Diorex

Had an issue with Google today that pissed me off so much, I decided to blog about it so that others can avoid the problem.

Basically we had a server issue this morning and while everything was being sorted out, we went to all of our PPC campaigns and paused the traffic so we were not paying for clicks that were gonna go nowhere. Google makes this very easy, you can click the little white button under pause on the summary page which selects all of your campaigns and then click on pause and it is basically a quick way to pause lots of campaigns.

Once the problem was fixed we reversed the process by clicking the white button and clicking on resume, quick 30 second restart to the account.

About an hour later, one of my analysts noticed that an ad campaign that we had not run traffic to in over 2.5 years was getting clicks. We then saw that half a dozen or more of our Deleted campaigns had somehow received clicks and impressions - one campaign at almost $10 per click. To make it worse, our tracking link scheme had changed and all of these clicks were either going to dead pages or to websites we dont even own or have relationships with anymore.

We quickly paused all of these campaigns and sent a note to our Google reps letting them know about the problem with their system and asking for a credit for the $3200 or so in clicks we got on these deleted campaigns due to their system error.

A few hours later, we got a nicely worded note that said in the event of “user error” Google would offer us a one time credit of half of the problem.

Hold on a second - User Error? From the campaign summary screen the status of each of these campaigns reads in big red letters as it did before, during and after the issue - DELETED, from the ad group summary screen each adgroup had a status of “Ad Group Deleted” once again in red letters, and from the individual adgroup pages, right next to the ad box, it once again said Deleted in red letters. So on three screens I see prominently displayed in red a notice that the campaign, adgroup and ad are all deleted. I am very definetly not seeing user error here.

Google explained that since I had selected all campaigns and hit resume that they interpreted the request to apply to all ads in the entire account regardless of campaign, adgroup or ad status.

Quick aside on Webster’s dictionary definitions of certain words -

Deleted : to eliminate especially by blotting out, cutting out, or erasing

Resume: to return to or begin again after interruption

The first word clearly implies permanent, the second clearly implies restarting after a break (which could also be considered to be a pause).

Google does not allow users to actually DELETE a campaign, despite flagging campaigns as such, in fact for their purposes there is little real difference between Delete and Pause.

The money means almost nothing, it was a tiny fraction of my spend with them today and will hardly affect my profits at all. The principle on the other hand means quite a bit.

Here is a company that holds itself out as holier than thou, yet at every turn seems to be willing to compromise its principles, which is a big part of the reason most advertisers I know are rooting for Yahoo, or Facebook, or Microsoft or pretty much anyone to actually compete with Google. They are a monopoly and act like one frequently.

In closing (and the reason for the post in the first place - other than to vent some frustration), how can you prevent this from happening to you?

First off find all the deleted campaigns or adgroups in your account, then go and change the maximum bid to $.01. That way if you accidentally resume something you have deleted you will probably get very few impressions or clicks.

Pretty easy actually but it should not be required.

They basically tricked us out of $3200 from in a few hours and who knows how much from others over time, by being intentionally deceptive about the function that is pretty universally understood to not mean temporarily. When was the last time you thought, I ought to hold on to this item in case I need it again, I will just delete it.

Have yet to really see anyone screaming about this, but then again I have not been looking that hard…

I was in SF this week meeting with both Google and Facebook and as a throwaway Google dropped the bomb that they are no longer allowing multiple domains in the same adgroup. Adwords Blog talks about it here.

What this means to the average affiliate marketer is that you no longer can test which Display URL (DURL) works best for you.

Lets take an extreme made up example of a dating site with the goal of a credit card sign-up.

If your DURL is FreeSex.com then you will get lots and lots of clicks which Google loves and thus your CPC will go way down but your conversion rate will be horrible since the DURL implies free when a sign-up is required.

What about a DURL of FatUglyChicks.com? You probably get very few clicks, meaning your CPC goes up, but someone desperate enough to click on that ad is probably pretty likely to convert since they have been somewhat pre-qualified.

This is nothing more complicated than an algebra problem - does lots of cheap clicks with a bad conversion work better than more expensive clicks with great conversion. As a marketer you really only care about the bottom line here.

This is an extreme example, but for a dating site there are literally millions of different possible combinations for URLs - some of which are naturally more likely to succeed than others.

Google used to allow you to test lots of URLs in a single adgroup and rotate those ads to get equal impression so that you could determine which URL worked best for your metrics.

