OK, so I had never heard of the AdWords Change History Tool until today. Yeah, laugh if you want - but I bet there are a number of you out there that have never heard of it either, so this post is for you.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Change History Tool, it is a feature in AdWords that allows you to look back on the account changes you’ve made in since 2006. In doing so, the tool helps you remember what changes you made that could have caused a change in your accounts performance.
To access the tool, just login to your AdWords account and click on ‘Tools” under the “Campaign Management” tab. Once you have done this, click on “My Change History” and enter a date range.
The way I see it, this is an invaluable tool these days, especially for people who are managing large AdWords accounts that require constant tweaking to try to increase ad ranking and decrease cost-per-click. By utilizing something like the Change History Tool, a PPCer will be able to better interpret the effects of account changes on their quality score/ranking/etc.
Also exciting (and the way I learned about this tool), PPC Hero announced that Google will be adding some graphing features that will give advertisers a more graphical look at how the changes effect their accounts.
If you’ve got an AdWords account or 20, make sure you start taking advantage of the Change History Tool…it could help you answer some of the magical mysteries of AdWords.
PPC Master, John Hasson found a way to increase his Google AdWords content network conversion rate by 35%, and decrease his cost for conversion by 46%..
How?
Dayparting.
For those of you not familiar, dayparting, or ad scheduling as Google calls it, is the process of setting different bids for your PPC keywords depending on the time of day the search is being conducted.
So for example, if you knew you got your highest conversion rate from 5 PM to 7 PM, but extremely low conversion from 11 PM to 8 AM, you could set your cost-per-click to a higher or lower number to make sure you get the higher converting traffic and you get less of the lower converting traffic.
The funny thing is, I don’t know if there are really a whole lot of people who bother to use dayparting features when they are available. To many people it seems like setting everything up might be a bit too complex and might not be worth the time.
But seriously - if you could increase your conversions by 35%, and your cost-per-conversion by 46%., wouldn’t you?
Check out John’s blog post to see how he determined what times to run various bids, and how he made dayparting boost the effectiveness of his AdWords content campaign.
One of our PPC peeps, Brittany, found a very interesting article for all you PPC folks on Search Engine Journal today. The article, Google Leaks Quality Score Variable (Pscore, mCPC and thresh) in Search Results, show some screen shots of what one can only assume to be quality score data appearing in the search results.
The data is broken into 3 different variables, which are:
Pscore - no one is totally sure what this is, but some believe it is a numerical value that represents the statistical significance of the match to the search term
mCPC - thought to be maximum cost per click
thresh - didn’t see any speculation on this variable
If this is accurate information, it’s terribly interesting to me that these three numbers would show up in the search results. The example shown in the SEJ article is for the term “warwick honda dealer” and shows that out of the two AdWords results, the corporate Honda website is likely bidding much higher than a non-official Honda site. The interesting thing is that the non-official site has a higher Pscore, which could mean it is considered more relevant that the corporate Honda site.
Of course, with anything like this, I’m left with more questions than answers. Namely, are these the only three scores that are used to determine placement? Also, why would something like this end up in the visible search results? Is it something that is normally visible to Google employees only? Finally, what the heck is “thresh”?!
Let me know your thoughts on the leak…and if you figure out what a thresh is.
Let’s face it. Google is in a tough position when it comes to user privacy. Google wants to give users the best possible experience and the most relevant search results and ads, but since everyone is different, they need personal user data to give the best results. However, most users don’t want Google to keep track of their online activities.
So what to do?
Well, if a Google patent application uncovered by Bill Slawski is any indication, Google has decided to use a lot of information to improve their ad serving through AdSense. And by a lot, I am talking everything from individual click activity, to your interest in certain topics, to mouse hover activity in certain regions of a webpage, and even your facial expressions.
When you pull the privacy element out of the mix, the solution would be fantastic for users and advertisers both. Users would get AdSense ads they may actually be interested in. Advertisers would get more targeted users, meaning higher click-to-conversions, and a better ROI on content matching through AdWords.
