Today I was going to talk a bit about the Yahoo Conversion Counter…which basically serves the same purpose as the Google Conversation Tracking tool. The thing is, with the Yahoo Panama update coming out, I have no idea what the Conversion Counter is going to look like once Panama is fully rolled out. So for that reason I figured I would go in a different direction.

Hopefully yesterday’s post got you excited about using tracking scripts. They really are a PPC affiliate’s best friend when used correctly. And with that in mind, I thought it would be helpful to give you some tips for using your tracking script data.

So without any further ado:

1. Make sure you have a relevant amount of data built up before you start looking at your conversion data. I would say you should wait two weeks before you start seriously using the data. As any PPC practitioner knows, sometimes your account just has a bad day. If you start looking at conversion data too soon, you might make some incorrect assumptions about your keywords.
2. To find your most troublesome keywords, look at your cost-per-conversion at the campaign and AdGroup level first. Find the areas where your cost-per-conversion is the highest, then drill down to the keyword level to find problem words.
3. Know your magic numbers. Figure out what you consider a reasonable cost-per-conversion, and then focus on finding the terms that have a cost-per-conversion above that number.
4. Before you erase a term, take a good look at your ad text and landing page. Does the keyword work with the landing page? Is the ad compelling enough to encourage a conversion? If not, you might want to modify the landing page and/or ad before you erase the keyword entirely.
5. Cut out the fat. After a month or two, go out and look for keywords that haven’t drawn and clicks or have some clicks and no conversions. Ask yourself it they are worth keeping or not – if not delete them or take them offline.
6. Don’t just focus on the negative! Check out your best performing keywords and ask yourself why they are doing so well. Is it the landing page? The ad? The keyword? A combination of all three? Conversion tracking is an amazing way to see what works best – so look for your best terms and figure out why they do so well. With that knowledge, you can be more successful in the future.

Alright! There is my list - hopefully it helps. I am sure I am leaving something out here, does anyone else have any suggestion to make the most of your conversion tracking?

SHAMELESS PLUG: Once again, the InsureMe affiliate program does allow you to use Yahoo Conversion Tracking scripts. And contrary to popular belief, getting your scripts up and active is a pretty painless process and only takes a few minutes. There is a help section in your account that explains the process, but if you would prefer to talk to a person, give me a call at 720.548.6190.

Posted by James Omdahl at 04:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A small sidetrack from Tracking Week here – but I found this blog post and the comments that follow it too good not to share.

There is a great post and discussion going down over at the SEOmoz Blog that discusses purchased text link ads and there effect (if any) on your SEO rankings. Rand points out that the company Text Link Ads (TLA) openly displays the sites that they sell links on, and guesses that Google probably scans the inventory and discounts the links from all of TLA’s sites.

In the comments section there is a lot of information posted by Jarrod Hunt, who runs TLA’s main competitor Text Link Brokers (TLB). There are a lot of comments, but I would suggest reading them…there are some interesting nuggets in there.

Interestingly enough, it sounds like TLA may not be looking at themselves as a company that sells links for SEO, but instead they are a contextual marketing company – although their site might lead you to think differently. It would be nice if TLA would have told its advertisers about this change in methodology, even if it would have cost them some money.

Alright, go read the post here.

Posted by James Omdahl at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now that I have rambled on about tracking your work through your InsureMe affiliate account, I want to talk about another form of tracking that could be one of the most powerful tools in your PPC arsenal. The tool?

Google Conversion Tracking.

When we started doing pay-per-click marketing about three and a half years ago, we always found it kind of difficult to really understand what was and what wasn’t working. I mean, we could look at our Campaigns and see what are conversion rates were – and we could also see that for AdGroups if we set them up with a unique tracking number in the AdGroup. But beyond that, we were really flying blind. We really had no clue which keywords were really performing for us and which were not. Without really understanding what was successful and what was not on a granular basis, we also had a hard time figuring out best practices on Google.

I’m happy to say that that’s not the case anymore - and we can thank the Google Conversion Tracking tool for the change. Now when we sign into our Google AdWords account we can see the exact conversion rate for every single keyword we have (and there are thousands).

