Archive for the ‘Google AdWords’ Category

Qualifying Your Traffic Will Save You Money, Fool

One of the biggest mistakes I see from newbie affiliates is the desire to run before they can walk. The difference between success and failure is rarely a stroke of luck. It normally has much more to do with understanding your market and reaching it effectively. So today I was hoping to chat some shit about qualifying traffic for the offers you’re promoting. It’s rarely as simple as it sounds.

By qualifying traffic, I’m talking about getting the most out of your paid advertisements. In your head you know the type of people who you want to direct to your page, right? But are you getting your message to them without massively overspending?

The difference between breaking even and 100% ROI can often be as simple as cutting out the crap. Just like the difference between slim and fat can often be cutting down on the calories you shovel down your cakehole every evening. And instead of going out to buy some berries, you should probably first look in the mirror and ask what you could be doing more effectively. Same concept for scaling a PPC campaign (err…I think…somewhere in there). If you want to increase your profit margins, you should weed out the bad traffic before you go hunting for more.

If you don’t qualify your traffic, you are quite literally engaging in the very unsophisticated art of throwing shit at a wall and hoping something – anything – sticks.

Too many affiliates think of sailing the ocean before they’ve explored the depths of their own ponds. They cast the net wide and try to capture every last stream of traffic. Presumably because this is what the “super affiliates” are doing to harness big volume and big earnings. Well fuck what the super affiliates are doing. You should start worrying about your profitability before you start dreaming of your palaces.

Right from the very first planning stages of any affiliate marketing campaign, you should be considering these key points:

1. How can I drive targeted, relevant and interested traffic to this offer?

2. How can I make sure that I’m not paying for clicks, page views and impressions that are never going to convert?

3. How can I ensure that the CTR from advertisement-to-LP is just as healthy as the CTR from LP-to-offer?

You wouldn’t believe how many campaigns I’ve created that have failed under the scrutiny of that third point. It’s very easy to get a strong CTR to a landing page. You can make up any old bullshit if you know the demographics that you’re targeting. But if your creative is mustering a stench of false promise, you’re going to see a huge drop-off in clicks through to the offer.

Successful affiliates know how to create a sales funnel. They know how to grab an innocent Googler by the wrist, drag him kicking and screaming through a text ad, appeal to his needs with a relevant LP, and then finally seal the deal by convincing him that he genuinely needs Product X.

The art of this process is understanding your traffic. You need to understand where those clicks are coming from, why the user has decided to click your ad, and what you can do to stop them from nailing the Back button.

If you are one of the many newbie idiots who moves in to a new niche, downloads a 15mb database of keywords, imports to Adwords and sets a default bid to $0.50 across the board – you are walking in to a complete unknown. You don’t truly know why your users are clicking your ads. How could you?

If you don’t know what your users are searching for, you can’t possibly design a landing page that slaps them in the face and says “it’s your lucky day, bitch, come on in”. No, you’re an Eric Generic affiliate – and considering most ordinary affiliates despise the sheer thought of losing money, this is a great way to create 1000 campaigns, lose money on all of them, and etch yourself the certainty that affiliate marketing doesn’t work.

I know there are many affiliates out there who can afford to unleash a new campaign, lose a thousand dollars, optimize and eventually see a profit. But most new affiliates are too piss poor from their day jobs to afford such luxuries. That’s why you’re following the dream, right?

So start small.

Let’s take colon cleansing as an example, if only because I’ve got it on my mind after the chilli I had for dinner.

So you’ve designed your beautiful flog to scam the living christ out of every last poor American with a weight problem. You sit there staring at your masterpiece and thinking “Damn, how could anybody NOT want their colon cleansed?” I mean, just look at the before and after pics, right?

The newbie affiliate will then assume that his hard work is done. The hard sell is there. He just needs to get people on the page, right?

So he’ll load up Adwords, create maybe 4 ad groups, empty entire categories of suggested keywords in to each and hit the Activate button. At this point he probably minimizes his window, posts some advice on the Warrior Forum, and waits for the clicks to roll in. Which they do.

He checks his stats (probably every 7 minutes), and notices – firstly – that not many of those visitors are clicking through to his Pure Cleanse Kit V909.