But then there is privacy. The patent application lists some potential concepts of learning user interest and intention to creepy new levels - specifically “user eye direction relative to the document” and “user facial expressions.” Not sure how they plan to get that info outside of a controlled environment, or if it’s just in there to future-proof the patent. Either way, “watching” how the average user surfs the Internet and reacts to it outside of the browser window just seems to be a bit too intrusive to me…even more intrusive of tracking click and visited site activity.
Like the Google’s ideas or not, reading Bill’s analysis of Google patents is always interesting and usually gives some insight into the way Google views the world and its role in it. Head over to the post, have a read, and let me know what you think. Does the patent seem as creepy to you as it does to me, or does it seem like business as usual for the GOOG?
This week is keyword research week on the PPC Hero blog, so it’s needless to say that I’m looking forward to each new posts they do. Today’s PPC Hero post got me really excited since it covers one of my favorite things - free SEO/SEM tools.
The list cover 4 different keyword tools that can help you expand your keyword list, research keyword volume and trends, and even identify a general cost-per-click for different keywords. All important things to understand before you start a PPC or SEO effort for a particular product or service.
Out of all of the tools I think the one I like most is Spyfu.com. Specifically, I really like the data they give on the CPC range for keywords - something I’ve been missing since Yahoo! went all “black box” with their Panama platform.
I ran across a post on the PPC Hero blog today that I thought I would share with you. The post, Un-Clutter & Optimize Your Account with Better Organization does a good job of laying out some of the basic guidelines to organizing a PPC account. While the post is a few months old, I don’t feel like any of the info is outdated.
The post does a good job of explaining what seems to be one of the more important aspects of AdWords success these days, account organization. It’s funny to me that account organization has become so important - and it really shows that there is, in fact, a fairly complex ranking algorithm running behind the scenes at AdWords.
I mean, I remember setting up InsureMe’s first PPC account and basically just tossing in keywords in whatever way made sense to me and my reporting needs at the time. Now we’ve got the fear of Google not liking the way our accounts are structured to worry about - and an accounts success or failure can depend upon the number and type of words you are putting in an AdGroup.
So if you are looking for some real world advice about PPC account structure, check out Amber’s PPC Hero article here.
BONUS: Aaron Wall recently gave a candid interview about the present and future of SEO to Marketmou. It’s certainly worth a read if you’ve got a few minutes.
One of our affiliates was checking out the Google results last week and was surprised to see that Google was obviously in the process of testing out some new versions of the results page.
Here’s a screen grab, you can click it for a bigger view:
As you can see there are a number of things going on this Google results page, including:
AdWords ads showing up with a bright yellow background on the top and the right
A video results section is showing up under the AdSense ads on the right sidebar
A news results section is showing up under the video results on the right sidebar
A big “searches related to” section running at the bottom of the page
The affiliate also reported that he saw other iterations of these results showing up, including one where the video results section was running on top of the AdWords sidebar on the right side of the page.
Very interesting stuff. But why would Google do this?
I was having lunch with one of our PPC affiliates this week and the topic of privacy policy came up. Specifically, the affiliate said that even if he’s running traffic through AdWords to a thin site “one page site”, the site will still have more than one page - and one of the main reasons is because the site will have a privacy policy page.
Coincidentally, Search Engine Land’s Bill Slawski posted an article that talks about the importance of a privacy policy when you are doing search engine marketing. Like any of Bill’s articles, this one is well thought out and researched and points to three reasons you’d want to make sure you include a privacy policy on your site (so make sure you read the full article here). They are:
Privacy policies give your site credibility and reassures your users
Whether your site has a privacy policy or not has an influence on your PPC Quality Score with Google
Some people think that having a machine readable privacy policy will affect everything for search rankings to the filtration of sites by toolbars and other tools
All this privacy policy talk made me realize that a lot of new affiliate marketers probably don’t even think to add a privacy policy to their affiliate site - which could be hurting their chances of success. If you fall into that boat, you should make it a goal to get a privacy policy added to your site(s) by the beginning of next week.
Oh yeah, one other thing, don’t just go and steal someone’s privacy policy off their site…that’s bad form. Instead use one of the helpful online tools out there like this privacy policy generator.