I can’t emphasize enough how important this tool can be to your business as an affiliate. I know that a good percentage of our affiliates are using the conversion counter tool right now, and we have heard that it has dramatically improved their AdWords accounts. I know it has really helped us out. Gone are the days of wondering which keywords are working and which aren’t – now we know and we can act accordingly.

When we first started sing conversion counter we waited a couple of weeks before really diving into the data, but when we did we were amazed what we found. For example, when we started to dig through our account, we were finding keywords that had cost us hundreds of dollars per conversion…which means we were basically tossing money out the window…and no one likes doing that. Except for some rappers I have seen on MTV – but I digress.

By using Google’s Conversion Tracking and spending a couple hours looking through the data, we saved our company thousands of dollars a month. Even better, we used the conversion data to locate our best keywords and creative – and with that knowledge we were able take those best practices and increase our revenue by thousands of dollars a month.

Pretty awesome, eh? Don’t you want to be awesome too? :)

Of course you do…and good news! InsureMe affiliates are a couple easy steps away from being totally awesome – because you are only a few clicks (and maybe a tiny bit of typing) away from having AdWords Conversion Tracking running on your InsureMe promoting AdWords account. All you need to do is grab the conversion tracking code from your AdWords account and enter it into the “Tracking” section in your InsureMe affiliate account. Within an hour or two your conversion tracking script will go live and your AdWords account will start displaying conversion data.

YAY! You get to be awesome!

If you need help with this stuff, send me an email or give me a call – I’m here to help. :)

Google Conversion Tracking is one of the most powerful tools you can have for your AdWords account. If you aren’t using it – START! Stop tossing away money and start TRACKING – if you do you might be able to afford to toss money out the window like one of those rappers on MTV.

Actually, you might just want to put it in a mutual fund …

Posted by James Omdahl at 04:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For the first Tracking Week post, I want to talk about tracking as it pertains to InsureMe affiliates. So I guess what I am saying is this stuff is going to mean a lot more to our affiliates than it will to non-affiliates.

Just as some basic information for people unfamiliar with InsureMe’s internal tracking system – InsureMe uses different links with “refby” numbers attached to them to track our affiliate’s leads. Every affiliate is able to create a virtually unlimited number of links if they prefer. Also, our affiliates can group together their links into “campaigns,” which are basically just a way of ordering links so they display grouped in our reporting.

Anyway, on to tracking…

One thing that always surprises me when I look at affiliate’s accounts is the vast differences in the way they set up their tracking links. We have some affiliates who use hundreds of links with cryptic names like “Glink5,” we have a lot of affiliates with a dozen or so links with different names like “Homepage Link” and then we have the affiliates who have one link for their entire account (some very large affiliates, in fact). Overall, it seem like the only thing that is consistent when it comes to people setting up links in their affiliate account is general inconsistency.

And that is just fine – whatever works for our affiliates works just fine for us. But with that in mind, I do want to tell you an effective way to utilize our internal tracking schema. We use a similar system for our internal tracking here at InsureMe, and through much trial and error we have found a system that helps us effectively keep tabs on our PPC and SEO efforts (although I am really going to focus on the PPC side in this post).

First off, let’s talk about links. I would say our main rule for creating links is use as many links as you need, but no more. A good example of going overboard in link creation is one of the Yahoo! PPC accounts I created a few years back. As an experiment, I created a different link for each of the hundreds of keywords in the account. I figured it would give me some really good keyword-by-keyword conversion data…and it did…kind of. In the end, there was just too much data to sift through, and the report was more annoying than useful.

So with that in mind, we tried out a lot of different ways of setting up our links internally to give us a good amount of information, but not so much that we are overloaded.

In the end we found, from a PPC standpoint, that when creating links for a PPC account, you might want to create links on an AdWords “campaign” level. That way you will be able to get the overall idea if something is working or not within a campaign, but you won’t be overloading yourself with too much data. With that said, if you are more of a data junky, I would suggest making use of the conversion counting tools provided by the search engines, which I will write about in the next couple of days. These tools will give you conversion data on a keyword-by-keyword basis, but not clog up your affiliate account.

