Free Self-Hosted Analytic PPC Tool and More

7 Comments Written on July 10th, 2008 by
Categories: PPC Tools

This giving away a fully functional, leave on your server, analytic software started with a hosted program called tracking 202. I guess the fact that tracking 202 was hosted caused a bit of confusion at one of the marketing forums. It really sucks to create tools from your own pocket and then get accused of potentially stealing keywords.

That’s when Wesley Mahler, CEO of prosper 202, listened to his user-base feedback and immediately developed a free self hosted analytics software. I liked tracking 202 because it’s easier to set up. However, after playing with the self hosted program on Wesley’s Mac, I was instantly sold on the product. The weird thing is that the product is free. You can download here. This is not mandatory but if you like the product you can help out by donating here.

Aaron did this something similar to this two years ago by creating an entire suite of search marketing tools and not charge a penny for it. I honestly feel that our seo tools and prosper 202 are better than some of paid and expensive products in the market.

Take advantage of these tools. They will save you time, money and help you gather the right data so that you make more.

Google Affiliate Network to Replace Pay-Per-Action Beta

1 Comment » Written on June 30th, 2008 by
Categories: Google Adwords

Google sent out an email to pay per action advertisers announcing that the program is being phased out at the end of August.

Google is constantly working to offer features that will provide a better experience to our users. As part of Google’s recent acquisition of DoubleClick, the Performics affiliate network is now a part of Google and has been renamed Google Affiliate Network. To consolidate our offerings, we will be phasing out the AdWords pay-per-action beta in the last week of August 2008. As an alternative to pay-per-action advertising, Google offers two products that allow you to manage your advertising on a CPA (cost-per-acquisition) basis: the Conversion Optimizer and the Google Affiliate Network. To learn more about these options, visit http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=97264.

How aggressively will Google market their new affiliate network? It seems the current integration plans are a bit haphazard, requiring AdSense publishers to sign up different affiliate accounts, and forcing users to sign up under ConnectCommerce.com. If you login to an AdSense account Google warns “Referrals is being retired during the last week of August 2008, so we recommend that you do not implement referral ad code on your site at this time” yet they do not tell you to sign up to promote affiliate offers.

Review of Google Ad Planner: Site Targeting Cheat Sheet

15 Comments Written on June 29th, 2008 by
Categories: Google Adwords, PPC Tools

I recently spent hours playing with Ad Planner Beta, Google’s newest Adwords tool. If you thought Adwords Editor made your life easier, consider being spoon fed with Ad Planner. The program is amazing, especially if you site target on Google’s content network. It’s a lot like Quantcast, only much more accurate.

Google Does the Work for You

Demographic Filters

Just type in any URL and the tool will group it with other relevant sites. To get even more laser targeted, there is a demographics option where you choose:

  • location
  • language
  • age
  • education,
  • income and
  • gender

 

Site & Category Filters

After getting the results, you can sort through the data according to

  • impressions
  • page views
  • unique visitors
  • index
  • category

You can find sites with audiences related to any particular site. Here are sites related to seobook.com

And for any particular site you can find audience details, similar to those provided in Google Website Trends, but with the addition of demographics information.

Filter by AdSense Formats

Here’s the fun part – You can easily handpick relevant sites that are involved in the Google content network. It even allows you to choose the types of media available.

Tons of Great Opportunities

While site targeted advertising tends to be less profitable than keyword targeted ads, if you’re using the content network for brand exposure or e-commerce, the Ad Planner can help you research and reach your target market.

And there are a variety of great non-AdWords related uses for this tool

  • compare your traffic levels to competing sites
  • find sites worth doing direct ad deals with
  • find affiliate sites worth emulating
  • find sites worth pitching stories to or writing guest columns for
  • find sites worth buying links from or buying outright

Know Your PPC Geography

5 Comments Written on June 28th, 2008 by
Categories: Conversion, Geo Targeting

Geo-Targeting AdWords

To improve tracking and save on a cost per click basis, I separated one of my campaigns into countries where English is the main language. I used Adwords editor to carbon copy each campaign from the main one and everything were kept the same except for the target area. The countries all seemed to fare well when grouped in one campaign but when separated, the numbers returned to me were disturbing. I realized that the countries expected to outperform did so-so and very poorly, ROI wise. I would have never known this if I didn’t test on a regional basis. The ratio of ROI was 4: 2.5: 1 where the best campaign did 4 times better than the worst.

Optimize Your Account For ROI, Not Clicks!

Another note is that my CTR was highest at the region that converted the lowest. I’m going to study this further and see why some countries did better than others. I had an entire week to collect data and will now dissect the Google reports. At least my quality score increased from the higher CTR.

The lesson I learned is to never assume anything with PPC advertising.

What Exactly Are You Marketing?