Secondly he notices that those who are clicking through to the offer…aren’t actually signing up their free trial. How inconsiderate of them, I know.

A few hours pass and Google Adwords swallows the equivalent of this poor mope’s subscription to PPC Coach. He pauses the campaign and moves on to the next niche.

Of course, if you were to look through his stats, you’d probably find active keywords like this:

“cleanse my colon”
“clean my car”
“free colon kit none of that rebill shit”
“professional colon treatment in texas”
“lose weight with colon”
“put on weight with colon”

I’m exaggerating, but the point I’m trying to make is that each of those keywords expresses a different need. A different want. A different desire.

It doesn’t matter how well suited your landing page is to your target market…if you’re not finding that target market. What is actually a very easy problem to correct for the experienced affiliate becomes a campaign breaker for Average Joe. He assumes that because he’s tried every last keyword in the colon niche, there can’t possibly be any profit there for him.

If you’re new and inexperienced, I can’t even begin to stress the importance of testing with the lowest number of factors to consider. Troubleshooting is a lot easier when you have less data to work with.

Start with small ad groups that are direct matches for the content of your landing page. Worry about scaling in to general and broad terms when you’re making profit. I know a lot of guys will say that their best success has come when they tested a few thousand keywords and filtered out the crap. Well…nice. But I’m speaking to the affiliate mindset that’s still paralyzed with fear over the idea of losing money. And it’s all a learning process. If you scale upwards slowly, research your niche well, and target separate content to separate audiences, you’ll find that you lose a lot less money on clicks that were never going to convert in a million years.

Another classic example of qualifying your traffic comes from working with CPS offers. If you’re promoting something that requires the target to part with his credit card and pay a hefty sum – you damn sure better mention it in your ad text.

Your CTR will naturally take a nosedive if you start mentioning that Product X costs $74.95 plus shipping. That’s because most people surfing the Internet are not in a buying mindset. You can decide not to mention the price, have them click your ad, and smile at your lack of conversions. But that’s pretty stupid, don’t you think?

The CTR from LP-to-offer is just as important. There is absolutely no gain in having somebody click your ad on Google if they never even had $75 in their bank account to begin with. Bust out your most appealing ad text but do yourself a favour and mention the catch. If you’re paying by the click, you don’t want to waste a windfall on unqualified traffic.

To advertise something like dating with PPC, particularly if you’ve chosen an offer where your payout is only confirmed for a specific market (say 30-40 males) – it goes without saying that you should be dressing your ad text with incentives for that audience.

“Aged 30-40? Want A Girlfriend?”
“We’re Offering A Free Pass This Weekend”
“Chat To A Girl Near You Tonight…”
“DatingSite.com/30sTo40s-Only”

You’ve qualified your traffic in several ways. You’ve narrowed down the field to only 30 to 40 year olds. And you’ve mentioned the search for a girlfriend. In theory you should be attracting males in the right age plan. You shouldn’t be wasting too much money on clicks that can’t bring you conversions. Either that or you’ll attract a bunch of keen bean lesbians. And if that’s the case, opt them in to an email list and forward that shit to me.

At the same time, it’s very easy to play some neat mindfuck tricks on your target audience to get them to click ad texts that they otherwise would have ignored. I’m a believer that if you can get the user to say “yes” to several questions, they’re more likely to say yes when it matters.

There are many other examples. You really should be making use of negative targeting to filter out the crap traffic that isn’t suitable for your offer. I normally make sure that any search query with “free” doesn’t get the slightest sniff of my sponsored ads. The same could be said for “torrent”, “download” and a few others. Your negative terms will vary according to the offer.

I’ve been talking a lot about PPC here. The truth is, it doesn’t matter what form of advertising you’re currently using. There are many ways to qualify traffic and avoid wasting money. The super affiliates might be happy to burn through their wallets for quick success. But you have to earn the right to enjoy that freedom. So you better start from the ground up and get to know your target markets.

If you’re wondering why you always fail, it’s probably because your sales funnel is trying to please too many people. Make everybody who visits your landing page feel as if it’s been designed just for them and you will start to see a lot more success.

