Fraser's Affiliate Marketing Blog » Search Results » adwords

Google Adwords Optimisation

Fraser — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:42:02 +0000

A while back I got a phone call from someone at Google Adwords offering to optimise one of my campaigns. I thought there was nothing to lose so let him go ahead and produce an optimised campaign. Time passed and he emailed me to say the optimised campaign was ready. I logged in and had a look to discover that all my negative keywords were missing which didn’t seem helpful.

I mentioned this on Twitter and got back responses from people saying similar things

Today I got a call from my optimiser that went something like this

Google: I notice you haven’t used your optimised campaign
Me: Yes, that’s because you removed all my negative keywords
Google: No – I just moved them to campaign level
Me: Nope, there is nothing there. I’m logged in now.
Google: Yes there is, just click ……oh…….(background noise)…… dial tone

Anyone had any better experience of Google optimising your campaign for you?

He did phone back 5 mins later and said we seemed to have got cut off but he had found my negative keywords and would put them in place now

Still not sure if I should actually run the campaign for a week in place of my own one!

Some New Tools & Services

Fraser — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 16:31:33 +0000

I get quite a few emails from people about their new services and sites and although I would love to I just don’t have the time to test them all out properly but I’m sure they are mostly worth a look. Here’s a quick round up of what I have been sent lately

AffiliateMerchants.org.uk is intended to provide information for new affiliates who are looking for affiliate programs. They are able to search by network, by product category and by merchant. Mark is keen to hear any feedback or suggestions for improvement.

My Aff Site – all you need to do is point your domain name at their nameservers and then pick a template etc to build sites like BMX Bikes. It’s a good idea for the less technical affiliate but will cost you 25% of your commission for the service. Definitely a possibility for those many domains we all have waiting for development.

Efficient PPC – “Discover Efficient PPC software, which includes a smart PPC campaigns builder for Google AdWords, hundreds of pre listed keywords for your campaigns, and an easy to use keyword lists editor.” Again I haven’t had a proper chance to try this out but it looks like a handy tool for generating keyword lists and creating PPC ads.

Let me know if you have tried any of these tools and have any feedback.

Netklix PPC Ad Network

Fraser — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 14:27:16 +0000

I’d like to welcome Netklix as a sponsor of the blog. Netklix is a PPC advertising network, similar to Adwords content network where you can create an ad and run it across a network of sites. It operates on a PPC basis but instead of matching on a keyword basis it’s based on matching ‘channels’ or subject areas.

I signed up my Car Articles blog as a test site and picked 10 subject areas that fitted the content. This didn’t take long and I was then able to place ads with that are similar to adsense by using a snippet of Javascript code. An example is here

http://www.cararticles.co.uk/uk-audi-q7.html

The only downside here is that there doesn’t yet seem to be a lot of advertisers in my particular sector.

On the advertiser side the ad formats are fairly similar to adwords and the bids start at 10p. You need to open the account with a deposit of at least £19 so it’s a relatively low commitment to allow you to try the system. There is also a £100 Free Advertising offer running at the moment so you could take advantage of that.

Like any network, Netklix will have to continue to attract advertisers but all in all it would be well worth a look. In the early stages especially you’ll have more chance of getting traffic at minimum bids.

Do you bother with Yahoo and MSN?

Fraser — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 13:12:19 +0000

I’ve had a copy of NMA sitting on my desk for a while because I wanted to write something after reading this article (subscription required). It’s a comment on some stats from Hitwise which show that the UK Search share in May 2008 was as follows

Google – 87.3%
Yahoo – 4.9%
Microsoft – 3.7%

Andrew Girdwood from Bigmouthmedia comments in the article that at times optimising & reporting for Yahoo is “wasting clients money” which I think is a fair point.

So what does this mean for affiliates? Do you still try and optimise for natural search in Yahoo & Microsoft? What about paid search? The market share applies the same way so is it worth actually running and monitoring your paid campaigns on anything but Adwords?

Sumo Omni Affiliate Chair

Fraser — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 20:01:49 +0000

There’s an interesting thread on the affiliates4u forum at the moment about office chairs and it seems that there are quite a range of chairs out there.

I however have been the luck recipient of the ideal chair for an affiliate courtesy of Sumo.