One of our tech guys pointed out this article from The Register that talks about a new technology Google is looking to push out called “automatic matching.” In essence of the article is that automatic matching will deliver your AdWords ads to terms that you haven’t bid on, but Google deems relevant, in an attempt to use up your daily click budget.
The example in the article would be that the shoe company Adidas might start having their ads show up on terms like slippers, not because they bid on them, but because they are similar to words like shoes and sandals.
It sounds like the rollout of automatic matching will be in beta, and available to bigger advertisers only at first. But if this goes AdWords-wide, I think it might be a major concern for affiliates…especially for people who have set their daily budgets artificially high to ensure their ads are served 100% of the time.
I can see the reason why Google would do this (money) but I’m hoping they are extra careful when it comes to serving the ads, and that they provide accurate tools to show you what terms you’re showing up on.
Read the article and share your thoughts. Do you think this will be a good thing for anyone but Google?
Right now, maybe nothing…but very soon, maybe a lot.
Barry Schwartz of SEL and SERran across some chatter that Google AdWords is going to start using page load time as a factor for a landing page’s quality score.
The speculation started on the WebmasterWorld forums, but has spread to other outlets as people found this section of the About AdWords page:
Beginning in February 2008, youll be able to see a grade for your websites load time in your AdWords account. Load time refers to the amount of time it takes for a user to arrive at your functional landing page after clicking your ad.
Several weeks after your load time grade becomes visible, it will begin to impact your landing page quality and, therefore, your Quality Score. We recommend working to improve your load time during this interim if its received a low score.
Now I know that watching costs is something that all affiliates try to do, but this change solidifies that affiliates should make sure their sites are hosted with a reliable, speedy hosting company. (Of course, you should be doing this for conversion and user experience reasons anyway).
I know that in my daily perusal of sites I run across a good number of affiliate sites that take way too long to load, especially if they are sites that are being hosted on a third party’s domain. So if that describes you, it might be time to start looking for a new host.
Luckily, there are a number of decent hosts out there that can get you quick load times without busting your budget. Personally I like Site5 and our developers tend to favor Westhost…but if I were you I’d shop around and find someplace that works for other affiliates.
If you have a personal hosting favorite, let us know in the comments…but don’t leave an affiliate link, ok?
PPC guru and affiliate marketer John Hasson has updated his list of PPC companies that work. If youre looking for some new places to spend your PPC dollars, you might want to explore some of the companies on his list.
With that said, Id remind you that John does work in multiple verticals, and the smaller engines he lists could work for some verticals and not others…I know our companys experience differs from Johns.
Also, never forget Vinny Linghams principal of Return On Effort (ROE) - make sure you are spending your time in the places where you can get the biggest return…and in the PPC world, that often means the bigger search engines.
Thanks for updating the list John - keep up the great work!
Big news from Google, starting yesterday Google started a very limited test of video ad units on their search engine results pages (SERPs). In doing so, Google is taking a step forward (for better or worse) in giving advertisers more options of how to advertise through Google search.
Here’s a quick list of details on the video ad test:
The test will be very limited to begin, and so far no one has reported seeing any of the video ad units
To start, the videos will not be visible on the search page, but there will be a plus sign symbol attached to the ad that you can click on to open the video
In the future Google may consider adding a thumbnail photo of the ad instead of the plus box
Advertisers will be charged when someone views the video, or if the video is not viewed, when someone clicks on the text of the ad.
Advertisers will only billed once if clicks occur on the video and the text ad
Google feels now is the right time to try out the video ads in the SERPs since the currently are showing video results through Universal Search
Google’s thinks that the video ad units could be used for branding as well as click throughs to websites
Google will continue to focus on ad relevance - so you can rest easy if you think major advertisers will run “branding” ads on unrelated keywords
I for one am very interested to see where this all leads. From an affiliate marketing standpoint, I think it is time to start figuring out how you could leverage video ads for your promotions now. That way, when this program opens up to everyone, you can be one of the first in your vertical with a video ad.
On thing that worries me is to think that a year or two down the line your Google click-through rate might be dramatically affected by the quality of the videos you are able to produce. Kind of makes we wonder if the “little guys” are going to be able to compete with major players who have ad agencies and are already producing video advertisements.
