AzoogleAds 0 – NeverBlueAds 1

In my posting about using a backup affiliate offer I wrote about how beneficial it can be to have more than offer for your PPC campaigns. In this case I was running an offer from AzoogleAds that suddenly stopped converting. I switched to the same offer that NeverBlueAds carries and to my surprise conversions were picking up where AzoogleAds left off. I am making a little less per conversion now, but overall I am back to where I were before when the offer was doing great. I had emailed AzoogleAds, but nobody from their side seems to be willing to follow up on this offer. I let some of my campaigns run the AzoogleAds affiliate link, but the results were very disappointing. For me this is very disappointing and it show how much (or less) interest there is on the side of this affiliate network to work with the smaller affiliates. I guess you really need to be a super affiliate that they start listening.

From a business standpoint I think AzoogleAds is not doing them a favor. It’s like with everything that has to do with customer service. If you start treating lower end customers with less respect, how do you expect these customers to follow you when they eventually become more “important”? In affiliate marketing this would be if the small affiliate suddenly becomes really successful. If I suddenly have more “buying power” who would I prefer to work with more? The affiliate network that is open to smaller affiliates as well or the one that ignored me when I was just a small player? Pretty easy decision – I would push my volume mainly through the affiliate network that treated me properly when I was just a regular Joe.

Of course I am not there yet, but this is how it works with normal customer service anywhere. If you abandon the smaller customer it will come back one day. It might not affect your entire business operation, but do you know how much business you are missing eventually just because of this?! Is it just 0.1% or maybe 5%? You never know who your next top customer is. It might be the little guy you just treated with less respect ….

What to do if your affiliate offer stops converting?!

Let’s assume you have a great going PPC campaign. Traffic is good, CTR is good, conversions are rolling in and then suddenly the offer stops converting. Nothing has changed – not your landing page, not the number of clicks on your ads, not the landing page of the merchant. I usually give it a little time before looking into it. For an example one of my campaigns has been going great for a while until suddenly the conversions stopped. On the second day there was no conversion until late afternoon and between 6 and 7 PM I suddenly had a big pile of conversions. For me this looked strange as the actual clicks on my are usually going down around that time of the day (people leaving office, dinner time, etc.). I suspected some tracking problems that were fixed and the day results rolled up in one big pile (so to speak). The next day I got a single conversion. One! 1! Same traffic, same amount of clicks (same range) – one conversion. In that moment I figured something is up. Is the affiliate network upping up its own share (of course not ) or is it the merchant maybe (in this case I am kinda ruling it out)? Since I am a small player my affiliate network always pushes back and rules out tracking problems. I don’t have enough voice and $$$-Power to be heard I guess.

So, it is always good to have other options. Whenever I am working a new campaign/niche I try to find a backup provider. Some other network I can switch to that runs the same or a similar offer. In this case it is the same offer going to the same merchant landing page. Since I am hiding affiliate links through a redirect file system I can swap offers on the fly without affecting my landing page at all. Sure, I make a little less per click, but I’d rather take that, than continuing to lose money. In this case now I am making $0.20 less per click, but that is still plenty. I can now monitor conversion and use that data to go back to the other affiliate network and make my case. This type of stuff does not happen too often, but in general it is a good idea to have more than one choice. What if the merchant pulls the offer? Is your campaign dead in the water then? Or can you replace the offer with a different one and continue to make money (even if it is a little less)? I choose the second option whenever possible.

Here is some criteria to look for:

• Is the offer available through more than one network?
• Are there similar offers available that can be a substitute?
• Could you modify the landing page slightly and adjust for a different offer easily?

So, add some redundancy to your PPC marketing efforts now.

PPC Landing Page Optimization Tactics

If you run PPC marketing campaigns, landing pages are critical to your success. If your landing page sucks, you will waste a lot of money on advertising without seeing any significant conversions. Therefore it is extremely critical to get the landing pages designed properly. DO NOT use one template for all your different offers and campaigns. What works on one offer is a dead end on another. Work with a custom landing page for each and every offer.

Keep it simple, stupid. “KISS” is still working and probably always will. Don’t go overboard on your landing pages. Make sure the visitor can understand what you are offering and does not get confused. Be extremely focused on the topic and don’t waste valuable space on items that have nothing to do with your offer. Make clever use of paragraphs and bullet points. Explain why a visitor should take action.

Speaking of taking action. Offer multiple calls to action. Don’t assume the visitor knows where to go. Your landing page has several functions. One is to explain why the visitor needs your product and once convinced you need to take the visitor’s hand and guide her to the “click me to buy” button.  Use a fair mix of text links and buttons. Flash or animated GIF buttons can help to draw the attention to the “take action now” part.

Let the visitor know where she is. Provide the necessary value to gain trust. Trust is needed to get sold on your offer and to take action. If the landing page does not tell the visitor why she is on your site, she will click back to the search results. Your PPC ads needs to be continued on your landing page. This will create a chain the visitor can follow and understand. Don’t get tricky with your landing page. Don’t hijack the visitor. If the back button frightens you because you lose a visitor, your problems are much bigger than you can anticipate. It is also against most PPC search engine’s Terms of Service.  Using shady tactics to keep a visitor on your page is a big no no.

Link tracking is important. Every call to action link or button should carry a subID you can track. Why? Well, you kind of wanna know if it is the button in the middle of the page that brings the converting visitor. If you never receive a click on a specific link and that link also does not show conversions, what’s the point of keeping it. Rather use the real estate on your page to show another benefit.