The new revised version of the DURL policy now requires you to set up different URLs in different adgroups - meaning that even though you might be bidding on the same keyword that Google’s algorithm now decides your quality score and will not evenly rotate them and ultimately end up serving the ad that meets Google’s best interest.

Unfortunately this is short sighted for Google. I have a URL that is awful - no one would think it would win in a test, yet for some reason it resonates well with consumers and qualifies them and induces them to click frequently as well as convert - great combination.  Without testing, we never would have found this hidden gem that allows us to pay Google millions of dollars per month. Without testing, Google would have chosen a better clicking DURL and I would have never optimized my business - which ultimately optimizes Google’s business.

Any one else concerned about this change?

I have been asked by several people in the past about doing some consulting work and have always refused. Mostly because I don’t think my insight is worth the hourly rate I would charge to do the consulting. But someone I had corresponded with via email and met at a conference asked very nicely and was persistent enough without nagging that I scheduled a call with him a few weeks back.

We logged into his account and as I saw areas for improvement I pointed them out,  looking through and sharing some of the high level strategies we use for testing and landing pages etc. was a fascinating process because I realized that I had to quantify and justify to myself why the way we do things might be better before I would share it with him.

I know I did not share anything proprietary, but rather things like the best way to setup an ad copy test, or landing page test or how to best setup adgroups etc.

Anyway, the interesting thing about this 30 minutes session was that it really got my creative juices flowing. We are in totally different verticals and I was doing nothing other than commenting on ways to improve his account, but I walked away with 2 ideas that I have put into production for both my personal and corporate accounts, one of which is very lucrative ($1500 per day) - the other is much more promising but I am having some bandwidth issues getting it implemented.

Just a note, I did not steal any ideas, the ideas were my own and not in his account in any way.

The interesting thing for me, was that I believe he found good value in our conversation, and as an unintended consequence I walked away with this creative energy that brought me some very lucrative results.

I guess the morale of the story is that teaching other people what is seemingly obvious to you can make you take a fresh perspective on things and find new opportunities. As an “ideas guy” finding new sources of inspiration is always a welcome thing. I dont think if I consulted for free or on a regular basis that this would work, but I am going to give it a shot every month or so and see if this was a one-off type of event or if it persists.

Idea generation is hugely important in affiliate marketing, “me too” type strategies almost always fail. Take your girlfriend or best friend or mother and sit them down and try and explain to them what you are doing. See the kind of questions they ask, dont dismiss the question, but rather really try and answer them, perhaps you will learn something by teaching someone else like I did.

As a test, because I love to test my theories, I would love to hear your results (good or bad) for those that give it an honest try - maybe this does not work for everyone - maybe it does…

It has been so long since I have had a new account at Google, that I have not had to deal with many of the day to day hassles that many new marketers have to deal with. My team starts a new account, or a new ad group or make some changes and they get approved immediately, for as bad as my customer support level is compared to my spend it is world’s better than what the average marketer is getting.

Recently, I had an idea that led to us starting a test that produced low volumes of very high converting keywords at CPCs about 10% of what we normally pay because there is virtually no competition for those ads. It is worth high 5 figures annually to us, worth bending over and picking up, but not a home run. For most starting advertisers it would be a gold mine.

I took a look at the idea and realized it should work for other really long tail stuff outside of our particular niche and with the extraordianrily low CPCs I could probably make it work on standard affiliate commission payouts and maybe make some real money by automating and scaling it.

So I fired up a brand new Google account, paid my $5 and then uploaded a bunch of keywords as a test. Got an initial burst of traffic, then had the ads frozen by Google. I have seen this before, it typically means the ads are under review. So I did not panic, and waited.

3 weeks later, the account has not gotten a single impression since the first day.

I know google’s rules better than they do, all my ads are fully compliant, I am in programs that allow me to use search etc etc. My ad quality score is 8 or 9 across the board with a very few 7’s and nothing lower. I am not doing anything other than what Google wants advertisers to do - bid on keywords that are specific to the product and land customers on relevant pages about that product.

I can almost certainly get this fixed with a single phone call linking this account to my corporate ones, but since this is a side project I am hesitant to do so.

This post is not really about the fact that this is not working - it is that I know I have jumped through Google’s hoops and it is not working. I can only imagine how many countless plumbers or lawyers or affiliate marketers have been through this same process. Go to the trouble to create a website, open a google account and then have nothing happen and conclude that internet marketing does not work.

