Diorex

Hey guys - a little help please.

Yahoo is rolling out the ability to Block Domains in the near future. The only problem is that we are having a hard time getting visibility into the domains we might want to block.

Google has long had the &site={placement} tag that will pass the referring domain so we could track conversions.

Something Yahoo does in their redirects keeps us from knowing where a huge percentage of the Yahoo traffic originates from. I’m not the servers guy and I did not understand the Swahecian Tech dialect he spoke trying to explain the issue.

We have of course asked our Yahoo reps who are normally pretty helpful, but they seem to be clueless here.

Does anyone know of a tag we can put into the landing page URL that will allow us to collect the referring page in Yahoo?

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 want to thank Sup3rnova for the mentions in his Uber Affiliate Marketing Guide. Best of all it has a low price of just $97, but if you click now there is an instant rebate for my readers of $97. Thats right he has compiled everything you would ever need to write an Ebook on making money in internet marketing totally free!

My traffic has skyrocketed as a result of his post, which I appreciate. But, I appreciate that he took the time to find all of these gems. I actually ended up re-reading some of my old stuff and all of the other links in there. Some absolutely amazing blogs I have never even heard of, as well as tons of great content, tips, secrets, and commonsense.

It is free, but it would be worth every bit of the $97 he should have charged…

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.

I get asked the question “what would you do if you were just starting out?” at least once each week by a reader and I have tried to offer advice where I can, but I just figured I would blog about since this seems to be a popular query.

Since most of my knowledge is PPC - let me focus mostly on that, I am not a good resource for SEO or Social media or building a community, other people are far more qualified to talk about that than I am.

A few things I would not do first:
1. I would not spend any money on e-books or other guru lessons. While they can be useful, there is just too much good information out there for free.
2. I would not spend too much time on forums - nothing against forums, but many of the people there are far from being experts and are probably not far from being in the same boat as you. Wicked Fire had the infamous Chris Lingle who turned out to be a fraud, yet hundreds followed his advice. The other reason I would avoid forums is because you will get a ton of conflicting ideas (many of them good) but if you are always off starting new projects and never finishing the old ones, nothing ever gets done.
3. I would not spend any serious money on domain name purchases. While there are bargains with great traffic, people who know far more than you about valuing domain names have probably already passed it over. Besides you can usually get a reasonable domain name for $10 from GoDaddy or other registration places.
4. I would not try to compete in ringtones, mortgages, blockbuster, porn, gambling or any other highly competitive PPC space. In general, if you have read about how lucrative it is on a forum or a blog post, then it is probably not a good area to pursue. You want to be the only affiliate in a space (or one of a very few) if the page is full of affiliate ads, you are going to have to be better in some other way. I have accumulated skills, knowledge and experience to pull this off and I still avoid most of these verticals, the average person just getting started has no chance.
5. I would not focus on zip submits or email submits. They can look enticing with $.05 clicks and 30-50x that payout. There is some ROI to be had, but the hassle is huge. It is hard as heck to scale. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard people say - I made $5 on this one zip submit, if I can just do that 20 more times I will be good. A lot easier ways to make $100 a day on the internet than that…
6. I would not put any faith at all in what someone from Google or another engine says. After dealing with their reps for years, I have come to the conclusion that most are guessing at best. They have no insight at all into their algorithms or what will or will not work. The vast majority do not even really understand how their system works anywhere near as well as they think they do.

Things I would do:
1. I would join lots of affiliate programs and dabble in different PPC for lots of different merchants. I would not necessarily avoid retail or brand names, nor would I avoid seemingly obscure spaces. If you can be the only person bidding on a highly relevant keyword that earns you money in an undiscovered space you can do very well for yourself. Some of my most lucrative verticals started almost by accident.
2. I would not be afraid of being in a space where it seems like 2-3 major name brands own the space. There are spots for 10 ads on the page and they can only have a few of them, you can sometimes get highly relevant traffic for very low costs in medium positions. This is becoming less common, but there are still plenty of opportunities. Stay away from online only businesses even without brand names - Satellite and InkJets are 2 that can be brutal. One opportunity is a review/comparison site of 2-3 major brands. With affiliate links to them.
3. I would focus on Content - It is a fickle and ever changing game. Most major brands and even SEM firms are just not going to put the time in to optimize this. You can often land directly on a merchants page without having to focus on building landing pages or owning domains. Plus you can find a lot of cheap traffic this way. Try the major keywords in combinations of 1,3,5, or 10 keyword combinations or all of those and more. You never know what is going to work. Focus on brand names and otherwise prohibited keyword sets. Since there is no way to police exactly what you are bidding on, you can get away with bidding on the brand names in content, which can be very lucrative. (someone will probably make $1000 next month off that tip alone)
4. I would start with Google - they are the most difficult nut to crack, but the rewards for cracking that nut are worthwhile. Stay away from Yahoo Content! MSN is going to have 1/10 the traffic at 10x the hassle.
5. I would start to focus on what is working. Slowly leverage what is working, add volume, ask for larger payout. Start to reach out to affiliate managers at the merchant themselves, dont get buddy buddy with your Network manager. The goal is eventually to go direct in one product. This will remove middlemen, offer you the chance to get higher payouts, better tracking all the way around a good deal.