You heard it before – do split testing. Test different versions of your landing pages. Why? Well, you might be missing out on a large number of conversions. The same way you test drive a new vehicle you are interested in, the same way you should evaluate the performance of your landing pages. I admit this is a difficult task that often comes with an extra price tag, but don’t skip this task for too long. Have your landing pages reviewed by non-Internet Marketeers. First of all chances are extremely low that those people “steal” your idea and second you might get extremely valuable insight from a “normal consumer” perspective.

Also make sure to spend enough time testing. A one day test with 30 visitors will not speak a clear language. I know, you will be craving for conversions and any hint makes you want to ditch that one landing page and use the other one, but make sure to have a few hundred clicks go through every landing page to make conclusions. You are also not limited to 2 different landing pages. Feel free to mix more into the rotation if needed.

I admit I am not always following the advice I am giving here. I make the same “lazy marketeer” mistakes like many other folks. It takes some discipline to pull this through. The one thing I learned is that the more you can stick to rules like these, the more successful you will be with PPC Advertising. Good Luck.

Tax Return for 2007 completed

Just finished the final steps on my tax return for 2007. In the end it turned out to be the almost perfect tax return in regards to much I owe or how much I receive as a refund. I owe less than $80.00 in federal taxes and I will receive somewhere around the same back as a refund from the State of Colorado. There will be a time difference between paying my taxes (tomorrow) and until I receive my tax refund from Colorado’s Department of Revenue (~6 weeks or so). I am so glad this tedious task of filing my taxes is done. I used TurboTax to prepare my tax return and then spend the $17.95 fees with them to eFile my tax return. This is the very first I am doing that eFile thing. It is actually pretty convenient not having to deal with all the paper or different websites and doing it right out of TurboTax.

Late December I signed up for the Federal program to be able to make estimated tax payments electronically. I have not yet used this program, but probably will start doing so by entering the 3rd quarter (depending on how business develops). At the same time I might go and use an accountant to outsource my business paperwork and the tax filing. Not sure yet about this. When I started my business everything was designed to be simple and I am sticking to that as much as possible. I avoid certain things because they make running a business complicated and increase my administrative tasks more than what I want to do. Yes, it will mean I might make less money, but I like “simple” when it comes to those things. “KISS – Keep it simple, stupid” is not a bad way of doing things in my opinion.

Google Adwords Campaigns Stabilized

It seems like that my current (new) Adwords campaigns have stabilized. Today was the first day without any changes in minimum bid prices. That is very good as I am still seeing a good conversion rate of about 250% in net profit (yes – two hundred fifty percent). I know it is still very early in regards to building up history with this campaign, but I think it is a good start. I will now (finally) start working on scaling up this campaign – maybe even expand to MSN Adcenter. Not sure about the latter one just yet. If I can manage to triple or quadruple the Google Adwords traffic and keep a similar conversion rate that would be awesome.

I got a second niche I am working on. I am not sure how much volume there is, but the offer is paying about ~$5.xx per lead and with the keywords I am searching I am maybe seeing 2 ads per search result. This could either mean that this is absolutely not converting or worth to pursue or it could mean that I found I nice niche with less competition. If I go more broad with my search term I find at least 15 advertisers and so I hope I am up to something here. We will see, but you can be sure that I am going to write about it in more detail.

PPC Tip of the Day:
One important thing you have to keep in mind when doing PPC advertising with Google Adwords is to keep an eye on the numbers of people clicking through to your site and then immediately going back. I think that’s what caused my former “great” rated keywords to switch to “good” from a quality score perspective. I went back to analyze my keywords and one series of keywords was more on the generic side of things and I could imagine that I might see a higher rate of people clicking through and then going back (or competitors checking me out maybe). Anyway – the better your ads and keywords match your offer, the lower your rate of non-converting visitors.

Google Adwords Mind Games

It feels like playing Mind Games with Google Adwords. Two days ago I uploaded a campaign and received pretty good results. Great CTR, great conversion. It’s a very targeted campaign and open/honest enough to the visitor. I received quality score ratings 90% as “great” and minimum bid prices varied from $0.02 and $0.05 mainly. A few keywords were rated as “Good” and click prices were $0.10. Those keywords I deleted as I do not wanted to bid that high. So, overall I think I was doing well. Quality score good, CTRs good, Conversions good – show me the money.

But I was wrong. When I finally came home last night and had time to review my campaigns I discovered several keywords showing new minimum bid prices. It was not a “normal” Google Slap where prices go past $10.00 or so, but the quality score was changed and minimum bid prices went up accordingly. I would still break even or make a small profit, but overall it would put me more at risk with these campaigns. So, instead of scaling up my campaigns I was doing cleanup and recovery. From what it looks like now I am at maybe 30% in volume and revenue compared to yesterday.

Then I setup more campaigns. I usually wait about 10 minutes after uploading a campaign and then go in and check keywords and quality score. I sorted through everything, deleted keywords made adjustments and then finally set the ad scheduler to the time I wanted to run these campaigns. I uploaded more campaigns and did more maintenance work. I decided to check on something on my earlier uploaded campaign and – WTF – quality scores had changed again in over 50% of my uploaded ad groups and keywords. Come on, Google. I do accept your quality score stuff, but do not give me extra work by making me go back several times to check my your work. You want me to spend my money on Adwords and I want to see a fair ROI from my ads. Don’t water down my profits by making it so difficult and cumbersome.

This morning I am still seeing high CTRs and good conversions – but with many good keywords gone the volume is way down. We’ll see how things look like tonight and then I can hopefully spend some time in moving this campaign from testing to production and expand my keyword lists.

Tools I am using: SpeedPPC and Adwords Editor.
Music I am listening to right now: George Thorougood – Night Time (Live)

Next Page »