Once you have created a link for all of your AdWords and Yahoo and MSN campaigns, you might find your reports looking a little busy, especially if you have multiple accounts with dozens of campaigns. Well guess what? We had the same problem as well…and that is why we created our InsureMe Campaign level functionality.

(Things might get a little confusing here so remember, there are campaigns within the PPC accounts, and then there are campaigns you create in your InsureMe account.)

I’m not going to take you through step-by-step directions of how to create and assign InsureMe campaigns in our system (feel free to call or email me if you need help), but I will emphasize that the campaign function is the best way to organize all of the links you have created.

The way we use the InsureMe campaign function is to group together the links from different PPC accounts. For example, let’s say I have two PPC accounts. One of them is an Adwords account for with I have created a dozen links in my InsureMe affiliate account. The other account has twenty links in my InsureMe account and those links are used in a Yahoo! Search Marketing account. From a reporting standpoint on the InsureMe site, having 32 links all showing on your main report will be a bit of a mess – and it takes a little manual work to separate the revenue generated from each account.

Using campaigns, you will be able to take your dozen AdWords links and group them together (for reporting purposes) into a campaign that you could name something like “Google AdWords Account.” After that, you could group your twenty Yahoo! links into one account that you could call “Y!SM Account.”

By doing so, your reports will start to display by campaign, not link, which makes it extremely easy to see the revenue from your two PPC accounts at a glance. But that doesn’t mean you are losing any link level functionality. If you want to see a link-by-link breakdown for your AdWords account, all you would need to do is drill-down on that InsureMe account campaign and you will be able to see all of your AdWords links in one place.

Pretty cool stuff!

(I am realizing that this post might be about as clear as mud at this point to some of you. :( Sorry about that…call or email me if you want to discuss this)

When it comes down to ir, I think the real rule here is to make sure you have some type of plan or schema or something that you use when you are creating your affiliate accounts. By putting a little thought into things ahead of time, you will be able to get the most out of the link and campaign based tracking that affiliate programs (like InsureMe’s) provide.

So that’s it for link and campaign tracking in an InsureMe affiliate account - tomorrow we will talk about the magical world of Google AdWords’ conversion tracking tools.

Posted by James Omdahl at 04:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I ran across an article from eMarketer titled Pay-Per-Click Not-So-Easy today and thought one of the stats was really interesting…in a scary way. In a survey of online marketers who have been using PPC for at least the last two years, 27% admitted that they did not know their cost of conversion for their PPC campaigns.

Pretty crazy, huh? To me that means they are setting up PPC accounts tossing money into the black hole we all know as the Intarweb.

Well guess what folks, tossing money into online marketing and NOT tracking your results is not so smart (read: dumb). Online marketing is the most trackable form of marketing on the planet…and if you ain’t tracking, you ain’t living up to your full potential.

And since being a successful affiliate isn’t easy (yes, I said it), you need to do whatever you can to be your best as an online marketer.

So with that in mind, I dub this week Tracking Week (YAY!). And this being the first ever theme week for the InsureMe Affiliate Blog, I hope not to disappoint (or forget to post).

My post this week will cover four topics:

• Using InsureMe’s tracking capabilities to better understand your PPC performance


• Tracking Google Adwords with the Google Conversion Counter


• Tracking Yahoo Search Marketing with the Yahoo Conversion Tracking tool


• Tracking your SEO efforts

Hopefully Tracking Week will rule, and help some of you get a better understanding of your online marketing efforts. Please leave a comment if there is a tracking related subject you would like me to cover.

Thanks! Happy Monday.

Posted by James Omdahl at 04:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Remember that new ads diagnostic tool I told you about in last week's post that lets you know whether or not an ad is running for a particular keyword you're bidding on in Google? Well, I've discovered that's not all that little tool will do. Check this out....

