The Coming Adwords War

Over the weekend I was finally able to take some time out of my agenda to read “The Coming Adwords War” by Michhael Reining from MindValley Labs.

In his 52 page long document, Mike shares his journey into the internet marketing world and later his individual entrepreneurship. It was a fun but somewhat over dramatic read on skills and facts most of us already know.

According to Mike, the Google Adwords world as we know it, will cease to exist before the end of 2009. The theory his book thrives on is that because small businesses don’t have the money or manpower to build an automatic system that optimizes all the campaigns by accessing the Google Adwords API they don’t have a competitive advantage and therefore don’t compete. This is based upon the Adwords Optimizing system Ebay launched somewhat time ago. But how well did that turn out ?

I agree with Mike that competition is getting fiercer and the PPC landscape is changing, this was clear to me when AffiliateSupportTeam was at the Google Headquarters in Dublin, but let’s not get carried away: For now, and as it will be for a long time in the future the Adwords will still be based on a Quality Score based algorithm where CTR plays a big role in. And as I described in an earlier post: Adwords Quality Score is more based about incoming links to your site than anything else. And let’s be honest small and efficient business can do that just as well or maybe even better then the big corporations because they are very flexible.

While it might be true that those companies got a lot more financial power then you do, they are also limited to budgets. While it’s a lot easier for a small company to put in some extra cash once they see a campaign is profitable – hell most of the affiliate business out there get all the revenue in before they have to pay their Credit Card bill, a big company can’t easily relocate a budget. In my opinion flexibility always wins..

In “The Coming Adwords War”, Mike does share some techniques that have helped him get more out of his campaigns. Most of it is pretty obvious, but if you’re a newbie to PPC Marketing and Google Adwords, reading this document might help you get some good insights and avoid some mistakes.

Visit “The Coming Adwords War” website.

P.S. On a little side note, I do think it’s pretty spectaculair that Mindvalley decided to move their business to Kualu Lumpur and there recruit people from all over the world. That stuff, to me is pretty inspirational.

Is linkbuilding important for PPC Campaigns ?

Yes. And the importance of this will continue to grow in the future. For several months we’ve been teaching the first AffiliateSupportTeam students the pillars to building stable and long-term Affiliate Marketing campaigns. And link building has always been an important aspect of the traffic pillar.

As we’ve always suspected, the biggest aspect of the Landing Page Quality Score is the Domain Quality Score. From our experience the domain name quality score is measured in a variety of ways but the two most important aspects are:

• Keyword Relevancy in the Domain name
• Incoming Links (Back Links)

Google predicts that in a period of time your website will generate a certain amount of natural backlinks. If that’s not happening your site might get flagged for manual review by their spam specialist team.

In a presentation at SMX San Francisco Michael Gray said the following, according to Bruce Clay’s website:

“Michael says the Landing Page Quality Score is a lie. It has nothing to do with your landing page. It has to do with your organic rankings. The better you do organically, the better your quality score will be. Learn how to break things.

He shows us his site for Sanjaya ringtones. His AdWords ad was disabled because he had a low quality score.

He shows another site. It has the same ad copy but it’s going to a different domain. That ad runs for 75 cents. On the other site the ad goes for 10 dollars.”

You can actually do some experiments with this yourself:

• Duplicate an excising campaign
• Rename it to “Test Campaign”
• Remove all ad groups except one
• Duplicate that ad group at least 4 times.
• Make sure all the ad copy is the same
• Change the Display URL for all 4 ads
• Choose some domains you think or know have a lot of backlinks, like Google.com or CNN.com
• Upload the ads.

As you are probably shocked to see, your Dog Training or whatever campaign receives a better Quality Score on CNN.com and Google then it does on an actually related domain.

One of our students is currently experimenting with running campaigns on authority websites like Squidoo, for some small campaigns. So far his campaigns have survived the latest Google Slap.

I hope I made the importance of backlinks for your overal marketing plan, and especially search more clear..If you’re not currently building organic links to your website, do it now.

Simple Keyword Research

A lot of people always ask what kind of “secret” tools we’re using for our niche campaigns, and what tools they should purchase. While that is conversation for later.. nobody EVER asks for the simple handy tools.

Even though a lot of the good stuff comes from what they call “up here” I sometimes just quickly want to look up a few variations for a general keyword. Here’s what I usually do:

I quickly go to Yahoo.com and type in the first few letters of the keyword I’m looking for. Since a few months you immediately see more specific searches on the topic of your keyword. If you don’t see anything, make sure you switch “Search Assist” on. Scroll through Yahoo’s suggestions and write them all down.