Google Drops The Banhammer On Bizopp Affiliates

I’ve been getting bombarded on MSN so I thought I’d address this with a single post.

If you haven’t already heard, Google has decided to bite back against bizopp affiliates. If you’re one of the guys who received this email over the last couple of days, you’re probably too busy scratching around for new traffic sources to be reading this post. I’ll paste it for everybody else.

It’s come to our attention that you have submitted ads that promote Google Money Tree or ads that promote a misrepresented affiliation with Google. Due to multiple complaints from our users and publishers, we’ve made the decision not to accept these ads.

This is a notification that your account has been suspended due to the submission of these ads and your ads will no longer run on Google. Please note that future accounts you open will also be suspended.

As noted in our Terms and Conditions, Google reserves the right to terminate advertisements for any reason. To view our Terms and Conditions, please visit https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder.

We appreciate your cooperation.

Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043

You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your AdWords product or account.

This has, quite understandably, caused a large number of Adwords-only affiliates to shit uncontrollable bricks over where the next pay cheque’s gonna come from. As I’ve said on a number of forums, you’d be a fool to believe that it’s impossible to get another account up and running on AdWords. But then, you’d be an even bigger fool to actually bother.

Time to face facts. If you’re looking to run ads that promote a Google bizopp on AdWords, you’re living on borrowed time. I’ve heard more than enough reason to believe that the hottest keywords in this niche are now auto-triggering a manual account review. When that review comes, you better have your ass wrapped up in some pretty shit hot cloaking to stand a chance of escaping the ban.

Guys, this isn’t the sort of ban that you get on a forum. You can’t just choose a new email address (and maybe a new IP), and then go re-registering. There’s much debate over how sophisticated Google is when it comes to tracking those who opt to game the system after a ban. I’ve heard opinions ranging from the quick fix of emptying cookies and using a pre-fill credit card. And at the other end of the spectrum, some think nothing less than buying a new PC, shaving your fucking head and going under the knife is going to be enough to dodge the Adwords Suspendo team.

If you’re really such a lovesick puppy dog that you can’t bare to make a dollar away from Adwords, you will definitely need to:

• Get a new credit card.
• Get a new address on the credit card.
• Find a new IP to access your Adwords account from.

Ironically enough, my Adwords account was registered to an old home address. I’ve since been given a new credit card and my new Internet was installed yesterday so I’ve automatically got a new IP. I could go and install a brand new sparkling Adwords account with no back history of bizopp abuse, but you know what? I really can’t be bothered to waste my time with them.

I’m sure many affiliates are actively hunting out new credit cards to get their Adwords accounts back up and running. But why? It really doesn’t matter if you were running a campaign that was making you a five figure sum of profit every day. If you didn’t immediately explore your traffic options after you established that profitable campaign, you’re a fucking retard and you deserve to fail.

I’ve said this to PPC guys and I’ve said it to SEO guys too. If your entire business is built around driving traffic from Google, it’s no more than a castle built on sand. Especially if you’re operating in the shady business of rebills where it’s quite obvious that changes are necessary to regulate the industry.

If you’re one of the affiliates who’s woken up to a suspended account and no other source of traffic, it’s time to consider whether you’re in this game for the short term riches or the long term success.

Adwords can be an incredibly profitable source of traffic. If you can find a way to keep campaigns ticking over by Google’s rule of thumb, you should feel entitled to enjoy those large cheques. But don’t expect anything less than a steep, harsh learning curve when Google changes it’s rulebook and leaves you staring in to the abyss.

Look at all the options available to you. Diversify your traffic, test new waters, and don’t be afraid to stop living as Google’s bitch. The same can be said for every major traffic source. Diversity and flexibility are the keys to establishing successful campaigns that last longer than it takes for an Adwords teaboy to press “Ban”.

Avoiding The Google Quality Score Slap

I thought I’d take the chance to reveal some of my AdWords Quality Score research. Take it with a pinch of salt. This is small sample stuff.

I know a lot of people rely on AdWords to send traffic to their CPA offers. It might not be the best service, and it’s certainly not the most liked – but AdWords remains the number one PPC solution in terms of sheer volume at your disposal.

The trouble is, absent of any real competition, Google has long since decided to get picky and bitchy over the types of paid ads that it’ll allow.