The Sumo Omni is the perfect chair for spending many hours on while thinking about new affiliate website ideas

and then when Google kicks out your website, slaps your Adwords and it all gets too much this chair provides the perfect refuge…

Thank You & Happy Christmas

Fraser — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 11:24:11 +0000

One of my last blogs posts of the year is a chance to thank those merchants & networks that send Christmas gifts & cards. In some ways it’s a small thing but it really does mean I feel more loyalty towards these companies and it marks them out as the “good guys” that I should be trying to work with more next year.

One of my larger merchants that I sent almost £500,000 of sales to this year hasn’t even sent me a happy Christmas email and again it’s strange how that changes the way I feel about working with them next year. It’s also interesting that my adwords spend didn’t manage to earn me a Christmas present from Google this year although I’ve had something in previous years.

Anyway, on to the Thank You’s!

Thanks to Graham & everyone at Buyagift for the 6 bottles of Bollinger – unfortunately there are only 5 left
Thanks to Clarke & all at Paid On Results for the very fancy bottle of Jack Daniels
Thanks to Matthew & the folks at Existem for the bottle of Veuve Clicquot Champagne
Thanks to Sarah at Books Direct for a fantastic pile of holiday reading! I really love books so this was a great gift.
Thanks to All at Affilinet for the lovely hamper.

So it’s time now to think about finishing up for Christmas and I’m about to head out on my work Christmas lunch. That’s right my company secretary (& wife!) are heading out for turkey and all the trimmings!

Happy Christmas to everyone and best wishes for 2008

David Bain – 13pillars.com – Video Notes

Fraser — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 13:55:28 +0000

A while ago I had a chat with David Bain from 13pillars.com about his new video product.

Following the original blog post Edward sent me an email asking about some of the sites David mentioned in the interview and so I have collected together the links we discussed which form a helpful list of some of the best resources for internet marketing. Sorry for the delay in getting this together!

Keywords

Wordtracker

Auto Responders

AWeber

Paid Search

Welcome to AdWords

Directories

Article Submission

13pillars.com Bonus Interviews

Blogging

Press Releases

Paid Links

TLA – Smart Link Marketing

Forums

Outsourcing

Social Networking

If you want a bit more background about how all these different links fit together you could watch the video or buy the 13pillars.

Adwords to Adcenter – Transferring Your Adverts & Adgroups

Fraser — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 16:27:29 +0000

It not exactly the easiest process in the world but here is how I have been moving some paid search campaigns from Google Adwords to Microsoft Adcenter. Don’t expect everything to transfer exactly and also keep in mind that your Google ads are probably shown over two lines while your MSN Adcenter ads can be shown over one line and the link break is ignored.

Step 1 – Export Your Ads from Google

Log into adwords and choose Reports > Create Report

1. Report Type

ad Performance

2. Settings

Tick Text Ad
Date Range – This Month

Campaigns and Ad Groups – check “Manually select from a list”

then click Add in the left hand side to move the selected adgroups over to the right column.

3. Add or Remove Columns

Tick

Campaign
Ad Group
Site/Keyword
Ad Id (not required for adcenter but Google insist)
Match Type
Headline
Description Line 1
Description Line 2
Display URL
Current Mximum CPC
Keyword Destination URL
Destination URL
Impressions (again only required by Google)

4. Name the report and save the report template

Click Create Report

It may take some time to go away and have your lunch

when it’s finished download the file as csv (for excel)

Now you need to do some editing to the file

Delete columns I and M which should be adgroup ID and Impressions

Remove the first 6 rows of headings and labels etc

Remove the last row which is the totals

Sort by column C so that you can remove all rows that are about content targetting

Now you need to make sure your columns are in the following order

Campaign
Ad Group
Keyword
Keyword Matching
Max CPC
Keyword URL
Headline
Description 1
Description 2
Display URL
Destination URL

Then save as an excel file

Another problem here is that MSN doesn’t like ad titles which are of the form

{Keyword:Buy Stuff Here}

So you are going to need to do a find and replace on

{Keyword:

and

}

to get rid of them

Importing

Campaigns > Import

Make sure you select UK or whatever is relevant

Click import – point it at the excel file

cross your fingers, hold your breath and hope that it’s your lucky day

You’ll probably get some errors which have to be downloaded as a CSV file to review.

Some of these errors are purely created by Microsoft to help you grow in patience

However in the end it’s better than nothing – just!

You now need to go into your campaign in adcenter and go through and review every order as they are only imported in draft format. Nice touch eh?