Now go to Google Suggest and check out their variations on your topic. Alternatively you can scroll down to the bottom of the page, and see what Google thinks is related to your search: (Affiliate Marketing in this case)

Of course, when it comes to campaign research you should go MUCH deeper, but we’ll get into that a little bit later. Hope you enjoyed this quickie

Investigating your PPC Conversions

I’m sure everyone of us sees differences and fluctuations in their conversions. One day it can be 200 sales per day, and the other day it can be 170. This is only a difference of 15% but it’s still a substantial number of sales. Now part of the conversion difference might be on the merchant side, but there are factors on your PPC side as well that influence the conversion rate and the conversion amount as well. Let’s see how we can find them shall we..

• Go to the reporting tab in Google Adwords.
• Click “Create a New Report”
• Click “Campaign Performance”
• Set the View to “Daily” and select the last two weeks, to get a good idea of what is happening on specific week days. You can also choose a different period of time, but two weeks gives you just enough data to get a clear view on the current trend.
• Click “Advanced Settings” and select from the “Conversion Columns” the following items: conversion cost, cost/conversion, conversions and conversion rate.
• Click “Filter your Results” and set Ad Distribution to Search Only
• Name your report, and where you feel the need, set it to run weekly
• Click “Create Report”
• Open your report from the Reporting Tab
• In the upper right corner right below the range date you can choose what you want to see the graph for. Choose Conversions
• When you take a look at the graph below for a very small campaign you’ll notice that on week days the conversion is much lower then in the weekend, where it is high.
• With this data in mind, go and take a look at the following items: average position, number of clicks per ad group or even keyword, click through rate.

You’re probably going to find out some differences that are worth taking into account when your optimizing. Imagine what a small change can do on a yearly basis. If you can’t find anything, e-mail your account manager with your findings and have them do an investigation.

Premium Subscribers:
Our Premium members can find this tutorial and some more advanced examples in the Education section. A video tutorial is also available from the Video Tutorials tab.

Adwords tips for Hispanic Campaigns

So, in the AffiliateSupportTeam fieldtrip broadcast we already encouraged you to expand your campaigns to Latin America because overall, you can generally you can acquire your sales at a much lower CPA than in the U.S. market where there is much more competition.

At the 2nd day of Ad-Tech we scheduled a session with Google, where they gave us some tips on how to expand your campaigns to Latin America and what to keep in mind. Unfortunately Google didn’t allow is to videotape the session so it’s going to be just text guys

• Have Spanish Campaigns with Spanish landing pages. In addition to a boost in quality score, this will boost your conversion rate.
• Make your Spanish landing pages just as high quality as your English Landing pages
• Split test your Hispanic landing pages. There might be user behavior difference between the Hispanic users and U.S. users. Even if it’s just 0.50% better, that’s going to mean big bucks annually.
• Facilitate easy switching between English and Spanish.
• Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion
• Use more straight forward language
• Use images on your landing pages of Hispanic people - Not Caucasian.
• Build a whole new campaign for your Spanish traffic and separate this from your English campaign (can be in the same account) then negative match the Spanish broadmatch keywords in the Spanish account with the English translations. Also do this the other way around. Google’s broadmatch algoritm still translates and broadmatches the English keyword for the Spanish translation, and you want the highest CTR possible so don’t have your Spanish campaign run on English keywords or the other way around.

AffiliateSupportTeam already has two successful Affiliate Marketing campaigns in the Hispanic Market and will continue to expand their campaigns to Latin America in the coming months. We will keep everybody posted..

Premium Subscribers Note:
Premium Members can contact the Spanish and Portuguese translators from the Guru’s tab, to have their keywords and ad copy translated.

Actively Create New Campaigns !

Admitting your own mistakes is not fun. But self critisism will help you achieve new levels of success. So as an affiliate marketeer THIS IS A MUST!

For one of our own social networking sites, we used to do quite some spending on Yahoo! but after about six months our Account Manager switched companies and Yahoo! didn’t really care about our accounts. So we simply stopped spending with them..

Without officially putting it on my to do list, I always wanted to get back in the game with Yahoo SM sometime in the future. Some time went by and I already had lost familiarness with their interface.

A couple of weeks ago I had to help a friend out with creating his Yahoo campaign, and I took some time to go over the interface and I realized that it actually worked quite effective. It wasn’t their interface that scared me off, it was my own lack of comfort for something I didn’t know.

I made a mental note: to create at least ONE NEW CAMPAIGN EVERY WEEK. It’s important to be familiar with the PPC interfaces of all Search Engines. PPC Dashboards have to be your Oyster and the thing you feel most comfortable around on the web.

So ask yourself these questions:

-Do you know EXACTLY how to move adgroups from one campaign to another ?
-Do you know how to change Geotargeting for all your campaigns at once ?
-Do you know how to work with Demographic targeting ?
-Do you know how to correctly ad Negative keywords ?

These are just a few questions to ask yourself, but ofcourse you can make this list as long as you want.

Bottom line: Spend MORE time in your PPC Accounts and LESS time reading Blogs.