Diorex

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

Jason Calacanis recently unveiled Mahalo, which is a human edited search engine.

I for one think it just might work. (Todd at Stuntdubl disagrees) It is becoming more and more common for me to not find what I am looking for with a Google search, especially on commercial type searches.

SEO’s (and rightfully so, it is after all money) have gamed the engines on anything and everything worth gaming the engines over. Lets take a generic and high volume search for the word “Google” on both engines.

Google’s results are just an uncategorized list of links to different Google products. Mahalo has links to the company, the charitable arm, GMail, Youtube and several other things someone with that generic query might want. Then they go a step farther and list news articles about the company from a variety of sources, then a recent stock chart, then links to all of the products and acquisitions made by the company, blog entries, even a hacks and tutorial section, a criticism section and links to other companies someone searching the generic term Google might want to find. In fact just about anything I want to learn about google can be found within 1-2 clicks from these results.

Try eBay, Apple, Yahoo and others and the results are consistently better.

What about Celebrities…

Take Paris Hilton (who is now staying at the 1star Lynwood Hilton…) her page is nicely broken out into the Top 7 which is about the same top7 as Google, but followed by sections devoted to Photos, Videos, News, Biography, Timeline, Gossip and merchandise. It has a few dozen links on the page nicely organized and easy to find.

What about the darling of Dallas - Tony Romo - I think Google wins this one, but mostly because Mahalo suggest to me he is playing for the Dolphins and trying to date Jessica Simpson (2 strikes…) Otherwise, once again there is a lot more links neatly categorized for someone trying to get information about him.

Lets take something Spammy (I think they should re-name spam to Viagra or maybe Blue Pill) and search for Viagra. Noone who is not an SEO or a spammer is gonna tell me that the 5th link in Google - Yacht Club of America - which then redirects to a pharmacy is what I was looking for. Mahalo has awesome information, links to blogs, natural alternatives, plus its top 7 are almost the same as Google’s results.

I for one cannot wait to see how they build it out. Will they be able to stay on top of thousands of news topics, celebrities, and other searches or will the pages grow stale quickly? For now, I am just disappointed to see that most of what I searched for returned ‘no results’ even when closely related. i.e. Buy Viagra.

Certainly an alpha product, but it will be interesting to see how easy it is to game it and how fresh the content remains. As an internet marketer I love google, as an internet user I am ready for a better alternative.

Google has been testing the color of the premium boxes on Adwords. This is the first time I have seen it.

The interesting thing to me is that in the screenshot, the yellow box looks clearly yellow.

However on my monitor, the yellow box on an actual search is only visible when you look at the screen from an angle. When you view the screen head-on the box is completely transparent and the three ads look like they could be natural results. Yes, the formatting is a little different, but I look at this stuff all day everyday and my initial thought when I found this was that this was a search without premium listings. I only noticed it because I walked away from my desk.

Is this an optical illusion? Are others seeing similar things? Is this an unintended consequence or a very specific color designed to appear transparently? Is it a chance outcome based upon my monitor settings, angle of the monitor, and lighting at my desk?

As an advertiser, I very much like being in the blue box, but I am somewhat concerned if people are being tricked into thinking that my ad is a natural result.

Google wants your conversion data. If you are already voluntarily sharing this with them, shame on you.

Sure Google analytics, Webmaster Central or Website Optimizer are useful tools with powerful features that are not readily available anywhere else for free. But have you ever stopped to think about why Google is spending millions to bring you free services?

If you ask Google, you get the stock answer along the lines of : “With tools like this, we show webmasters how to more profitably spend money on Google and thus are willing to spend even more.” or some variation of this. They are very aggressive about inviting big spenders into these beta tools to help further optimize websites and thus potentially spend more.
(more…)

Content match is a minefield that many publishers never survive.

A few basic thoughts before we get started:

(more…)

I see no reason why every single keyword should not be in its own adgroup. Why every single ad copy should not have its own display URL. Or why each match type should not be tracked differently.

Yes, it is a pain to set-up. Yes it is anal. Yes it matters. It can mean tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year difference.

The difference between singular and plural keywords can be huge. It is not out of the realm of possibility for the plural version to be a home run, while at the same time the singular version of the keyword could be bleeding you dry. Or the broad match is getting killed and the exact match is a huge cash cow.
(more…)

Yesterday afternoon around 4:00, I noticed that the ads for one of my verticals were not appearing.

I quickly checked 4-5 other keywords for that account and saw that none of them were showing. I then logged into the adwords interface and went to the diagnostic tool. It told me my ads were not displaying due to budget restrictions.

I looked at the daily budgets for my campaigns and none of them were even at 1/2 of authorized daily spend. Regardless I changed daily budget to $50,000 per day for each campaign. That did not resolve the issue, despite the very clear statement stating that a higher budget would re-activate my ads.

I then got a CSR on the phone (new account, does not yet qualify for a dedicated rep, despite spending almost $500,000 in 2 months….name another company anywhere in the world where a new advertiser could appear overnight, and be on pace to spend $3 million annually and not have an account rep..ok,ok Yahoo…GRRRR) and was told that everything looked fine with my account and that there were no problems.
(more…)

You have probably heard the old saw about beware of the light at the end of the tunnel, it just might be a 10 ton locomotive heading at you.

This is how I am starting to think about paid search and Google.

Before I lay out my thinking, let me say that I do not think Google is going to kill paid search and arbitrage any time soon, but I strongly believe they will make it far less lucrative over time.
(more…)

Fresh on the heels of me ranking for Dave Pasternack’s name misspelled, I thought it might be a good time to talk about keyword strategy.

I used to market Dish Network. The number 1 keyword in that space by a huge margin is Satellite Tv. 1 T 2 L’s.

I just checked my spreadsheets and I got clicks for 47 different spellings of the word satellite, and actually got sales from over 20 of those.

Standard misspelling tools on the net are predominantly mistyping tools rather than misspelling ones. They will help you when someone transposes or skips or doubles a letter in a query. Unfortunately, these automated tools are not as stupid as people.

Words like satlite, sattelite, satalite, sat light, and others dont show up on any of the lists of misspelled keywords, yet they were 4 of my top 7 volume from both click and sales perspectives. Desh Network, Dish Net Work were 2 more. Sometimes it pays to take the automoation out of things and to think like a high school dropout.