Diorex

Yahoo tries hard. So does the cheesy guy at the bar, does not mean either of them ever scores.

We recently ran the Yahoo Tune-Up that was available in one of our accounts. (SERoundtable talks a little about it here.)

This was a totally wasted effort, it was so off base that we just had a good laugh and moved on.

For instance:

This is obviously not ready for primetime and shows just how in touch Yahoo’s engineers, business managers and customer service people fail to even understand their own product.

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?

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.

Shoemoney has opened up his blog to guest posts, which not surprisingly turned into an opportunity to Spam a little.

I have no idea who Big Daddy Lawson is, but he writes an open ended glowing review of Miva - the former stink pile known as FindWhat.

He talks glowingly about his particular niche and how Miva gets him clicks for half price, then hints that Ringtones or Home Equity loans would be worth trying there. Then ends with it “being all about the Money”

Got me to thinking that I know not a soul who has ever received any kind of ROI from this company. I have used them at 4 different companies that spend over $1 million a year for search (most far more). Each time giving them a try, setting a very low budget, very low CPC’s and still getting my entire budget depleted within a few hours and always with no conversions, despite enough traffic to have generated several at a minimum.

Now some might say, I had a bad landing page or bad ad copy or that even my server might have had issues that day, Miva reps certainly tried to make that point. They even went so far as to claim that what works for the other engines is not likely to work at Miva, because the audience is a little more sophisticated.

The last time it happened, I pulled server logs and realized that I was billed for hundreds of clicks despite showing only a few visits from Miva. Miva countered that the visits are from partner sites and would show up differently on server logs. We had set-up a unique URL just for them for tracking purposes and that was the data…Bottom line they were fraudulent clicks, Miva knew it and was trying to gloss it over.

Then a few months later, I get an email from a guy at Miva with a memorable enough name that i recognized it immediately when I got another note 9 months later at my new company. He sent the same exact 3 paragraph email to me at 2 different companies, even with a fake datapoint being the exact same data with the name of the industry changed. Slimy. He signed it “The traffic speaks for itself and results don’t lie.” Which is exactly what i thought about when I read the post on shoe’s blog.

I had a long conversation with someone yesterday who did not realize that Click through rate is important. he made the comment “Even on google?”. This made me think that there are lots of naive new affiliate marketers out there who are gonna read this post on Shoe’s blog and go throw some money at Miva.

Please save your time and money.

Please!

OK - it has been awhile since my last post. Not sure if I plan on being a regular blogger again, but I had something I wanted to get off my chest so here goes….

Affiliate marketing has a dark side. Sure lots of people, myself included make a very nice living from driving traffic to merchants, lead providers etc. But it is not always wine and roses.

As part of what I do, I am consistently looking for new lines of business for both my personal marketing and the super affiliate firm I am a partner in. I talk to lots and lots of people and have what I think of as pretty good insight into the industry.

Over the weekend, I attended a dinner party with about 15 couples and in the course of the conversation I came across someone who ended up being the CEO at a major name off-line corporation (you have heard of this company!) with a huge affiliate program. Thinking I might have hit pay dirt, I steered the conversation to the affiliate program which the CEO replied something that has really been bugging me. (before you ask, we were traveling in my wifes social circle not mine…CEO’s at dinner parties is pretty common)

He basically stated that they had spent millions optimizing the website with multi-variate testing, spent millions testing banners, paid search and other traffic generation tools. Basically they had not been cheap about their website. Then he told me that the affiliate program was designed to lose money for the affiliates. He basically said that although margins were about 4x what the payout was, that unless an affiliate was generating free traffic that they were not supposed to make money.

The company does zero PPC on their own (except on brand name) but knows exactly what it costs to generate a sale. They pay about 90% of that level and it is one of their most profitable divisions. I asked him how he kept affiliates long term. His response was he did not care about them long term. They have been part of many different affiliate programs, they have worked with many super affiliates, and gotten ringing endorsements from name-brand affiliate marketers but they don’t care that these people are spending money to drive essentially risk free traffic. They only care that the brand name is strong enough that every “sucker” in affiliate marketing(the CEO’s words) is willing to throw a $100 or so at their program because it is such a strong brand.