Internet marketing does work and those plumbers and lawyers should not be discouraged because Google has a screwed up ad system that they themselves dont understand. I sent a concise description of the problem to Google support thinking maybe I fell through some crack - the response I got back was - SURPRISE a canned response to a question I did not ask which told me to go to a page that was full of useless and vague information - fortune cookies are more specific.

I have done some searches and looked at some forums, and this seems to be a fairly common occurrence. I am having a hard time understanding how a company basically refuses to accept advertisers money?

Once again I know I can get it fixed because of my other activities but should I have to spend millions to get it fixed? How many profitable campaigns to Google and advertisers never get any traction? How much revenue is Google leaving on the table a few hundred dollars a month at a time?

I have used this blog to post some job openings in the past and found several very good people that way. Through the grapevine I have heard that quite a few SEO/SEM type companies are getting the bad news about their accounts and are subsequently laying people off. We are still growing like a weed and looking for great people with SEO /SEM skills.

A few things I really need (not necessarily out of the same person):

• SEO experts or people who want to learn SEO - more SEO work than we can handle for our own accounts, entry level and more sr positions.
• Strong Analytical Ability for our paid search programs
• Past management experience (not at Dairy Queen)

I probably have about 6 positions we will fill for a training class starting in January.

We provide all the great stuff you would expect from an employer; health, 401k, paid time off, great location and office space, fun work environment, company paid trips (ok maybe that one is not typical) - basically we are probably the best company to work for in Dallas that no one has ever heard of.

So if you are in Dallas and have gotten some bad news, or are just looking for a new challenge then send me your resume and I will get it to our HR team.

Read a great blog post from someone named PunditX that I found following one of my backlinks.

It was about how he made $95k in 2 months marketing a product all of us are aware of but few probably
knew it had an affiliate program - Adsense.

His post spells out just what he did and it seems perfectly reasonable to me. I can think of a dozen or more ways to market the product beyond what he did.

The ’secret’ to his success is that he did not assume “oh that must be saturated” or “that will not work”. he went out and made it work.

He even states he tested 35 different landing pages - which is probably a huge driver in his success. Not being lazy is a critical component to affiliate marketing success.

Too many in affiliate marketing assume that they have to follow the crowd or that their AM knows whats best - the entire time I was focused on affiliate marketing I never had an AM I spoke with regularly. There are some awesome deals on CJ noone has ever heard of and most of the CPA networks are in business for themselves first.

I know a guy who markets $.05 clicks to small niches that then turn into Ebay sales. I know another guy killing it in the Wal-mart affiliate program marketing just a few select products via PPC. There are a million things that are not dating or ringtones or <flavor of the month> that are both sustainable and scalable and that do not require super technical skills.

The best advice I can give anyone wanting to get into this space is to get outside the zone of the affiliate blogging ‘experts’ and start thinking for yourself. If you never read another blog post about affiliate marketing, you will probably be better off than if you read the top 50 affiliate bloggers religiously. The honest truth is that most affiliate blogs are full of junk and one hit wonders.

Lots of marketers, both affiliate and otherwise have been encouraged, bribed, cajoled or otherwise convinced to use Google Analytics to track their campaigns. I actually suspect that Google reps are incentivized to get advertisers to use the product.

The main selling point is that it ties into Adwords and uses tracking to determine your cost per lead/sale/whatever back to each keyword with little or no effort on your behalf. If you know which keywords perform good or bad you can then improve your ROI and become more efficient in managing your campaigns. The pitch is perfect for affiliates since they are typically both lazy and like the pricepoint of free.

Google recently bought Doubleclick and there was this huge uproar that they might be in the business of selling rankings via their Performics unit (which they said they would be selling that part of the company), but it turns out performics is also an affiliate marketing network.

Yesterday Google announced that they had renamed the affiliate network to the Google Affiliate Network.

Seems innocuous enough… NOT!

Heres why I think this is a major red flag… If you are an affiliate marketer using Analytics for a product through another network where you are driving traffic via search and Google also has that or a similar offer on their network, then they can simply arbitrage your conversion data and use it to identify the best converting keywords etc.

Say you sell Widgets and Google’s free analytics tool say that the keyword ‘blue widgets’ converts for you at a cost of $6 a sale, yet the widget manufacturer has an affiliate listing through Performics
paying $12 a sale. Your 100% ROI profit is in danger of becoming a $12 profit for Google.  Why should they share that with you? afterall it was their visitor in the first place. Your free analytics tool has now cost you 100% of your profit!

