I’m going to share a little story with you today.

So maybe a week ago I had really been playing around with some new ppc campaigns.  I generally go out there and throw up a bunch of really targeted campaigns so there isn’t really much risk and then when any of those campaigns show conversions than I really drill into them and optimize.  If things still look really great then is when I blow it up and try to expand as much as possible.

Anyways, out of those new campaigns I threw up, one of them did exceptionally well off the bat.  Couple hundred profit first day with the test campaign?  NICE.  I went in and optimized it and let it sit for a few days, things jumped up to $400+ profit a day.

Now back to today, I jumped online to finish up my “blow it up” phase and was greeted by my affiliate manager with this:

Affiliate Manager:
Hey Trevor

Me:
hey man

Affiliate Manager:
no bidding on “*****”
Advertiser is bitching

Me:
serious?
is that new or something

Affiliate Manager:
hang tight one sec

Me:
i guess i didn’t see it anywhere at all on the offer restrictions and it said search-ppc is allowed
so i didn’t really have a way of knowing it wasn’t allowed

Affiliate Manager:
It was not listed
hang tight

Me:
sure

Affiliate Manager:
Crazy when advertisers come yelling then realize it was thier fault to begin with.  I am talking to them now.  Please give me a few

Me:
no prob buddy
im just thankful you deal with them for me
and i dont have to

Affiliate Manager:
hahha
all good

Affiliate Manager:
So, they realized that they were wrong.  The campaign will be updated shortly.  I Am going to email you the restrictions now.  Can you look and let me know if you think you can still do well with the campaign despite the new restrictions?

Me:
i can maybe bring a few in but i had really drilled into longtail terms with ***** terms

Affiliate Manager:
I guess their internal search guys are crying right now

Me:
lol
dude i would kill them if they were going against me
my ctrs were at like 60%+

Affiliate Manager:
I know you would …ahahha

Me:
well damn there goes that gravy train….is seo still open?

Affiliate Manager:
yes. Let me get you the restrictions

So I took a look at the new restrictions they made.  I won’t list all of them that they added but here are just a few in the list:

• You can not mask ***** URL’s with a different URL.
• You can not use ***** trademarks, brand names, web addresses, or any variation thereof in the display URL.
• You can not use direct linking.
• You can not utilize blog sites, review sites, “pre-sell” or other similar web pages.
• You can not use the registered trademark symbol.

OK first of all, you can’t direct link, you can’t load the site/link using an iframe(masking), and you can’t utilize blog sites or other similar web pages?  WTF???  You basically eliminated anyone from being able to promote your stuff in any way using a webpage.

The really funny thing is that they also added a bunch of restrictions specifically related to my ad that I was doing…and now THEY are doing it.  One example of what I was doing and they were not was using the registered trademark symbol in my ad.  There were many more restrictions referring to my ads being used too, that wasn’t the only one.  I love how they went from NO restrictions on the offer, to restrictions up the arse like this.

Anyways, the point of my post isn’t to bitch and moan, this kind of stuff happens in the industry…we have to just get used to it.

What I just don’t get is….why are these companies hiring internal search guys?  They are paying these guys to go take their product to the cpa networks and bid on their own trademark terms?  Why not cut out the internal search guy, take your product right to the network with no restrictions?  This way your saving money by not hiring an internal search team PLUS your going to have affiliates who will get WAYYY better results than the internal search people who have no motivation to really rock things like most affiliates do.  If your internal search team is only pulling like 5% or 10% or even 20% or 30% of the clicks in, and you can have an affiliate bring in 60% or more of the clicks….that is SOOO many more potential sales/leads to be made that you aren’t getting or even aware of.

I would love to hear YOUR opinion on the matter….or any advertiser horror stories you may have had in the past.  Comment away!

I threw up a bunch of PPC campaigns on Yahoo the other day and was just going through optimizing them. A couple campaigns were really doing well. I decided to break out every keyword getting clicks and pumping it into its own ad group so that I can write ads much more targeted to that specific audience.

When I went in to the first ad group to add the negative keywords for the ad group I noticed an alert in Yahoo saying this: (Excluded words only apply if the advanced match type is enabled for Sponsored Search)

I had to stop for a second and think…what?

Well for the short answer, you have to use the advanced match type in yahoo to use negative keywords. As for the reason why…here goes.

• Yahoo’s advanced match is like Google’s broad match. Yahoo explains advanced match as being “for matches that use your keywords in various contexts.”
• Yahoo’s standard match is like Google’s phrase match.  Yahoo explains standard match as being “for exact matches of your keywords or their minor variations.”

When using standard match, your a lot safer off.  It is going to be like going in using phrase match where if you bid on “get new york times magazine” you’re only going to show up for that phrase or something EXTREMELY similar.  The Standard match type displays your ads for exact matches to your keywords, as well as for singular/plural variations and common misspellings.