His statement was basically they get $75 back, we earn $300 and then hope they throw another $100 at it and see if they can make a go at it. These suckers are making our affiliate program a gold mine $100 at a time. A few hundred new suckers every single day.

Now I recognize that not every affiliate program is like this. It was just very disheartening to hear a CEO of a major online and offline company think of affiliates as a one-way meal ticket. As an affiliate, just realize that not all affiliate programs are everything they are cracked up to be.

Before you ask - I thought about posting the name of the company, but after looking at the angles, I have decided that the general warning was enough. I spoke with a lawyer friend and he said I would open up a huge can of worms if I said anything other than very vague information that could not identify the company. It would essentially be my word against the CEO and his lawyers. Just not worth the hassle. Take this as a cautionary tale rather than XYZ company is a bad affiliate partner.

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.
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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.
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Alright. I am just about done with Microsoft. My original Xbox would hang up and freeze every 30 minutes or so. My year old Xbox360 is about as reliable as a teenager with beer and car keys.

I can sometimes play for hours without freezing, other times it freezes before I even get the game turned on. Nothing quite as frustrating as sitting down to play a video game after a hard day and it taking 20 minutes even to get into the game.

This started on a consistent basis back in November when I bought Gears of War(it had happened a few times before that, but not consistently). To be fair I am not sure it was Gears of War that broke it, I had not played in about a month and before I could play the game I had this huge downloaded patch that had to be applied, it probably took 20 minutes.

Anyway, after this, the game would freeze on me for absolutely no reason. I played certain segments 10 or 11 times because there was no way to save until you reached a checkpoint. Then I picked up The Godfather, which was a strange sort of fun for me… but I cannot tell you how many saves I made and how much progress I lost because I would go through a 15 minutes mission and then the game would freeze on my drive back to a save point.

This has been a problem in each game I have played since November… the game just freezes for no reason and with no rhyme or reason.

So I went to my friend who knows everything…Google…This is what I got from Microsoft - no need to read it, it says try turning the system off, try unplugging all peripherals, try wiping the hard drive, try wiping the user account, try robbing a bank so you can buy a new one because you are screwed.

Then of course there are the forums with ideas like wrap it in a wet towel, place the game over an empty box, hang the power brick from a nail in the wall and a ton of other stupid stuff. I tried em all anyway, with no results.

So I called Microsoft to find that I bought the game 1 year and 5 days ago and my warranty was expired. I nicely explained that the problem had been regularly occurring for several months and was rebuked with “you should have called when the issue started”, I explained I was not trying to enforce a warranty I was just trying to get the system to work as it did before the patch was applied and was there any way to roll back the patch like I can in Windows.

Honest to God, this was the CSR’s response…”Sir, we are the largest software company in the world, we would never release a patch that would harm your machine, everything is thoroughly tested prior to release.”

Good thing I was not drinking hot coffee or juggling swords when this was said as it would have been very painful for me. I asked for clarification of this remark, and she explained that the Xbox was produced by Microsoft -”You know, the software company” and that they would not produce software that did not work properly.

I just about lost it at that point….Instead I just decided to quit entirely and let the damn thing collect dust. Screw it, I have more productive things to do anyway.

Unfortunately for me, the last game I had played was Viva Pinata with my 4 year old. She was having a blast. A combination of getting to play with Daddy and the game being somewhat on her level….Every day for the last 5 days she has asked me “Daddy have you fixed the game yet?”

So now where do I go? Disappoint my little girl at a time when she is showing interest in something I enjoy? Buy another crappy Microsoft product and reinforce the poor design? Is Sony any better?

Anyone know of anything to do to help this problem?