Improving our ads is something we can all stand to do from time to time. But before now, you had to click on your ad (and pay for that click) to get a bird's eye view of what it actually looked like on the search results page. But now, Google's making this part of PPC a bit easier (and cheaper) by letting you view your ad surrounded by those of your competitors—without creating an impression.

Being able to see your ad amongst others shown for a particular term lets you know where you are in relation to your competitors on that keyword (which helps in your bidding strategies). It also allows you to put yourself in consumers' shoes and see exactly what they see when conducting a search based on your term—without costing you a cent.

As far as I'm concerned, this is a huge development for paid search.

So how do your ads stack up? To take a look:

• hover your cursor over the magnifying glass next to a keyword on your ad group details page
• click on "What Do I Do?" in the pop-up box displayed
• choose the "Preview Search Results..." link for that term

What do you think? Are your ads distinctive enough to stand out? Are your competitors' ads better than yours? If you were Joe Consumer, which link would you pursue—and why? Use this free preview screen to find out—and make your ads the best they can be!

Posted by Penny Hagerman at 09:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Since it is Thanksgiving tomorrow, a couple of us walked around the office and asked InsureMe employees what they are thankful for. The video below is the end result. Hopefully it will bring you some Turkey Day cheer.

I also want to add that we are thankful for our fantastic affiliate partners and all the wonderful things we accomplished with them in 2006. You might have noticed that a lot of people mentioned that they were happy about their jobs at InsureMe (we actually had to tell people to stop saying they were thankful for InsureMe). Please know that if you are an InsureMe affiliate partner, your hard work is a big part of what keeps our business going, and we are all thankful for that!

Happy Thanksgiving!

[Note: Sorry about the cheese-ball background music in advance. Royalty free music has its limitations!]

Posted by James Omdahl at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With the end of the year coming, it has been a bit slow in the affiliate world. Aside from a kinda-sorta change in Google’s organic rankings (some reports say Google’s results are looking almost as bad as MSN’s in certain verticals *gasp*), this week has been, well, boring.

Never fear fair affiliators, the lull in excitement brings out the best in affiliate and online marketing bloggers…maybe not me, but other bloggers.

Want proof? Check out Randfish’s Cliches in the SEO World over at SEOmoz. A couple of my favorites are:

MSN/Yahoo!/Google/Ask Sucks

They usually "suck" because they're not sending you traffic and then, when you finally get things right on your site, they suddenly "rule."

And…

I've Been Thinking of Going White Hat

One of your big sites got banned and suddenly you're thinking that hard work and unique content and hours of labor are more attractive than 3 hours at the computer every night on your $1K-per-day churn and burns... Why am I skeptical?

The full list is pretty funny, especially if you ever attended a search marketing conference, where you’ll hear at least two of these clichés in every session you attend.

Check out the full post here, and add a comment to the list if you can think of any more.

Posted by James Omdahl at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

During all the hubbub last week about Google's quality score changes, I discovered a tool within that engine that's really helpful for keeping tabs on how well your keywords and their ads are working. It's something relatively new called the "Ads Diagnostic Tool," and you can find it next to the status column on your ad group pages within your campaigns.

Just hover your cursor over the magnifying glass next to each of your key terms, and a pop-up window will load that actually gives you quite a bit of information, including:

• whether or not an ad is showing for that
  term
• whether or not it's ranking high enough to be displayed on the first search-results page
• the settings you've selected for that key term, including display language and target location

If a term isn't working—or you see you've made a mistake in your settings—this tool makes it easy to see so all in one place, and then quickly make changes by ad group.

If your ads aren't showing on the first page of search results, you can click on an "Ad Diagnostic Tool" link in that same pop-up window. This will help you find out why your ads aren't showing and give you possible solutions. (You can check terms either by ad or by the URL of the search terms page where you believe it should be displayed, whichever you'd like.)

Knowing the status of a key term is important; but being able to see how well that term is working (or not!) is even more important. The ads diagnostic tool gives you all that information in one quick glance.

So...how well are your terms and ads working? Check out the ads diagnostic tool and find out!