By using advanced match, you can open up new opportunities to find converting keyword phrases that wouldn’t have come through otherwise.

When a campaign proves to be profitable and you have done a bit of optimization, you can use advanced match with a good list of negatives.  This will filter out any bad traffic that may come in from switching to the advanced match….yet leave you room to find out new keyword phrases to zone in on.

I personally use the advanced match with a good list of negatives most of the time.  If you are new to the game I would recommend not doing that and starting with standard match, than graduating to advanced match.  It just depends with how familiar you are with the traffic, market, etc.

What do you generally do with Yahoo, use standard match or advanced match?

I have had a couple people ask me for more posts that are examples…so here is an example of something I ran into the other day.

I was optimizing some campaigns in adwords.  I noticed that although I had my adgroups broken out using ONLY 3 word+ longtail phrases, I was still getting a significant amount of traffic from a 2 word phrase that I was not bidding on.  I have seen this before and I believe it’s because I’m using broad match so it can just match with certain words out of the phrase.  I like to do it this way when I can to let a bunch of low cost longtail keywords trickle in without really much risk.

Well this was all fine and dandy, I was getting good conversions on a variety of keywords, but I was getting a lot of traffic on a term I was not bidding on.  To make matters worse it was like a huge portion of the traffic.

At first I wasn’t quite sure what to do..then it hit me negative exact-match!

In adwords, when you add negative keywords you can actually use negative phrase-match or negative exact-match…which most people are not aware of.

So what I did to solve my problem was add -[keyword phrase] to my campaign level negative list, and bam that keyword that was getting all the non converting traffic just got shut off!

This turned that campaign into an almost breaking even situation to earning some serious ROI now!

Moral of the story:  Filter your bad traffic out AS GOOD as you possibly can.  Watch your tracking and stats and find out what is NOT converting and GET IT OUT.  You can do this so many ways from dayparting to geographically, down to adding a good negative list (properly using the correct negative match type), blocking site urls and placements, etc.

If you have any good tips on how to filter out bad traffic, please, do leave a comment.

If you are having quality score issues in adwords and have tried everything under the sun….than I have a small tip that just may help you out.

First of all, stop throwing up these total shit landing pages.  Do just a LITTLE bit of seo.  Do your simple onsite optimization.  Get at least a few backlinks.  That right there is going to help you out a ton if your not doing it already.

Now…for a few little pieces of info you may not have heard before.

1. When I am setting up my landing pages, I generally name the images for seo purposes trying to fit the keywords in appropriately.  What I didn’t know is stuffing in to many keywords in the images on your page CAN in fact hurt your quality score. (Not that I was like…spamming keywords into my pages or anything)
2. I also learned that instead of "overly" keyword stuffing the numerous image names you should be using a number instead.
3. I learned that there are certain "stop words" that may trigger google to go back in and review your campaign a bit more thorough.

I imagine this may confuse some of you so let me give an example…

If I have up a weight loss landing page, I would be using short copy, often consisting of many images.  I would give almost if not all of the images names like greenteaweightloss.jpg, helpmeloseweight.jpg, etc.  In hopes that this would help please QS and get my keyword stuffed in just a bit more.

Now take that landing page, on the bottom of the page I have a button that says "Buy Me Now".  I would name this image… buygreenteapills.jpg or something similar.

NOT ONLY will google probably penalize me for naming almost every image something to do with losing weight, but they will also notice an image with the word buy in it.  That buy word is a "stop word" that very possibly could be triggering the adwords bot to call for a manual or more in depth review.  Free would be another type of stop word…Words that google generally don’t like.

Now to fix that scenario.  I would name images as relevant as possible and if its not going to HELP me out…I name it a number such as 1.jpg or 2.jpg or whatever.

This is one of those tips that you should keep in the back of your mind for that slapped campaign that you just can NOT figure out… It just may save it for you.

Sorry about the long delay in posts.  I have been working on two HUGE projects that required a LOT of my time.  I will be back posting quite a bit more and have a lot of great info for everyone the next coming months!

Anyways……Not to long ago, I noticed Gauher Chaudhry started having a regular spot in CX Digital’s weekly newsletter.  After reading the first couple tips I noticed that everything he was writing was PRETTTTY geared towards beginners.  Which, of course, makes sense.  Nobody that advanced is going to be reading these types of emails really since they already get flooded with offers they should be running and expiration notices and the 10 million other emails you get a day.  Beginners WOULD be scouring through this info trying to pickup any tips they can get their hands on.

However, today I checked out the tip of the week:

TIP OF THE WEEK

By Gauher Chaudhry (Author, Pay Per Click Formula)

Statistics indicate that capitalizing the first letter in each word of a domain results in better conversions.  This is because the user can better read the display URL that may encourage better click-thru rates.  For example, the display URL"www.FreeRingtones.com" will generally result in a higher click-thru rate than simply using "www.freeringtones.com."

