CPA Share

I’ve enjoyed this crazy industry for almost 5 years now. Things have changed, and changed again, and they continue to change on a day to day basis. It’s what keeps things interesting. This post is here to just go over several small, and large changes that I’ve witnessed first hand in the internet advertising industry over the last 4-5 years. It’s one hell of an industry, that’s for sure!
When I first got into the affiliate marketing game I learned my online fundamentals with various blackhat techniques. Back in the day spamming a social network was easy cash and nobody seemed to care, until users on sites started complaining to the sites, advertisers, and even CPA networks. I watched networks, and spammers face the wrath of fox and myspace and I got out of that game very quickly. Following this I had my first legitimate run at Affiliate Marketing, promoting ringtones on Google AdWords, MSN AdCenter, and Overture. When I started running these campaigns using the word “Free” in your advertisements (Example: Get Some Free Ringtones) was completely acceptable, even encouraged by some advertisers. Slowly that became “Illegal” and I watched people work there ways around these regulations using words like “Gratis” and “Complimentary” or “Get Your Bonus Ringtones.” Nobody seemed to have a problem with “Complimentary” for over a year. Time passed, now when we promote ringtones the pricing information is plastered all over the landing page, you cannot mention Free, Bonus, anything really regarding getting ringtones and a deal. The only real sales pitch is “Get Some Ringtones, They Are Cool.”

In the mobile world people continued to get more and more creative, I remember buying media promoting “Crush” and “IQ Tests” initially these offers only mentioned the $9.99 per month pricetag on the very bottom in the page in hard to read text. I don’t know the exact chain of events in the Quiz/Contest type mobile offers but now these offers display the pricetag on each and every page of the simple “quiz” as well as on the confirmation page (A user receives a text with a pin, they have to confirm it on the website) there is a huge check box requiring users who wish to subscribe to check which states they understand the charges. Surprisingly to this day at EWA we continue to subscribe thousands and thousands of people each day on those IQ offers.

Promoting Dating campaigns on Pay-Per-Click used to be the easy thing to do, it racked in a ton of cash for me.. I remember promoting Singlesnet, Fling, and tons of other sites using Chat Keywords . These advertisers wanted my traffic so badly, They continued to beg for it. Than one day singlesnet and true told me to Pull all of my chat traffic (which was all of my traffic). I remember for months getting hounded by Affiliate Managers about running dating traffic again, when it was virtually impossible for me to get any traffic on Non-Chat Keywords. Now Dating is thriving once again, and is one of the most consistent verticals out there. When I go Google “Dating Chat” I see no affiliate ads which in my eyes is a crazy loss of opportunity, too bad the advertisers hate it so much!

Im going to keep on going, discussing the changes of Rebills, Credit Reports, Debt Consolidation, and tons of other changes I’ve seen in this industry soon. There are simply too many topics, verticals, and changes that I’ve seen to discuss in one post!

A month ago, I exposed a SEO consultant that fleeced ignorant clients. The other day, another internet marketing company, called us to promote their services. Somehow, I was a lead in their system, and they mentioned a site I hadn’t touched in several years.
So I posed as a client– asking them about what their services are, how it works, and so forth.
The conversation went something like this (names redacted to protect the guilty):

Tim (consultant): We have a direct relationship with Google and will get you traffic on Google via SEO and PPC.
Me: How do you do that? And what is SEO?
Tim: Well, we have a direct relationship with Google. We create articles and get them certified by Google.
Me: Certified articles? Do you pay for that and how does work?
Tim: When Google comes to your site, they see that we are optimizing it and that we are certified. We have to pay Google for that.
Me: So forgive my ignorance, since I’m not that technical– is that like AdWords? I didn’t know you could pay for natural results.
Tim: Let’s do a search on “web design”– those spots on the right are PPC, while the natural search results are on the left. Google sees what pages are ours and gives us priority.
Me: Really– so that wikipedia result in the first natural spot– how much are they paying to get certified?
Tim: Wikipedia doesn’t have to pay.
Me: Really? How do I know what is certified or not– can you show me examples? Can I pay Google more to have our articles certified faster?
Tim: Well we have a lot of clients, so what we’d do for you may be different. We’re not able to pay for expedited certification.
Me: Isn’t your practice of buying links considered “black hat”? I don’t want to get banned or anything.
Tim: We are completely ethical. Only experts in SEO are allowed to work at {SEO_company} and all are certified.
Me: Whew– because I’ve heard some horror stories from SEO companies that flat out lie to clients. And who am I to know what’s true or not?
Tim: Happy to educate you on these issues– I know they’re complicated, but you’re learning quickly.
Me: Great– please send me a proposal covering what you guys can do for us.