Check out Danny Sullivan’s take along with some mock-up shots at Search Engine Land.
This may or may not matter to you depending on the level of craftiness you use on your AdWords accounts, but if you have been using different display and destination URLs on your ads, you’re going to have to rethink your strategy.
According to Barry Schwartz (hi Barry!), Google has decided to even the playing field for advertisers by tightening the destination and display URLs policies for AdWords advertisement. The good news is that this mainly has to do with redirecting and sending traffic to other sites, and not (as far as I understand) using display URLs that don’t perfectly match the destination URL.
On the other hand, if we wanted to use a different site’s URL as the display, like www.InsureMeBlog.com, but we sent the click to a page on www.InsureMeBlog.com that redirects to www.InsureMe.com, that would not be acceptable. Also, we couldn’t send traffic to another URL if it had identical content to www.InsureMe.com, and we can’t promote InsureMe in the ad and then send traffic to a URL different from www.InsureMe.com.
I have a feeling this may be a reaction to some of the wild AdWords tactics that were pointed out on the Shoemoney blog recently - and it is unclear whether there will be algorithmic or manual enforcement of this policy.
From what I understand the changes will take place in August of this year, so if you’ve been getting creative with your display and destination URLs, it might be time to start coming up with a new plan.
One of the questions I get more often than not from new affiliates is “how do they do it?” How is it that InsureMe has affiliates who are pulling in tens of thousand, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars each month? Is it PPC? SEO? Something else?
My honest answer? I’m not totally sure.
Yes, our top affiliates use both PPC and SEO. But beyond the generalized tactics of creating good content, great ads, and knowing how to optimize for natural and paid search, there is a little extra something that all of our top affiliates use to make it to the top of our affiliate rankings.
Creativity.
But what is creativity when it comes to PPC? I mean, isn’t it all about good bids, high quality score and good click-through? Not always. Top affiliates make it a point to think WAY outside the box when it comes to PPC.
The Shoemoney Blog has recently pointed out two of these “outside the box” tactics. While these examples might be a little borderline, they are a good example of creative thinking in competitive PPC verticals. Check them out:
Again, there are just examples of creative AdWords strategies. I don’t think copying them will get you very far, since there’s a good chance someone is correcting these loopholes as we speak, but I do thing they show the kind of thinking that is implemented by top affiliates.
So next time you are strategizing about your AdWords accounts, try to think outside of the box. Actually, strike that, burn the box altogether.
The “one stop shop.” Based on research done by Phrases.org.uk, the term originated sometime in the 1920s or 1930s, with the oldest known usage coming from an auto shop advert in The Lincoln Star newspaper.
The concept of a one stop shop, a place where you can get all sorts of products and services in one place, has worked well for the mega retailers of the world like Wal-Mart, Tesco, and Target. We all know that the combination of a super retailer’s massive buying power, mixed with location based convenience creates a powerful draw on offline consumers looking to get what they need as quickly and cheaply as possible.
But as small scale marketers, we need to be careful when we assume that what works best for the biggest and brightest in the offline world is the right way to do things in the online world.
Here’s the thing, if you are an affiliate marketer, and you are aiming to be successful and build a business, the one stop shop concept is of no use to you. To begin with, half of the draw of an offline one stop shop is the ability to get a lot of different purchases made the same physical location. But in the virtual world, physical location really isn’t a concern since every product or service is just a Google search away.
But even taking the physical location aspect of the one stop shop strategy out of the mix, some affiliate would still argue that it is very convenient to get all of your online shopping done in one place. Naturally, whey would offer up Amazon or eBay as an example of one stop shop success. What they are forgetting is that Amazon didn’t start as a one stop shop, it started as an online book store. And eBay, a place to buy and sell Pez dispensers. You see, these companies grew and matured into a one stop shop of sorts, but they started and originally succeeded because they weren’t trying to be everything to everyone right out of the gate.
I’ve written a bit in the past about how affiliates who are not terribly tech savvy should consider using a content management system to build their affiliate websites. I’ve also suggested that affiliates consider using the WordPress blogging platform to get their sites up and running. Today, I cam across a free e-book that tells you how to do just that.
