over themselves to give syndication deals to crappy engines with huge fraud potential. Google states they want to be about quality user experience, but seems to fail to recognize that the most important users are those footing the bill, what about the advertisers experience?

Today while looking through the Tools section of one of our accounts, I noticed something that I had been waiting for for a very long time. IP Exclusion!

The ability to exclude IP addresses from viewing and therefore clicking on my ads. As a marketer the ads I click on the most are the ones of my competitors, not from any fraudulent intent, rather I want to know if and when they are testing new landing pages, what their landing page ad copy looks like and what colors and formats are or are not working for them.

Without even thinking about it I can visualize everyone of my competitors best of breed landing pages. This is helpful when I see a new landing page, as it might enable me to learn something without paying to test it. I assume (perhaps mistakenly) that a competitor is not going to choose a new control unless it outperforms an older version. So I might be able to quickly adapt based upon their findings. I am not saying a blatant copy, but working their learnings into my new tests.

I also assume that competitors are doing the exact same thing to my ads and my landing pages. Sure I probably pay $500 or so a month across various competitors doing competitive research and I am glad to save that money, but I much prefer to be able to not have to publish my findings for the whole competitive community to see. In the past I have found great new ad copy, only to see my competition blatantly copy it. I have also run landing pages to see similar set-ups from them within weeks of my determining what works. Competitive intelligence is a 2 way street after all.

Now I can just remove my ads from their listings. This will protect my ideas longer by making it inconvenient to do research on my ads and landing pages. At least a few of these companies will be too lazy to bother to check from home to see what I am doing.

Other immediate uses of this in my mind would be to block affiliate networks from my ads. I am not an affiliate of these networks, but they do not know that. In some verticals, the affiliate networks are ruthless about clicking ads to make sure everything is compliant. Take 5-10 affiliate networks across a few dozen keywords and that is a lot of clicks I am paying for them to do due diligence. (One other Darker Hatted idea would be to use this as an opportunity to run landing pages with the word “Free” for Ringtones or otherwise violate T&C I am not suggesting this, but it will likely be done…)

I would suggest parsing server logs and eliminating IP blocks that are low converting with frequent clicks. Unless you have lots of repeat customers, I would suggest a long timeframe to look at this. Don’t just add blocks that get lots of traffic or else you might turn off AOL or a company or university that is sending good traffic. It is also important to use conversion data in this exercise or you are going to cut off legitimate clicks that you want.

For those who want to know how to do this, it is under the Tools menu of your account. In the left column and it is called IP Exclusion. Directions for doing it are pretty self-explanatory.

This is a fun game…

A GoogleNope is a phrase inside parenthesis that Google returns zero results for.

Once blogged(and hopefully spidered), you then become the only result for it.

Some examples I found:
Monogamist Bill Clinton
Bush Institute for Foreign Relations
Alan Greenspan Bankrupt

Rational CEO Earnings
Affiliate Marketing Pornstar - Although there are Google ads for this…

Not surprisingly, nowhere on the internet does it say:
ringtones are a hard way to make money

to be fair (although it was a surprise) nowhere on the internet does it say…
ringtones are an easy way to make money

Once you get started thinking outside the box it is really easy to come up with these GoogleNopes…

Take a long sentence and phrase it oddly or two totally unrelated concepts and try it out, once I got started about every other thing I looked for was a GoogleNope.

I was saddened to find that Sexy Diorex was also absent from the index, come on ladies throw a guy a bone