After the call, the “SEO expert” sent me a couple canned proposals– both reflecting ZERO thought or customization, except for a find/replace on prospect name. This guy spend ZERO effort on tailoring the documents to the site I mentioned. There are a lot of good search engine optimization companies out there, and it’s charlatans like these that give the rest of us a bad name. How can we help clients see the real, earnest folks from the total fakers? The company that called me (name withheld) is a major agency, by the way.

Harrison

Most of you know to look at conversion rate, eCPC, CTR, CPC, and some other metrics that you can see inside your PPC campaigns. Did you know that your analytics tool can also help you get a sense of keyword quality– thus assist you with bidding and keyword grouping?

Bounce rate is governed by a combination of these factors:

* nature of the term itself: you are trying to sell “raspberries”, so you buy that term as well as “fruit”– in this case, “fruit” is broader than “raspberry” but has more volume. So you have a trade-off with volume and relevancy, as well as synonyms– for example, “apple” can be a fruit and cool electronics manufacturer.
* your ads: you might have bought relevant terms, but your ad is misleading– promising something that doesn’t exist. Maybe the product isn’t free.
* relevancy of the landing page: you’re sending people to pages that don’t speak directly to the term folks are looking for. Perhaps your keywords, ads, and content don’t match tightly.

If you have a multi-page or multiple visit conversion, then bounce rate is a great early indicator of traffic quality. In you are converting on a single page, then bounce rate is not meaningful. That said, while using eCPM and other ROI-based metrics to govern bidding overall, you can use bounce rate in several ways:

* if the bounce rate is over 70%, turn the term off. If the term is bad enough, you may even want to delete the term and also add it as a negative keyword. For example, we sell franchises for a major fast food chain and discovered that any keywords with “home” were of ultra low quality. So “work from home” and “make money from home” are horrible– these are not people who have $150k in cash to open a franchise. Having “home” as a negative keyword also improves traffic for “business opportunity” on broad match.
* if the bounce rate is less than 30%, then something is probably working with the connection between your terms, ads, and landing pages. If that term has high volume, place it in it’s own ad group and spin out more related terms. If your keywords are tightly grouped by theme (every term in that ad group means the same thing), then you should see bounce rate to be similar. Ignore bounce rates on low volume keywords, since you’ll see a lot of noise.
* if the bounce rate is medium (30%-70%), then you can use that as a quasi-lead. For example, if term A has a bounce rate of 40% has 60% of folks making it past the first page. And term B with a 70% bounce rate has only 30% of folks making it off the page. Thus, term A is delivering twice as many visitors per click as term B– and could be bid up twice as much, all else equal. You’re still going to manage to a CPA, but if don’t have many conversions or a low budget, this is a great early metric on whether that person will become a lead.

Our lead gen consulting company manages PPC campaigns for clients who have at least $10k per month to spend. keep reading my blog for more articles on maximizing online performance. Hope this was helpful to you.

Hey everybody,
I am writing to you guys from Bombay international airport. I just got here and am waiting for my flight to Cochin ( got a 4hour-ish wait)
I finally got my adwords qualified link setup etc so I thought I would blog about it. Although this really doesn’t help with affiliate marketing etc I still decided to take the test because of the small biz sem stuff i’ve been doing..
Check it out heh

-Although the page to google only shows as blitzlocal.com - it was me who took the test. But i used that as a company URL, i wish it had my name on it lol.