Think Google will not do it? The last time I read their terms and conditions, there is nowhere that it says they cant do this. They will make oral statements saying things like “If we did that we would lose the trust of our advertisers and go out of business”, but they have refused to put that in writing in any way, shape or form. In other words, they can do it.

Something to think about next time you take the easy way out and throw Google Analytics on your pages. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

As I was reading through the SEC posting about the Google Yahoo search deal, (Nicely summarized at TechCrunch) I ran across one tidbit I find very interesting and something Google may not have thought all the way through.

This line in particular: “Yahoo! also has sole discretion to decide on which pages to display ads provided by Google”

Any advertiser with a grain of metrics turns off the Yahoo content network due to the huge volume of non-converting clicks.

Google is also known to allow partners to serve search ads in some really strange places as search not content.

So if Yahoo wanted to hurt Google - My quick read saw nothing that says Google has a buyout right - I would just serve search network ads to the Yahoo content network.

Advertisers would start seeing their Google returns diminish greatly, Google makes it almost impossible to opt-out of specific advertising partners, and most advertisers do not even know that the search network is an option that can be turned off. If in mass, advertisers lowered bids by even 5%, that would take a huge chunk out of Google’s revenue and stock price, almost certainly triggering some articles about how Yahoo seems to be a better ROI for advertisers etc.

Probably will not happen, but what if…

Cannot tell you how often I get a PM or email or AIM message from someone who says they just cannot figure out how to scale or make any money, that all the campaigns seem so saturated, <insert excuse here>.

First thing I always ask is what kinds of things they are they testing - not the offer, but rather A/B type tests? Invariably the answer is a variation of “I plan to start once I find something with a really good conversion rate.”

I am here to say that Conversion rate is not born, it is grown - very slowly over time, with hard work.

Lets take an example of how someone can make a difference by testing.

• Start with a 3% CR which is considered about the industry average…
• Assume $.60 CPC which seems absurdly low to me, but lots of you guys are paying a lot less…
• Assume a payout of $20 per sale - seems fairly generic, lots of products pay more, lots less…
• If these numbers seem totally wrong to you, just set something up at breakeven for what you are seeing and build a spreadsheet…

After 100 clicks, you would expect to have 3 sales with $60 in revenue and $60 in cost - a total waste of time, right? Just move on to the next thing is what almost all people would do.

But the affiliate who likes to test might try a new headline, maybe some new ad copy, different hero shot or calls to action or any of 100 other things…

Say that this affiliate was able to increase conversion through testing by just 5% each month.

So the 2nd month, you would earn $3 more than you spend for each 100 clicks - a 3% ROI. Not going to quit the day job, but positive progress. At the end of the year, just finding one 5% increase each month the ROI on this “breakeven” campaign works out to be 42% which is almost certainly worth keeping.

This assumes that you do not manage to increase your CTR or quality score or otherwise lower your CPC which is very doable through testing.

Now say, we have a very clever affiliate who manages to find 10% conversion rate increases each month rather than 5%. At the end of the year, this guy has a 185% ROI from the campaign most of you would have walked away from.

Now if you are getting that kind of ROI, you have probably passed up the affiliate network and gone direct, which will be a free 10% lift, plus increased their payout above where they started, potentially significantly, which allows you to pay more, thus increasing your position, your test bandwidth and frequently your conversion rate in a beautiful cycle.

When you are starting out it is not ridiculous to think you might get 20% or more lifts from some tests, and trust me when I say that front loading the conversion increases significantly improves the end results.

All of the above being said, I am not trying to say that any campaign can be a winner. Nor am I saying that you should stick with a loser. I am merely saying that most people fail because they do not test their way into being a winner ad discard lots of things that would have worked with a proper test plan.

In the comments of my Affiliate Playbook post, I posted a link to SEO Blackhat’s list of 140 popular niches, by the looks of my outbound traffic, you guys were very intrigued by this.

Wanted to re-link to it for those who might not have seen it and follow-up with some comments about things to avoid or look for in a new niche.

Avoid -

Stuff to look for:

I am going to leave you with this thought, I have shared many times before. If you are picking a niche because you hear “so and so” is making a killing in it without regard for any of the above factors then you are setting yourself up for failure. You should be entering a niche because you have some sort of advantage or knowledge rather than because you are following the pack.

I am sure there are lots more things others can add to these lists based upon personal experience - feel free to share em.