The book is called How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with WordPress and was written by Caroline Middlebrook. The e-book does a fantastic job of outlining how take a domain, get it hosted, and how to install and configure WordPress to build a site that is capable of driving traffic to your AdSense or affiliate links.
While the e-book is a little AdSense heavy, it does a really good job pointing out the various things you will need to do to tweak a WordPress site to turn it into a viable ecommerce site.
Last week I pointed you to 7 SEO tactics you might want to reconsider heading into the New Year - today I found a post that points out 6 questions that you should ask yourself about your pay-per-click campaigns at the start of each year.
The post is really a template for giving your PPC accounts an annual audit, which can be very important if you’re running multiple or complex PPC campaigns.
The six big questions are:
Have your goals changed?
Are you using the correct keywords?
Do your ads point to existing landing pages?
Does your ad copy change over time?
Do you still have old tests running?
What do you want to learn about PPC this year?
By asking yourself these questions and taking action at least once a year you’ll end up with more organized, efficient and optimized pay-per-click accounts. Read the entire post called New Year’s Resolutions for Your PPC Campaigns at Search Engine Land.
It’s a new year, and if you’re one of the few affiliates out there who are still trying to make money online without having a website of your own, it’s time to get off your backside and build something.
And no, I don’t mean setting up a spam blog on Blogger.
Building a professional website will not only give you a lot more control over your business, but lets you control your online destiny as the future seems to be increasingly bleak for spammy hosted pages and “thin” doorway page websites.
The good news is that getting a professional site put together is really not all that hard, and in most cases it can be done in a couple of hours (this doesn’t really include time for creating content for the site, which should be your next priority). In a world where having an online presence is no longer optional; a whole industry of easy and inexpensive (if not free) website creation platforms has cropped up.
One good example is Weebly - a site that lets you create and download entire websites for the low, low price of free. Weebly gives you a number of attractive templates to choose from, the ability to add all sorts of page elements, and even options to add Google maps, videos and blogs to your site. The great thing is that you don’t have to know HTML to use Weebly - but if you do you can do some customization to your site as well.
Once you have your site built, Weebly will either host your site for free or will let you download everything you created into a .zip file so you can upload it to your server (if you are doing PPC or SEO, make sure you host the site yourself, ok?). It’s easy as that!
If you are still one of those affiliates who relies on framing, redirects or just plain old direct linking to merchants, make a resolution to get a site of your own up by then end of January. It’s not hard to do and it will help you future-proof your business.
[Big thanks to Web Worker Daily for pointing out Weebly. Also check out their other two recommendations SiteKreator and SynthaSite. And if you are looking for more of a content management system, make sure you read my posts about WordPress and Web Site Baker.]
Julie Mason put together a great article that outlines the importance of using landing pages for the online marketing of both products and services. Since I know affiliates tend to have little time for reading this time of year, I figured the article may be more appealing and easy to scan as a list, so I took the liberty of converting it.
Here they are, Julie Mason’s 9 tips for better converting landing pages:
Every time you create a landing page, consider its purpose
Every landing page should give your prospect a reason to convert, enable them to do so, and resolve any concerns a prospect may have
Landing pages should provide relevant, focused, and detailed information above the fold (no need to scroll to see it)
Always consider who your landing page’s audience is - create multiple pages for different demographics if necessary
Include a prominent call to action on every page
Design is important - make sure look and feel is consistent across all marketing channels
Promote trust by building professional looking sites
Remember that your headline and page title are two of the most important elements of a landing page
Never be satisfied - always be testing new and improved versions of your landing page’s headline, call to action, and design
To read Julie’s full article which includes some interesting research findings, go here.
In the video below, Google spam Czar Matt Cutts give a breakdown of what is included in the Google search results page, and how Google chooses what to display there. While some of this video might be old news to most of you, there are some helpful tidbits that helped clarify some things for me. Here’s the video:
Something interesting from the video was that Matt mentioned that Google knows that the word “car” and the word “automobile” are the same thing. While this isn’t too hard to fathom, it is something interesting to ponder this concept when doing PPC and SEO for terms like “car insurance.”