I’m kind of tired and am going to try and take a 1-2 hour nap
later
-Harrison

Yo Guys,
I’m going to make this post short, simple, and sweet. I want to do something like a FAQ but more on a post by post basis. E-mail me your affiliate/internet marketing specific questions and let me post the answers up here in actual blog posts. The ones that get chosen will be new posts here on CPAShare & I will go really in depth etc.

Also…Thought I’d let everyone know what I’m up to. This monday I am going to Cochin India for a wedding of my friend & ex project manager Sreeju. I will be in India from the 6th-13th & am also stopping in Amsterdam on the way back for a few days. I am staying at Cherai Beach Resorts what do you think ?? I will be posting from there and of course working as usual. I hope the internet’s fast!

Also, I wanted to just say what’s up to someone via the blog. I’ve never really done a “shout out” but I owe my boy Ryan a shoutout + I just have to emphasize the respect I have for this guy to all 300 of you readers. If you want to see who a real player is…It’s this pimp: Ryan, don’t lie your the pimp

Also.. In the next few days I’m going to be posting my Google Advertising Professional Logo thing. I took the test today & passed (my first try). I will post once google gives me the seal. I’m excited to have accomplished that although it’s not much I feel it will help me and my non-affiliate SEM business greatly.

-Harrison

hey everyone,
I have a Quick 5 Line blog post for you guys that will probably benefit you more than most of my posts :p ! Here’s the tip/way to optimize your campaigns a WHOLE bunch! Don’t just place the google conversion pixel, set up your conversions & your landing pages, mini-websites, or whatever type of web pages your using with google analytics they have added a bunch of new tools in the past 3 months which will benefit you greatly once you figure all of them out!
I will be posting some ways to use google analytics as an affiliate in the next few weeks - Analytics suck if you don’t know what to do with them!

Later
-Harrison

P.s. A lot of you may feel that this post was un-beneficial because you already know this, Sorry.. I see tons of affiliates not using analytics on there pages. I just wanna help :p.

Hey guys, I was just thinking of some more ways for you guys to increase your revenue. Today we are going to talk about double serving ads on search engines. Basically what this means is that you want your ad to show up multiple times on Google Yahoo or any other search engine.

Double serving ads is frowned upon but there are ways to do this that will keep you under the radar. On Google one of the methods that I use involves creating a Google MCC . A MCC allows you to control multiple AdWords accounts via their MCC dashboard. Basically Google views MCC account holders as agencies PPC management companies with many clients.

Having an MCC has many advantages. The biggest for me is the ability to split up the different types of traffic I have as well as test campaigns that onto accounts for that specific purpose. I separate all of my content network campaigns, search campaigns and test campaigns onto their own account. If a campaign I have on a test account starts to perform I will optimize it a bit and then move it over to my “
good” campaign’(s) account. The reason I do this is because Google looks at the account history of the different accounts and if I put a test campaign on my “good” account and it gets slapped it will affect the entire account. It is also much easier to stay organized if you organize your campaigns this way.

Another thing you can do is double serve ads. In order to do this simply copy your campaign over to another account and point it to a similar landing page. If you were promoting ringtones and your display url read “rockingringtones.com” and you wanted to double serve this I would recommend buying the domain ringtonesrocking.com or really any other different domain and then hosting the same or a similar landing page onto this new domain. Then simple change your display url on the copied campaign and you are ready to go. Your ad(s) will now be displaying multiple times for the keywords you are bidding on.

To sign up for a google MCC please check: https://adwords.google.com/select/professionalwelcome

Hey guys,
I know a lot of my readers have never really given PPC marketing for whatever reason well here is a way for you all to give it a shot.

So basically if you want an easy way to put a small amount of money down and almost guarantee yourself a profit I recommend you game the Yahoo search marketing promotional codes. With a $300 investment you can have $1300 in ppc traffic to play with.

In order for you to continue to receive credit after the creation of your first account you need to clear your cookies but as long as you do so every account that you create will be credited with the $100 in bonus traffic. What you can do is ask your affiliate manager for a few campaigns that are doing well on search. Get about 10 high traffic keywords for those niches and track your EPC on a keyword basis for those keywords. After you have spent your $1300 spread across the accounts you will know which campaign to focus on and which keywords are most profitable for you. Take your EPC and bid accordingly. It’s really hard to lose money doing this.