Posted by Penny Hagerman at 09:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We just got our new InsureMe mascot costume, and we want to show it off. Actually, I say we just got it, but we had one for quite a while now, except the head got crushed in shipping. So we got the replacement head, and all is good.

Below is the full length dance scene from today’s InsureMe Insurance Blog Wrap-Up. Thanks to our favorite accountant Eric (aka the Ugandan Twista) for showing us how he gets down in the I-Guy.

InsureMe…alright.

[Update: This is also a little victory dance since InsureMe was just recognized by the Denver Business Journal as the second best medium-sized company to work for in Denver!]

Posted by James Omdahl at 04:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[UPDATE: If you are a little lost on the whole Quality Score idea, or if you just want to read some great info on the subject, I highly recommend Evolution of the Quality Score parts 1 and 2 by Jay Weintraub. Also, for those more technically inclined, ShoeMoney talks about masking your links…which could save you for the time being.]

Thanks to our super best friends over at the Inside AdWords blog we now have a teeny tiny bit more insight into the recent AdWords Quality Score changes.

Here are the three questions and my summarized answer (slightly rephrased to capture my morning sarcasm):

Did the AdWords team know they were stealing Christmas by rolling out the Quality Score changes right before the holiday season?

Short answer: Yes, but that’s how they roll.

Since click-through-rates and conversion on my website are really good indicators of consumer satisfaction with content, will you be including my Google Conversion Counter or Google Analytics data in your calculation of Quality Score?

Short answer: Nah, even though good click through and conversions usually mean someone found what they are looking for*, we would rather use a complex algorithm that only looks at content. We do this because it will impress our fellow Stanford alumni and make us look cool down in the Google cafeteria.

Will using Website Optimizer, Google’s tool that helps people improve the quality of advertiser’s landing pages, help my landing page’s Quality Score?

Short answer: No, doing something like that would make our Quality Score calculation less mysterious and vague, and then advertisers would have nothing to freak out about over the holiday season…and where’s the fun in that.

Wow, I am pretty sarcastic this morning. Feel free to check out the actual questions and answers on the Inside AdWords blog.

Seriously though, I know Google has a reason for what they do and how they do it, and I respect them for focusing on the searcher’s experience. Still, knowing they have reasons for what they do doesn’t make it hurt and less when you get burned.

For an added bonus, I want to point you to a post from Steve Bryant called Top 5 Google Weaknesses. And no, kryptonite is not one of them. (Thanks to Big Pete S. for the link!)

* before someone points it out, I know that if conversion data was used for quality score it would be very easy to game the system…but I am sure the mega-brains at Google could figure out how to get around the problem.

Posted by James Omdahl at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

I am still looking around for opinions on the new changes to Quality Score on AdWords (thanks to those who have left comments on yesterday’s post). I actually ran into a different theory that is a whole lot less scary than the “Google-targeting-affiliates” theory.

You can check the thread over at the Search Engine Watch forums, but to summarize, it basically says that Google is not really targeting affiliates as much as it is targeting AdSense arbitrage sites (websites that bit on keywords on Google, then display Google AdSense ads on their site in hopes that they can make more from their AdSense clicks than they can spend on their AdWords ads).

It would be hard to argue that AdSense arbitrage sites are “high quality results” (but if anyone wants to try, please leave a comment), so I am all for Google cleaning up the arbitrage problem. Of course, if all Google was targeting were sites that display AdSense (and Y!PN ads), they should be able to pretty easily spot the code with the AdWords bot and target only arbitrage affiliates.

But it seems like Google is going further and looking for pages that just have low quality content…which might be why non-AdSense affiliates are feeling some pain at this point. If that is the case, it makes me think the changes at Google might be aimed at more than just AdSense sites…but I’m not really sure.

So what do you think? Leave a comment and weigh in.

Posted by James Omdahl at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

I looked around a bit to see if I could find a large amount of “oh my God - Google killed my site” type-chat and I didn’t see anything too widespread at this point. It does seem that some affiliates are feeling the effects, but from what I can tell, those affiliates have sites that aren’t what Google might consider “content-rich.”