Also, Matt mentions the Google Experimental page in the video, which I never knew about. If you want to see some of the search concepts that Google is working on, check it out.
One thing that super affiliates do well is optimizing. When it comes to PPC, super affiliates spend a lot of time collecting and analyzing data that might seem mundane to most people, but to them it is the key to maximizing profit.
One metric that PPC marketers can use to optimize their accounts is time of week and time of day. Both Google AdWords and MSN AdCenter provide tools to modify bids based on time of day and week, but I don’t think a whole lot of people use them since it takes a lot to figure out when to increase and decrease your bids.
Search Engine Land’s Brad Geddes sheds some light on time based bid modification in his post Optimizing Bids By Day & Time Can Dramatically Increase Your ROI. If you’re willing to invest the time to do the research, this might be a new optimization avenue for you to explore.
Check out the article to see if day-part optimization is right for you.
We’ve all heard the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, but if you’ve ever tried to buy stock photos to use on an affiliate site, you might want to revise that saying to “a picture is worth a thousand bucks.” 99 times out of 100, affiliates don’t have a thousand bucks to spend on a single image, so what to do?
Regardless of what an image-free Craigslist has managed to do, images are extremely important to most websites. Use the wrong images, you are going to drive away visitors in seconds, use the right images and you’ll see the conversion numbers you’ve been dreaming about.
Video ads. Just typing it leaves me with a feeling of opportunity and skepticism all at once. If you read the research, experts link that online video advertising will be the next big ad platform on the Web - and I bet they’re right. But I also bet that current video ad channels are ineffective in driving direct conversions and are more a branding tool. Not an ideal thing for your average affiliate marketer.
Even with my trepidation in this area, I think forward looking marketers need to start experimenting with this channel sooner rather than later. But getting started means doing something that may be a little outside of most online marketer’s comfort zone - creating a video advertisement.
Even though InsureMe has produced a number of videos in the past, the idea of creating a short video advertisement kind of freaks me out. I mean, what should an ad say? Should we use live action or screen grabs? Should we have music? If so, where can we find something that will sound right but doesn’t have royalties? Is our ad going to look so low-budget that it will scare people off?
Luckily, there are companies sprouting up that are addressing the video creation dilemma. One company of this type that caught my eye today was AdItAll. AdItAll allows you to put together videos using pre-made video clips, audio clips and text effects. The end result is a video ad you have the rights to use for $80.00 to around $400, depending on which elements you use. Here’s their video about how AdItAll works.
Ever since content match became an option on Google AdWords (you used to not be able to opt out), many advertisers have treated this piece of the AdWords Empire with a great deal of skepticism. Who can blame them? Most of the AdWords content traffic we get is of much lower quality than search traffic, as our conversion numbers support.
Google, in there never ending quest to make as much money as possible help advertisers deliver relevant ads to the users of various web properties, is constantly trying to improve the click-through-rate of contextual advertising (since higher CTR = More $). Even with a fleet of certified Stanford geniuses on the case, Google has yet to up this conversion to a point that is worth much attention for many online marketers, and more importantly to you, affiliate marketers.
After years of using engineering brainpower to try to get AdWords’ content match feature utilized by more advertisers, it seems like Google might have switched tactics to using marketing brainpower instead. In their most recent Inside AdWords post called Google Content Network Tips: Part 1, Google uses a lot of space talking about using contextual advertising to:
“raise awareness for your business and create demand among your potential customers that can be captured later by your search campaigns.”
Today’s topic has to do with one of the mistakes that a lot of newer affiliates make, and that’s buying the wrong kind of online traffic. All web traffic is not created equal, meaning varied conversion rates, so knowing what you’re buying is essential.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a terribly excited but very green affiliate tell me how they just paid someone $100 to send 10,000 hits to their site. Their logic is usually that if InsureMe’s average affiliate converts traffic in the 15 - 20% range, and on average they earn $8.00 a lead, if they send us 10,000 clicks, they’ll be sipping frozen drinks on the beach by the end of the month. In reality, those 10,000 clicks will most likely net them nothing, because traffic that cheap is usually untargeted traffic, and untargeted traffic usually does not have the right intent (which means they don’t convert).