If you think for a minute you can be a hermit crab and sit in your study and not make personal contacts and be a huge success in this business you are wrong. Pick up the phone and talk to the important people. The merchants affiliate managers always want volume. Dangle the prospect of volume in exchange for higher payouts. It is amazing how often you can raise bids, get aggressive and actually pay less for a higher position than you did for a lower one. It has to be done smartly and gradually, but it can be done with impressive results. Conversion will also improve as you go higher. You might even be able to completely replace the merchant in PPC, but it will never happen until you talk to them a few times, meet them at a trade show, and establish a personal relationship.

This is not an easy business, you will most likely lose your shirt many times before you start making it big. Just remember that you pay for bad ideas once, you reap the rewards from good ones over and over again. If you are not testing, you are leaving money on the table. If you are not pushing for a higher payout you are leaving money on the table. If you are not testing other vendors you are not being diligent. If you are happy with your affiliate manager at your network, then you are never going to break through.

It is nearly impossible to ask me how I would start over. I probably would not. The low hanging fruit is long gone. The days of spending a few hundred and getting back thousands right off the bat are few and far between for rookies. The rewards are amazing, but the rewards are in line with both the risks and time and effort put in. I work 50-60 hour weeks just to stay on top of what we are doing. Many days I feel like a total failure and like I have no clue at all, other days I own Google. On balance they seem to be winning of late. There are many more failures than successes. And the brutal truth is that by the time it gets blogged the idea is probably past its prime.

I know you are looking for a step-by-step process on how to get started, one does not exist. If I had one it would not be in a $97 e-book.

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?

In the last week E-Bay has stopped displaying ads on Google (not even gonna link to it since every blogger seems to have already written about it…) and just today I see where Wal-Mart has decided to drastically cut affiliate commissions.

Combine that with my recent post about a major company who admitted to me they dont care about their affiliates, blockbusters recent pullback on payouts and I am seeing a pattern start to emerge.

Major name brands do not really need you for traffic, at least they have some data that makes them think that. Ebay does not turn off Google ads in response to a stupid party, they had a well thought out hypothesis that the ads did not pay for themselves in the long run. I suspect that Wal-Mart (which has one of the world’s largest databases and loves to mine it) sensed the same thing. They were paying too much to affiliates for the traffic, that much of the traffic would still come at lower payouts or that they could actually make more from less sales…

People will continue to argue about the logic of these moves, but multi-billion dollar companies are like glaciers. They move slowly. They are not making a rash decision. This was most likely well thought out and tested. It may not work, but they have thought through the downside. Anyone who has ever worked for a big company knows how stupid they are, but it is usually a stupidity from inaction rather than taking action.

When I worked for a Fortune 500 company - worst 9 months of my life - we got a ton of sales from our brand name. We intentionally decimated our affiliate program by not letting others bid on our trademarks, and saw a huge percentage increase in profit from that traffic - we went from paying something like $50 a sale to less than $20 without any drop in sales, we just moved them from one bucket (affiliate) to the other(brand search). Took months to get the change authorized and days to see the benefits.

If you then take the other side of the equation - traffic generation - and look at how hard Google is squeezing people on quality score you quickly realize that the internet is quickly transforming from a wild-west marketplace where anything goes and anyone can make money to a very corporate “brand is king” type of market. As someone who makes my living from affiliate marketing I see 2 outcomes for our breed - extinction (which will be the result for most) and scaling to a level where companies want to work with you and thus give you negotiating power, the status quo is a diminishing opportunity.

Not saying it is ending tomorrow, I just urge all of you out there making a nice comfortable 25k a month from 2-3 verticals to reassess the long term viability. I was once young and making a fortune every month I thought would never end and in the space of 60 days in 1999 everything evaporated. I will not make the mistake of being unprepared again and urge you not to as well.

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.