After reading this, I thought I’d quick critique this tip.

First of all, I have looked and never actually found any study done on this so I would love to see which statistics Gauher is talking about.  Gauher, if you see this, comment and let me know.  I’m not calling you out, simply would like to look at this data.

Second of all, this tip works great for any of the results on the RIGHT hand side of the page. 

HOWEVER, for the top spots which show up above the natural results, I show a much better CTR with no drop in conversions by using ALL lowercase JUST like how it would be displayed if it was in natural search results.

So instead of using www.FreeRingtones.com like Gauher suggests, I would test www.freeringtones.com, freeringtones.com, www.freeringtones.com/  Destination url’s that are ALL lowercase.

One of the larger impacts I found on increasing your ctr is the destination url, so I usually split test a few different destination url’s right off the bat.

Something else I have found to work pretty good at times (but not always) is to use a call to action in your actual url.  For instance buying the domain clickherenow.com, and using subdirs off that clickherenow.com/for/ringtones

You can also switch that up a bit and try freeringtones.com/clickhere/fordeals …I’m sure you get the point.  It really comes down to split testing.  If your not testing everything that can be tested, than your not really doing your job.

If you have any questions or any other pointers leave a comment!

Well the last week I threw up some new campaigns and wanted to play around with Camtasia Studio so I decided to make a little "proof" video of the work I’ve been doing the last couple of weeks.  I did this intentionally to show a couple of my family members the possibilities of internet marketing in a "cool" fashion, but my buddy talked me into throwing it up on the blog for everyone to see instead….oh well.  Here you go!

 By the way, I know this isn’t the best video solution…I’m working on something.  For now though, if you can’t see the video, you can click the little full size icon right next to the audio in the lower right hand part of the player.  This will maximize it to full screen so that you can make everything out.

Well that was a loaded question haha.  The last few days I have been talking with someone who had a campaign and thought he was out of traffic.  Now I will admit he definitely had everything optimized extremely well and had really taken advantage of adwords.  However…adwords isn’t everything!

Just talking PPC alone here, I had him expand to Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN Adcenter, Miva, and Looksmart.  Now I won’t tell you which one didn’t make money but every source we tested except for yes…ONE…added profit on to the campaign.  He is now making almost triple what he was making with that exact same campaign as he was less than a week ago.

Now this post is short, but its short for a reason.  Sometimes the BEST tips, are the absolute simplest things we take for granted.  You know how to market, now go find the audience (traffic source) that is perfect for you.  Don’t get so one minded thinking you have to do everything in adwords.  This is something I see happening all the time.

Until next time, spread your campaigns out among some new traffic sources and start earning some more BLING BLING!

I have for a long time now used Keyword Discovery’s free search tool for most of my keyword research.  I took a decent break there for awhile and hadn’t thrown up any campaigns for awhile.  The other day though when I went to search for some certain keyword phrases I found the tool displaying this on many of the terms I was searching for: Search error: This search function requires a KeywordDiscovery subscription.

I didn’t really dig in depth to find out what all triggered that message instead of search results to be displayed, but I did find that if you search for anything .com it will display it.  I have started looking around for my new #1 free keyword research tool.  I know there are tons out there but so many are just junk that are more inaccurate than accurate.

If anyone has any suggestions on what to use please pass along your expertise.  Who knows maybe I will have to belly up for Keyword Discovery’s $70 a month charges to test out their actual pay service.  If its worth it and will help me increase my revenue, I will gladly pay that monthly fee.

Here is a simple little tip that will probably come in handy for a lot of you.

Not to long ago I posted about how Yahoo had disabled the use of question marks in their ads.  I had tested using the question marks in FireFox and in Internet explorer and the same thing happened in both browsers, the question mark simply disappears right after you enter it.

Welllll after discussing this with a good friend of mine we discovered that you actually CAN still use question marks in your ad, but ONLY if you import your campaigns.  I believe to have the import feature in your YSM account you have to spend over $300 a month for 3 consecutive months.  I also heard that this $300 amount may have risen to $500 more recently. 

This may be a problem for anyone just starting out.

I do know of a "loophole" to this if you are really desperate to get the import feature on your yahoo account.  If you sign up to Affiliate Radar they have worked out a deal with Yahoo to enable the import feature of your account, since it is needed to use Affiliate Radar properly.

I don’t know what it costs a month probably at least $50 bucks, but maybe you could signup, get the import feature from Yahoo, then either use your account if you like it, or just cancel it if it really doesn’t suit your needs.

There are actually many ways to answer that question, but the best answer would be to use Google’s Ad Preview Tool.

By using this you can view the sponsored ads results from any location in the world!

I am working with some ad campaigns out of Canada and the UK and was having troubles using other methods of viewing international ads.  I remembered I had used Google’s ad preview tool before so after a few google searches I found it again.

This tool has saved me a few times and just thought I would pass it on to you guys!