Princeton’s WordNet Search defines intent as “an anticipated outcome that is intended or that guides your planned actions.” Successful online marketing, especially in verticals like insurance, is all about intent. Search marketing (SEO and PPC) are amazing marketing channels because relevant ads are shown to consumers and those ads align with the consumers anticipated outcome, meaning intent (like buying auto insurance). This differs from more traditional offline and online advertising since it does not interrupt some other action or intent (for example - I want to watch this TV show but they keep interrupting it with commercials).
I was doing some, ahem, research on YouTube and ran across the first YouTube overlay advertisement that I’ve seen. From the picture below you can see that the advertisement ran near the start of the video (15 seconds in), and was and ad for something YouTube and HP are doing together.
I thought it was interesting that an orangey-yellow marker appears on the progress bar at the point where the ad started. I guess that is in case you want to get back to the ad? I didn’t click on the ad, but from what I understand doing so would have overlayed a video player on top of the window playing the original video - (see an example in the SEL post). The really cool thing is that the advertiser is only charged if there is a click on the overlay ad.
Overall, I’d say that if you are going to try to make some money on videos without being annoying about it, this is the best way to do it, so kudos to Google. I know if YouTube suddenly had a bunch of pre-roll ads running before videos, I’d be looking for a new place to do my…um, researching.
The big question for me is - when will search marketers be able to start placing these ads on a broad scale, and will there be help with the creation of the flash ads?
Get the low down on YouTube overlay ads from Search Engine Land in this article.
And if you haven’t seen it yet (and you are a Star Wars fan), you might want to check out some episodes of Chad Vader…it’s classic stuff.
Have you ever had a Google AdWords account that seems to be cursed? You know, one of those accounts that seem to land you on the third page of the search results no matter what you bid? Well, the curse might have a lot to do with account’s AdWords history, and a recent blog post from UberAffiliate seems to confirm that having a poor account history with AdWords can decrease your chances of success.
Here’s the set-up. UberAffiliate took two accounts, one was an old account with a lot of rookie mistakes in its past. The second account was fairly new, and had a stellar account history since it was set up with a good knowledge of the ins and outs of AdWords. He then added identical campaigns in both accounts and watched what happened.
The results seemed to be fairly conclusive - using the same bids, the old account with poor history ended up showing ads somewhere on the second or third page of the results with high minimum bids, the newer account with good history showed ads on the top of the first page with very low minimum bids. Pretty cool, eh?
If you are reading this, there is a pretty good chance you are doing some affiliate business in the lead generation space. Heck, you might even be working with the greatest insurance lead generation affiliate program ever (yes, I linked that to our affiliate program - what of it?).
One skill all lead generation affiliates should know is how to create an effective landing page. By tweaking and improving your affiliate landing pages, you will be able to see a substantial increase in your revenue and conversions.
So what does it take to have a successful landing page? Jon Miller knows. Jon is the VP of Marketing at Marketo, and is an expert of lead generation in the B2B space. The Top Rank blog features an article from Jon titled Ten Tips for Lead Generation Landing Pages. The tips range from everything from making a good first impression to removing navigation and to test but not over test.
Take a few minutes to read the article and ask yourself if there is anything you can do to improve your landing pages today. If you find something you can improve, change it. If you are sending everything to your homepage, create some keyword focused landing pages. If your landing pages are covered with banner ads, clean them up. Good landing pages are one of the keys to affiliate success…if you aren’t optimizing them, you’d better get to it.
Happy Friday! Since the online marketing world is not feeding me any tasty morsels of wisdom today, instead I present you this story of a hilarious yet surprisingly common pay-per-click mistake. (Via Sphinn)
Also, here is a total time waster video for you…if you ever went to Chuck E. Cheese or Showbiz Pizza when you were younger, this will freak you out!
Everybody’s favorite back hat SEO cloaker, Fanotmaster, posted about the rumored acquisition of GoDaddy by Google (yeah, you heard me right, the Google wants in on those famous Super Bowl ads).
