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?

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.

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.

Paul at uberaffiliate posted his earnings today. Good start!

I hate checks like this…and Shoemoney’s and MArkus at PLentyoffish.

I personally know no less than 20 people/groups doing what Paul showed or more every month (some weekly some even daily!) from solely affiliate/lead gen type stuff. Cashing the check takes 10 minutes (these checks dont go into the ATM… the tellers gets to see them…you may even let people cut in line at the bank so you get to make your deposit at the hot teller…) earning them takes considerably more time…

The difference between good (most of the readers of these blogs) and great (where Paul is) and blow your freaking mind (where a few people I know are) is dedication to testing.

He probably lost $5k or more just to fine tune these accounts. He does not just throw a million keywords against the wall, he actually thinks things through and has a strategy.

People who achieve this are not doing so by the seat of their pants. They invested in infrastructure and programmers and design people and relationship building and most of all focus - I dont know a single successful super affiliate that is making 50-100k+ at IBM and doing this on the side - I cant say that I even know any that started as a part-timer.

Some got laid off, some dropped out of college, some stumbled into it while working on something else (me). None are idiots, none are not amongst the brightest people you have ever met, every single one of them works their butt off.

Some are one man shops, some are teams, some are Inc 500 companies destined to go public. The scale is different with each, but the bottom line with all of them is that they are not just dipping their toe in and seeing if they can make it work.

This is not Amway or Excel or some other Pyramid scheme marketing scam that we “hope” to get rich at. These people work damn hard. Paul is probably the most professional 19 year old I have met since I was 19 and he was 2!

Bottom line…checks like these are bad for the business, it draws a ton of new people in with the promise of riches which they believe to be real, it jacks up bids, it clogs blogs/forums with useless newbies posting how they figured out a way to earn $43.85 each day on zip submits or some such - To make Wicked Fire Jon happy, this kind of stuff probably makes ebook marketers a mint as those shysters sell the ’secret’ to the sheep.

Statements like these are also invaluable for those who are close to breaking through, they show people to persevere and encourage people to take chances (google should send him a commission check, they will make 10x the revenue he posted off his post) and some of those will work out and eventually post their own checks, repeating the entire cycle. I suspect a small part of Paul’s success was saying if that guy in Nebraska can make that much then imagine what I can do…

Stop freaking sitting around… dont look up in 5 years and realize if you had just done something back in the glory days, you could have made yourself $20 million.

I spent the weekend with 2 old friends… One who made a ton of money in the 1.0 and the other who is still talking about how he could have made money if only… One lives in the present and does really cool stuff, the other the past and is bitter as hell… Don’t be that Guy!

To follow-up on a recent post about domain and error page exclusion ability, we think we have a possible workaround that will enable us to bid on content, domain ads and error ads separately.

We have enough evidence to suggest that the conversion rate on these items are vastly different, and also are susceptible to fraud on different levels as well. As part of our philosophy we always want to bid on the lowest common denominator whenever possible. Match types are in different campaigns, almost all keywords are in their own adgroup etc.

We just put this live so I cannot guarantee that it works, and in fact am sure that Google’s screwy content system is likely to mess it up in some way, but in theory this will work.

We start with adwords editor and copy and paste the enitre content account into a spreadsheet. We then alter the URLs (that is our tracking mechanism) and upload the account twice into campaigns called error ads and domain ads. At this point we have 3 identical campaigns with same bids, ad copy etc.

We then turn off domain and error ads in the original campaign so that it is now content only. In the domain group we turn off error ads so that it is content and Domain ads. Similarly we turn off domain ads in the error ads group leaving it with just Error ads and content.

At this stage we need to eliminate the possibility of content ads showing in the 2 new adgroups. The way we accomplish this is by running a performance placement report and then negative matching every domain that shows up in both the error and domain groups.

This leaves us with 3 campaigns, one that is content only, another that is Domain ads only and a 3rd that is Error ads only. I can now adjust bids and monitor performance for each type of ad and bid according to the return I am seeing from these different tranches of content.

LIke I said it just went live and is not fully battle tested, but on paper it should work.

