Google Slaps Some Affiliate Marketers a round.

5 People Speaking Their Mind - Put In Your Two Cents!

Posted on June 9, 2007 in Google Adwords, PPC  

Google Slaps some Affiliate Marketers a round with adwords latest quality score update. I was checking out the thread on digital point “From great to poor in last few hours” .  While I always hate to see this happen I also realize that Google is trying to clean things up and make progress. BUT I also realize at times Google has thrown out the baby with the bath water.

While i didn’t have any drastic differences take place like going from great to poor, I did notice a few of my keywords that were great go to just ok. But I am not surprised on some of them as they aren’t really targeted. My heavily targeted words stayed dead on the off beat ones had some minor changes but nothing to get up in arms about.

Now on to the big issue if you did get hit by the change… Well here are two Great posts to read that should help, CPA Mini Landing Page Sites and Building a Landing Page.

Whats your take? Did your bids get hit?

Clicks Don’t Equal Sales

2 People Speaking Their Mind - Put In Your Two Cents!

Posted on May 22, 2007 in Affiliate Tips, PPC  

I need a computer to count how many times I see a user post in a forum or send me an email saying. Affiliate marketing isn’t real i sent 10,000 visitors to the offer or site and didn’t get one lead. Usually the main reason it doesn’t convert is the traffic is untargetted or the traffic isn’t really traffic.

First there are programs/sites all over the net that will popup, under, intersestial for a split second your ad/landing page in a window then 98% of the time the user just closes it or it gets closed by a program. But the programs call these visitors when they aren’t. These are those get 10000 visitors for 5 bucks etc… I have tried one or two of these I won’t lie but the traffic is JUST TRASH!

Secondly I find people are taking the wrong traffic and pushing it to the wrong offer. Example one guy emailed me that his stuff wasn’t converting and he was pushing a ton of traffic to the offers. They were mortgage offers. Well the traffic he was pushing was myspace, screensaver type traffic. I told him there is his problem you can’t expect that traffic to convert for mortgage and debt, maybe other screensaver or zwinky or ringtone offers but not mortgage and debt. Don’t get me wrong that traffic may get a convert or 2 for mortgage and debt Just not a 1:2 or 1:4 return.

Some Tips:

1. Target your Traffic to Your offer (common sense you would think).

2. Get Cheap traffic don’t just rely on PPC look to CPM, direct advertising.

3. Track Your results by using your CPA networks Subid.

4. Before you buy traffic form a source search around google, forums and blogs to see what other people say about the traffic seller. (read no 5)

5. Just because a traffic source didn’t work for one person, doesnt mean it won’t work for you.  

6. When you have targetted traffic and it is working well. Play with your bids, and your ad copy to increase your return.

Remember clicks don’t equal sales.

You are having success with a CPA offer now what?

5 People Speaking Their Mind - Put In Your Two Cents!

Posted on April 24, 2007 in Affiliate Tips, PPC  

So you are having success with a CPA offer, now what? I received this question via my contact form so i decided to answer it.
Here are a few questions that go thru my mind when i have success with a CPA offer:

1. Am I reaching all of the audience i can (Meaning advertising on other advertising networks, sites etc)
2. A. Should I create a landing page If i am sending it directly to the offer page (will it increase conversions?)
B. Can i improve My landing page/site?
3. Should I bid more to capture more clicks? or Should i bid less and see if my conversions hold? (I usually test both)
4. If I am not already setup to promote via Natural Search Engine rankings, is the offer going to last and make it worth it to target natural rankings?
5. Is there a similar offer that i can promote the same ways?
6. Can i target another audience with this offer?
7. Try different Ad copy to see if i can get better click thru ratio.
8. Have I researched enough Keywords?

So there are a few questions and thoughts to get you going and moving on to making more with CPA offers.

Good Adwords Quality Score Doesn’t Equal High Traffic

4 People Speaking Their Mind - Put In Your Two Cents!

Posted on April 17, 2007 in Google Adwords, PPC  

I received a question concerning Google Adwords Quality Score and that they have good QS but don’t get any impressions. I am going to address this issue in todays post but first here is the email i received:

When running campaigns on adwords I sometimes notice that I have a quality score
of ok or better for all my keywords however only 1 or 2 of them get any real
amount of impressions. I know these keywords have a good search volume as they
are either quality keywords or I can verify it through google/wordtracker/yahoo.
Is their a way to tell adwords to give all my keywords equal impressions?

Right now I have a campaign with about 200 keywords for the finance market. Out of
all of them only one is showing any real amount of impressions and its probably the
most obscure one out of my list. I’d love to get more impressions out of the others
to see which ones can convert.

First off congrats on getting Good or Great Quality score many people have trouble even accomlishing that. I noticed you said you have a campaign that is in the finance market. Well the finance market can be pricey which is why even though you have Good Quality Score you are not getting any impressions especially if you are bidding the bear minimum to keep the keyword active. This would make perfect sense as to why your obscure phrase is getting impressions as many people are probably not bidding on that single phrase. The solution to get more impressions is bid more, just because google gives you a good quality score and says your minimum bid can be .05 that doesnt mean that bid you will get impressions. OR try to gather up more obscure keywords and bid directly on them for cheaper. This all depends on how much your spend VS return formula comes out as you don’t want to bid so much that you are not making a profit. I will say this though, many times i have had to bid a little more knowing that over time (not always but usually if your CTR is good and QS is good)  you payout per click will decrease even though your bid is higher as Googles system starts recognizing your site for those searches as a better match than other bidders.

Lastly, don’t limit yourself to just Google Adwords look to other sources of Search Engine Traffic. Even though most people stick with the top 3; MSN, Yahoo, and Google, you can get return from other search engines out there.

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