Fun with Content
I have been paying attention to content recently and it has really been paying off nicely.
One of the things I have been doing is making sure that my ads are prominently displayed on websites that are getting traffic for the keywords I am bidding on in the major search engines. So I was spending some time clicking the natural listings and then looking for adsense on them.
I was mentioning this to a friend of mine who we can barely talk to me without him suggesting a script or automating stuff. The amount of stuff I do manually drives him up a wall. So a few days later in my inbox I had this nifty little tool that basically allowed me to upload a list of keywords and then the script would automatically check the first few pages of search results on Google, Yahoo and MSN and then tell me which pages ranked for what terms and which pages allowed adsense ads.
I quickly fired it up and ran it for all my best keywords only to find that my crack content team already had us pretty much showing up on these placements. There were a few sites where we went and fine-tuned for better position or to show up on, but for the most part we were on top of things.
Then a few weeks later I was in a training class for some new hires and we were covering a list of words we are not allowed to bid on for competitive or legal reasons and one of the trainees mentioned it was too bad because we were probably losing a lot of profitable volume. A few hours later, back at my desk, I got an IM from my friend asking how his tool had worked out.
That was when I decided I needed to fire up the tool and look at my pretty extensive list of prohibitive keywords. Eureka! I was all of the sudden able to target dozens of websites that ranked for terms I would love to bid on and could not. These clicks came at bargain prices and converted really well.
Moral of the story… Look to the content network to pick up volume on keywords you are not able to bid on for whatever reason. Then doublecheck to make sure you are showing up on the sites that rank for those keywords.
October 5th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
As always great shit. Glad to see you’re posting regularly again I get a lot from your posts. As I got to paragraph 2 and before I got to what you were actually doing to thought immediately about finding places to run CPM ad banners. I haven’t done much with CPM but there’s lots of volume to be had there as well
Again great post and Thank you.
October 6th, 2007 at 3:26 pm
You really rock!
I learn more about the intracies of SEM on your blog than anywhere else on the net.
Put a PayPal donation button on your site. I’ll be the first to donate!
Thanks again!
October 7th, 2007 at 10:29 am
it must suck, knowing some of those trainees take your info and go launch campaigns at night in their bedrooms. Do you encourage it, or you have the non disclosure thing going on. That must be a really, really interesting challenge.
October 7th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
Nicholas - I am not terribly worried about it. We tend to pay far more per conversion than other affiliate programs even offer, so they are not exactly trained in how to take a new campaign and make it successful. They also dont have good analytics, great creative, and good relationship building skills that I consider to be critical to success in PPC. They also see that we typically invest $50-$100k in losses into a vertical before making it profitable. Top that off with it violates the terms of their employment agreement and I do not see it as a rampant issue.
November 8th, 2007 at 1:33 pm
Hey Diorex - I don’t suppose you could e-mail me the script that lets you upload keywords and check for AdSense publishers, could ya? LOL! Sounds incredibly useful…
- David