So early this week, we noticed on a few of our most profitable terms that our impression volume went through the roof. Like 10x the average daily volume and 8x the highest daily volume in the last 6 months.

On these keywords our clicks went up by approximately 50% of previous levels and our sales volume did not move one iota. Meaning that on 1/3 of our clicks we were getting zero conversion!

So we call up our friendly Yahoo account rep. Who is in an ‘important meeting’ but breaks away to say “fluctuations can and will occur” then says she will look into it. 6 hours later (after we have essentially turned off our account because cost per sale is higher than our total revenue) she dashes off a quick one line email to the tune of “I am having our click quality team (just try and get any of your account reps to say the word fraud, honestly try) look into the matter and they will have an answer within 5-10 days, but our click detection algorithms are the best in the business (another good one, that is like being the best looking girl at the over 300 pound Weight Watcher session).”

Whoa…I was not even terribly concerned with the fraud, I will take the refund, but I just wanted to alert them to the problem of someone figuring out a way of their best in class system.

The next morning we call Yahoo again and get sent directly to voice mail, we then go to her manager who will “call you back as soon as possible”. Finally come late afternoon we call the standard 888-Yahoo-SM phone number and finally speak to someone on our 3rd call who apologizes profusely and goes and gets the manager to call back. The 2nd person we spoke with actually said “that is not my problem” the 1st person said she would get it fixed in 15 minutes and call us back, an hour later the extension she gave us is a dialtone and noone has even heard of her. (Seems like the penalty for trying to help someone out at Yahoo is pretty severe).

So I finally get the manager on the phone. He of course apologizes and says this is not how customer service is supposed to work and that this will be used as a training example, blah blah. Yet he actually says that 5-10 days our rep quoted us is probably the low end of the scale and that with the holiday coming up next week that we probably will not hear anything until afterwards.

He then goes so far as to say, it is funny none of the other ”major” accounts in your vertical have noticed anything. I am tempted to explain why, but decide it does not matter and is not worth the efffort.

The bottom line is that he is totally unable to help us. He is apologetic, but really does not seem to care.

So we are left to our own devices. We ended up putting their Yahoo analytics on a single high volume keyword to track referrers. We accidentally forgot to properly install the conversion pixel, because that is none of their business. Less than an hour later, we had a single referrer that had more than double the volume from Yahoo itself, without so much as a click through on that page.

That does not seem like something that should have actually been rocket science for Yahoo to figure out. 10x impressions was the first start, how hard is it to isolate impression volume by IP and flag suspicious volume, especially when an advertiser brings your attention to it.

So based upon our experience with Yahoo who did not think there was a problem, we decided not to alert them to the non-problem url, we figure in a few days the ‘major players’ who don’t monitor their account nearly as closely as we do will see the decrease in conversion and raise bloody hell. Our result was almost immediate, conversion rate recovered and impressions fell back to normal levels. Problem solved, except for the problem.

Paul at Uber Affiliate shared a tip with me about GeoTargeting at Ad:tech and then blogged about it today.

We had tested this in the past and our results were that our CTR went down significantly and our CR also declined slightly. One thought for the change, is that we are selling national products that people probably do not think of as state specific. I was more profitable even with the non-targeted out of zone clicks (which was less than 5% of total click volume) so since my primary goal is total profit, I preferred to do without the Geo-Targeting.

A second thing is that Google’s geo-targeting is screwy. For a long time our search results at the office thought we were in a city and state more than 1000 miles from our actual location. I have spoken with other industry Pro’s who also have similar problems. Also dont forget about the school district that sued Google because it showed ads for another country. I don’t exactly get a warm fuzzy when an advertisers tells me I can get a great deal 4 states away - their credibility (courtesy of Google) is shot from the start.

I think Paul’s idea of testing this is very valid and will probably work for some verticals. The problem is that lots of people will just read and implement without testing. Anything you read on my blog or any other should be taken with a grain of salt and only implemented if it makes sense for your business, as well as actually performs better than what you have now. The only way you will figure it out is by testing.