Coupon URL: Free $100 Credit
Promo Code: US2300

Hey Guys,
I got this E-mail today and it seemed like good news to me!

“Pricing Update:
Minimum Bids will no Longer be Fixed at $.10

Starting in the next several weeks, the minimum bids for a number of Sponsored Search keywords will no longer be fixed at $.10. Your new minimum bids can be lower or higher than $.10. Content Match minimum bids currently will remain at $.10.

This update is intended to align your minimum bids with the value and quality of your keywords. It also is designed to help improve the overall search user experience by rewarding advertisers for better quality with lower entry points into keyword markets.

The amount set as your minimum bid on a keyword in Sponsored Search can vary depending on multiple factors, such as:

• The relevance of your keywords (as measured by the quality of the ads associated with them)
• The number of bidders and bid amounts in the particular keyword market.

A keyword term becomes “active” — switched “on” in the system and eligible for display — when your bid is equal to or greater than your minimum bid. If your bid falls below your minimum, your keyword will not be displayed. You’ll be notified of such changes and will have some time to adjust your bid.

What You Should Do to Prepare
• Get to know your keywords and their value.
Since minimum bids can vary by keyword, it is important to know which keywords work best for your business. Remember, you can check and set your bids at the keyword level. Learn more.

• Improve ad quality to potentially receive lower minimum bids.
Your minimum bids generally take your quality into account. In some instances, higher quality means that you could have a lower minimum bid. Learn more.

• Learn about updates to the account interface.
Become familiar with new tools that can make managing your keywords simpler. Learn more.

For more information on this change, please read our FAQs. ”

A lot of people IM me asking about how to make money and talk about how clicks are too expensive. Although this may not discount clicks in competitive markets you be able to save some money on those long-tail keywords etc! get working guys, and don’t expect to get .03 clicks on the keyword “ringtones” ;), many are already trying lol (not me, I promise).

-Harrison

ey all,
I am starting to do more keyword stuff than I was the last 2-3months (I found cheap alternate traffic sources which got kind of whored out, I just stuck to it for a while though) and definitely learned my lesson. I hadn’t done keyword stuff for a while and was just trying to be lazy one night and set up a redirect on one of my domains and got to work creating a campaign. After about 4 hours of work a friend of mine instant messaged me, I started telling him how I was working on a campaign etc. After I told him that I had no landing page he virtually stopped dead in his tracks to tell me “Dude! Not Smart!!” This could’ve been my savior but I thought I knew my shit and proceeded. Like 2 hours and 30 minutes after my ads went live i logged on to see if anything had happened, I had like 10 leads with a revenue of like $65.00 or something. I was anticipating see how much I had spent to achieve the $65 in leads so I stayed on my PC for a good hour to see google update, I had spent $133.00 to do $65.00 in revenue :-\, I was glad i had caught it early since I had a 2,500.00/day testing budget set in place, shorty after that I decided I should tweak my ads, keywords, and the keywords on my little meta-refresh page to up the QS a little bit. After working 2 hours on this stupid campaign I uploaded everything into adwords editor expecting a better margin on the campaign.

I went to sleep and in the morning i woke up to see that I had spent $1750.00 to make $900.00 and my ads had all been shut off because of them being direct linking etc.

To prevent this from happening again I have decided that under no circumstances will I not use a landing page on any google campaign I do for now on. Hopefully I can just learn to suck it up and hit up my friend Keeb whenever I am getting a campaign going and get a pimp landing page made. I am also really researching the QS just for personal knowledge; whenever I see anything on it I try to read it and I am always browsing google FAQ etc to see if their is something I don’t know about the marvelous google quality score.

I hope you take my advice and just get a simple landing page to avoid 1. Getting a terrible QS 2. Probably getting your ads shut off and 3. Maybe lose some money

I’m out, its 1:15 am
-Harrison