1 Comment » Written on June 28th, 2008 by
Categories: Affiliate Marketing

Do you think it’s possible to sell a product you don’t know about? I guess in the offline world, aggressive salespeople can get away with it but not in the attention starved Internet. It’s important to assume your website visitors as having an extremely short attention span. If they’re not happy with your site-design or if your headline is irrelevant to what they’re looking for, they will leave your site in a heartbeat.

This is why knowing your product plays an important role. If you sincerely understand the problem your product solves, you will understand the mentality and buying behaviors of your target market. You will then customize your landing pages including the headlines and content according to their needs. In addition,  familiarizing yourself with your products will help magnify your keyword list. Knowing your product will open doors and broaden your scope for promotion.

Why Google AdWords Site Targeting Usually Does Not Work

5 Comments Written on June 25th, 2008 by
Categories: Contextual Advertising, Google Adwords

When you buy ads direct from a publisher they usually charge a premium rate above what that ad inventory would sell for if it was sold through an automated ad auction. When Google launched site targeted AdSense ads years ago it was a cheap way for advertisers to buy specific audiences. Perfect for brand advertisers, but not as good for direct marketers. Why?

Advertising in Deep Dark Corners

It turns out that when you buy site targeted ads you typically first get exposure on the least valuable pages and least valuable ad units within a site. It makes sense that if all you want to do is advertise on a particular site then of course Google is going to sell you the inventory they struggled to monetize with their traditional keyword targeted PPC ads. So if the site has an offbeat category, or an AdSense ad block that is below the fold in the right column, those are the ad positions you are buying first.

Overpaying for Premium Exposure

You can buy your way into the more premium positions on the best pages too, but in order to do so you must bid high, which means you end up bidding at premium rates on the best pages, and you end up bidding too high for the backfill / remnant ad inventory on the least valuable pages. Not only are you losing money buying that off targeted backfill inventory, but you are competing against the most targeted ads on the most valuable pages, so it is hard to make money from buying site targeted ads unless they have a small niche site or are in a category where the ad market is exceptionally inefficient.

How to Buy Site Targeted Ads

There are some hacks around the issue of wasting money on site targeting though. The easiest of which is to look for footprints (URL, footer text, author name, etc.) on a site or the section of the site you want to advertise on and bid on those related keywords. If there is a section of the site that is irrelevant you can look for related footprints that are specific to those pages and use them as negative keywords.

Who Chopped Off PPC’s Long Tail?

1 Comment » Written on June 24th, 2008 by
Categories: Google Adwords, Yahoo

Mona Eisley highlighted that the Yahoo! / Google ad deal intends to focus on the monetization of longtail keywords. There are a few major flaws with this deal from the onset though

  • Google is more selective with distributing ads than other search engines are, and tends to not show advertisements on many hard to monetize longtail queries.
  • When Google does show ads on longtail queries they generally are showing ads for head keywords via their broad match and automatic matching options. Many of the lower end aribtrage plays have been killed off through search ad quality scores.

Google AdWords Ad Selectivity

This SearchEngineLand chart compiled from comScore research shows that Google shows fewer ads than most of its competitors do. So part of Google’s solution for the long tail is to ignore monetizing it to offer a better user experience and win marketshare.

Google Ad Recycling

Andrew Goodman left a great comment on the above linked post

Google is definitely heavily testing this recycling of ads concept and the new automatic matching. When you think about it, though, filling up the ad space to a user for a tail term with an ad they saw previously is a pretty brilliant tactic on Google’s part, as long as users don’t revolt. Instead of lowball affil & arb ads or white space, a high quality advertiser from a previous search gets re-shown, and another chance to make an impression.

With the way Google AdWords is heading it seems the key to dominating the tail of PPC is to dominate the head – improve your conversion rates and value per visitor so you can bid more aggressivley and use broader matching options to get the additional longtail exposure.

On organic search publishers still have many options on the longtail front (publishing niche content, guest articles on authority sites, exact match domain names, etc.), but some of those are disappearing through the promotion of mega-authority broad sites like Wikipedia, About.com, and even newcomers like Mahalo.

How Yahoo! Could Fix Their Search Monetization Problems

If Yahoo! would just allow searchers to opt out of arbitrage traffic and syndication fraud their click prices would come up and they could serve their own head keywords across the long tail. But if they let Google serve too much of their inventory before they fix the syndication problems they will never have a chance to fix it in house.

Database of US Town Names & Zip Codes

3 Comments Written on June 22nd, 2008 by
Categories: Local Search, PPC Tools

Recently the zip code guy blog highlighted a huge database of USA cities, towns, and counties in a wide array of formats. The database includes lists of
 
 

  • All US Cities
  • All US Counties
  • All US Zip Codes
  • Latitude and Longitude of Cities/Zip Codes
  • States and State Abbreviations

For $25 this database is a great investment if you are run geo-local AdWords campaigns using tools like Speed PPC.

This video offers more background on the United States zip code database.

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