Scott Jangro posted his theory about the changes — surmising that “thin” landing pages would be the real victim of the recent PPC housecleaning at Google. He also thinks that people using “thin” landing pages will be forced to continuously rebuild new sites as soon as Google zaps their current site.

This is an interesting theory, and I hope it is correct. But there is also another theory…it is what I like to call the “wake-me-up-in-a-cold-sweat” theory. Are you ready for it? (You might want to make sure your little affiliates are out of the room before you click).

This theory goes something like this…Google’s AdWords bot is out there hunting for links that look like affiliate links on AdWords landing pages. If affiliate links are found, Google dramatically decreases the site’s Quality Score and raise its minimum bid to an amount that is too high for an affiliate to pay. By doing so Google, in effect, takes the affiliate site (and hundreds of other affiliate sites) out of the AdWords market completely. What is left are websites that have what Google considers to be a non-affiliate business model.

Pretty scary, huh?

But is this just a scary theory with no merit or do you think Google is on a crusade to remove affiliate pages from their AdWords results?

Has anyone seen or heard anything they would like to share?

We really want to know the recent changes are affecting you as an affiliate. If you could, please leave us a comment on this post– a change like this could dramatically affect your business and ours, and we want to know what affiliates are thinking. You don’t have to use your real name or email or URL – we just want to hear your opinion on this one.

Thanks in advance for your input.

Posted by James Omdahl at 04:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

In an effort to improve user experience, Google has begun making changes related to how AdWords evaluates landing page quality. Starting this past week, it has begun incorporating landing page quality into advertisers’ quality scores on contextually-targeted ads (this is already done on search ads), and improving its algorithm for evaluating landing page quality.

For sites with poor quality content, this will affect bids, ads and keywords.

But let's back up just a bit. In case you were wondering...

What are quality scores?

According to Google, the “quality score” is the basis for measuring the quality and relevance of ads and determining minimum CPC bids for both Google and the search network.

How are they determined?

Using click-through-rates, as well as the relevance of ad text, keywords, and landing pages.

How will this affect your campaigns? If providing quality information on your landing pages is something you work hard at, it probably won't. In fact, as with its last update in July, Google says these changes will affect only a very small portion of advertisers; the vast majority won’t be affected at all (*sigh).

On the other hand, the company says advertisers who are providing a poor experience on their sites could:

1. Notice a decrease in content traffic
2. Begin paying more for minimum bids, and
3. See their ads and keywords become inactive for search

But why is Google doing this? Is it just trying to make things difficult?

In its own words:

“We believe high quality content and ads attract more clicks, encourage user trust, and result in better long-term performance.”

As I always say, content is king. Apparently, Google agrees.

If you notice sudden changes in your Google PPC efforts, this update may be why. So keep a close eye on things and give us a shout if we can help smooth the transition. We're all in this PPC thing together. :)

Posted by Penny Hagerman at 09:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s been a while since a tracked down a new tool for you fine affiliates, so I decided to take a look around this morning. After a little searching I found a really cool tool that was made by Aaron Wall, aka SEO Book, aka OG Playa SEO (ok, I made that last one up).

The tool is called the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion tool, but should be called SEOBook’s Super Ninja Tool of Keyword Destiny (Aaron – I will let you use that name at no charge). Calling this tool simply a keyword suggestion tool would be giving it too little credit – it is more like a keyword Swiss Army knife.

All you do is type in a keyword and you get information from:

• Yahoo! Search Marketing


• Google


• WordTracker


• Keyword Discovery


• Regional Search Volume Estimates (Google Labs)


• Bid Prices (Yahoo!)

But hey, why are you reading about this tool, you should be using it! Thanks to the kindness of OG Playa…ah…Aaron, anyone is able to add the tool to their site. So here it is on ours!

Keyword Suggestions for:



USA UK Australia Austria Denmark Finland France Germany Italy Netherlands Norway Scotland Spain Sweden Switzerland

By Aaron Wall's SEO Book

Type in a keyword and watch the magic happen – and if you dig what you see, make sure to thank Aaron over at SEO Book.

Posted by James Omdahl at 08:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)