Basically, this isn’t 2003 anymore. You can’t throw any old squeeze page on to the web and expect Google to suck it up to your plastic. Neither can you whore thousands of $0.05 clicks to a site that looks scammy, and probably is scammy.

If you’re just getting started with PPC, there’s a fat chance you’ve added an AdWords campaign only to see your Quality Score knocked to 1/10 after a set period of time. You’re probably wondering what’s gone wrong, what’s changed, what’s happening. The answer is nothing. Your campaign was always going to get hit eventually, it just took a few weeks for AdWords’ manual reviewers to pull their fingers out of their asses.

If we look at the exact guidelines, we’ll see this on the black list:

Redirect URLs: Ads that contain URLs that automatically redirect to the parent company.

Bridge Pages: Ads for web pages that act as an intermediary, whose sole purpose is to link or redirect traffic to the parent company.

Framing: Ads for web pages that replicate the look and feel of a parent site. Your site should not mirror (be similar or nearly identical in appearance to) your parent company’s or any other advertiser’s site.

So yeah, sucks to be an affiliate marketer, right? Not quite.

I spent a lot of time setting up different vehicles of promotion to find out what Google deemed to be a “bridge page”. I mean, where is the line drawn? A sales letter? A review page? A fake testimonial?

Well depending on the offer that you’re promoting, it can be extremely difficult to pass ANY of those through the manual account review. But interestingly enough, I ran in to a few strange patterns.

My testing involved setting up 12 almost identical campaigns across 12 different AdWords accounts. The only difference was the local country of the account. I ran my campaign through the USA AdWords, the UK version, the Canadian version…and so on…

To my surprise, there were some distinct variations in how the quality checks were performed based on the account reps doing the checking. My America-based campaigns were shot down in a matter of days rather than weeks. Here’s how it averaged out after some extended testing.

USA AdWords – QS dropped after 12 days.
UK AdWords – QS dropped after 15 days.
Canada AdWords – QS dropped after 27 days.
South Africa AdWords – QS dropped after 56 days.

Now I’m not saying placing your cheap ass campaigns on a local South Africa based AdWords account is going to save the day. As you can see, they got to it eventually. But it got me thinking, and hopefully it gets you thinking too.

I’m based in the UK so my main AdWords account is managed by UK reps. I decided to run a couple of identical campaigns and tweak them so that they were only active between 6pm and 7am. Why this time period? Well, common sense says the working day for most office employees is 9am-5pm.

If the manual review team are asleep in their beds, my ad is going to slip under the radar. Baring in mind that I have no clue how Google operates internally, this was all just pure speculation. I thought it was worth a shot.

Sure enough, the campaign avoided a Google slap for more than the original average of 15 days. It’s still running today – over 3 months after I carried out the research. I just pause it during the hours when I’d imagine a manual reviewer to be actively trolling accounts.

And hey, if you want to know what time was “peak” for getting the slap – every single one of my UK based campaigns was slapped between 11am and 3pm on Friday afternoon.

Could it be pure coincidence? I’m not gonna lie, it probably is. But then, I don’t particularly care.

A campaign that risks getting the Google slap is absolutely no interest to me. I like long term stability – and the only reason I run with a quick squeeze page is to split test an offer, or to test the profitability of a new niche.

If you want to truly succeed in avoiding the Google slap, you’re going to need to offer value for content. A fake testimonial or a non-discrete review blog will both draw the wrong kind of attention under the gaze of a manual review.

But there are techniques out there that work. I’m not going to reveal my most effective method – because it’s massively underused and I’m reaping the profit from it. The ultimate goal is to create a page that looks as if it’s going to give the reader an unbiased opinion. I’ll drop a hint in saying that two-way communication is the best place to start.

I know a lot of guys have success with cloaking, but that’s not something that I dabble in.

If you try everything and still can’t sustain a long term profitable campaign on AdWords, maybe you need to start looking elsewhere. Both Yahoo and MSN AdCenter provide excellent platforms for PPC advertising. They’re also slightly cheaper and vastly different in the markets that they reach. I’ll have a separate post on that later. Until then, happy getting slapped.