He explains that there are a number of scary issues black hat SEO will face if GOOG does buy GoDaddy. Things like Google being able to identify, real-time, when domain names change hands (so Google can reset rankings and what-not) and Google being able to see behind the ever popular Domians-By-Proxy service so they can track down naughty site owners.
I’ll go one step further and say that this rumored acquisition could be really bad news for PPC affiliates using Domains-By-Proxy who open multiple accounts owned by the same company or person to drive PPC traffic. If Google’s PPC team can identify a common owner to multiple sites they can consolidate those accounts (don’t ask me how I know…I just do), making it a lot harder to scale your business.
Fantomaster provides three strategies to hide your tracks in case the GoDaddy acquisition goes through.
One involves setting up an offshore corporation, which is so Miami Vice and so cool…cue the opening credits…(read the whole post here.)
I’ve been playing around with the Google AdWords Keyword Tool this afternoon and I’ve found it to be a good way to identify keywords that good a decent amount of search volume but aren’t already saturated with AdWords advertisers.
Enter in the URL of your homepage or one of the pages on your site
Optional: Check the box next to the words “Include other pages on my site linked to this URL”
Click on the “Get Keywords” button
Once you have the results, click on the search volume column title
Starting at the top of the list, look for terms with high search volume and low advertiser competition
Click the “Add” button to add the terms to your AdWords account
Repeat the process for the URLs of your competitors and other sites in your vertical
By identifying the terms searchers are searching for, but don’t have a lot of advertiser competition, you should be able to secure some good clicks at a lower price than normal…and who doesn’t like that?
Search Engine Land’s Alan Rimm-Kaufman wrote up an article with eight tips to improve you paid search copy. The tips include best practices for writing and testing of ad copy.
The tip I found most interesting was “Bad copy hurts more than good copy helps.” Alan points out in his years of experience in paid search that:
theres significant benefit in fixing bad copy …, some benefit from improving decent copy …, but the additional benefit that accrues from perfect copy is often small.
If you believe what Alan is writing it could have a dramatic impact on the amount of time you spend on writing and rewriting ads that are performing decently, but not perfectly. If you think in terms of Return on Effort, it might become obvious that all that ad tweaking you’re doing to make the “perfect” ad may not be giving you as great of a return as, say, building a new site or new PPC account.
This week is keyword research week on the PPC Hero blog, so it’s needless to say that I’m looking forward to each new posts they do. 
I ran across a post on the PPC Hero blog today that I thought I would share with you. The post, 
I was having lunch with one of our PPC affiliates this week and the topic of privacy policy came up. Specifically, the affiliate said that even if he’s running traffic through AdWords to a thin site “one page site”, the site will still have more than one page - and one of the main reasons is because the site will have a privacy policy page.
Right now, maybe nothing…but very soon, maybe a lot.
PPC guru and affiliate marketer John Hasson has updated his 
This may or may not matter to you depending on the level of craftiness you use on your AdWords accounts, but if you have been using different display and destination URLs on your ads, you’re going to have to rethink your strategy.
One of the questions I get more often than not from new affiliates is “how do they do it?” How is it that InsureMe has affiliates who are pulling in tens of thousand, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars each month? Is it PPC? SEO? Something else?
The “one stop shop.” Based on research done by 
We’ve all heard the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, but if you’ve ever tried to buy stock photos to use on an affiliate site, you might want to revise that saying to “a picture is worth a thousand bucks.” 99 times out of 100, affiliates don’t have a thousand bucks to spend on a single image, so what to do?
Video ads. Just typing it leaves me with a feeling of opportunity and skepticism all at once. If you read the research, experts link that online video advertising will be the next big ad platform on the Web - and I bet they’re right. But I also bet that current video ad channels are ineffective in driving direct conversions and are more a branding tool. Not an ideal thing for your average affiliate marketer.
RANT WARNING
[This post was inspired by the post 
I ran across an interesting post last night from 
Have you ever had a Google AdWords account that seems to be cursed? You know, one of those accounts that seem to land you on the third page of the search results no matter what you bid? Well, the curse might have a lot to do with account’s AdWords history, and 
I’ve been playing around with the 
Search Engine Land’s Alan Rimm-Kaufman wrote up an article with 