If you give this a try then do leave me a comment and let me know if I have made any errors.

Adwords to Adcenter

Fraser — Fri, 25 May 2007 15:54:40 +0000

I’ve been working on a post about transferring your campaigns from Adwords to Adcenter but I’ve not quite finished it all yet. Anyone got any tips to share on this process and then I’ll combine everything together and publish the easiest process to follow.

Google Disorganisation

Fraser — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 14:22:38 +0000

Organise the world’s information? Don’t make me laugh. It doesn’t look like they can organise their own information. That’s a full screen of cluttered messages before I can simply check my adwords stats.

Why PPC restrictions don’t always make sense

Fraser — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 10:11:45 +0000

The Safe Shop recently sent out an email about new PPC restrictions introducing the follow restrictions

Affiliates using Pay Per Click such as Google Adwords are requested not to bid or cancel existing bids on brand name terms or derivations or misspellings including but not isolated to:

the safe shop
thesafeshop
the safeshop
safe shop
safeshop

Affiliates are not allowed to have adverts appear for searches on these or similar terms. To avoid broad match issues please include restricted terms as negative keywords in all your PPC campaigns for The Safe Shop.

As of the 1st April 2007 affiliates found bidding on restricted terms may have pending transactions cancelled or face temporary suspension from our programme.

I’ll always defend the merchants right to control their brand if they want to but I think sometimes restrictions are put in place without a full understanding of the issues. I just picked this one as a random example and I didn’t even know I was actually signed up to the program until I got this email.

Firstly does The Safe Shop have a recognised brand to protect? Are people searching for this company by typing “Safe Shop” into Google? If they are then here’s what they might find

The first two results, including the fairly dominant quick links are for a website called Shopsafe.co.uk followed by The Safe Shop which is closely followed by a site called SafeShop.co.uk so it looks to me like The Safe Shop isn’t a clear leader in the natural results.

Looking across at adwords I can see 5 different competitors who are all actually selling safes and the last result is an affiliate who I expect the network won’t allow to remain there for long.

So in the end what have The Safe Shop achieved by restricting PPC? To me it looks like they have just made it easier for competitors by removing any affiliates that were supporting them. Their competitors will have an easier time of it in terms of paid search and a top adwords result would have compensated for not holding the number 1 position in the natural results.

I think the issue is different for every merchant but I think smaller merchants with fairly generic business names need to take care with the restrictions they put in place as often actively working with your affiliates will be a lot more beneficial.

Interview with Jason Dale – Loquax

Fraser — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 10:00:24 +0000

Podcast 12

I’ve been speaking to Jason Dale from Loquax who is a very experienced affiliate. Jason started out with a competitions website and has grown to now operating websites in several different fields. Some of the subjects we discussed included..

Competitions & Affiliates
Online Bingo
E-mail Marketing or not!
UK Affiliate Association
Web hosting

Hosting & Domains

The Positive Internet Company
Hostroute
names.co.uk
Dedipower

I also mentioned a couple of topics in the introduction.

Intro Music was from Stomp Song by Apollo

Technorati Tags: Loquax, Online Bingo, Affiliate Association, Web hosting

Google Adwords set to take another swipe at affiliates

Fraser — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 13:02:59 +0000

A while back Google (GOOG) made some pretty dramatic changes to their mysterious quality scores and now it looks like they are getting ready to hit affiliates with another more dramatic set of changes.

A thread on a4uforum contains some information that was passed on to one of the forum moderators. It seems that landing pages, cashback sites & sites where you switch to a different domain at some point in the buying process could be in trouble.

Let’s wait and see what happens but once again it doesn’t look good for affiliates using adwords.

Interview – James Little – St Minver

Fraser — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 17:25:14 +0000

Podcast 10

On Friday last week I spoke to James Little from St Minver about a variety of issues connected to online gaming including

St Minver & White Label Gaming Solutions
New American Gambling Regulations
Implications for affiliates
Online Bingo Demographics
Adwords & Bingo Advertising
Gambling addiction and responsible promotion.
Which Affiliate Networks St Minver are working with

I also covered a few topics in the introduction which included

Intro Music was Stomp Song by Apollo

Technorati Tags: St Minver, online gaming, Online Bingo, Gambling

Podcast Interview with Kieron Donoghue from UK Offer

Fraser — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 18:51:37 +0000

Today’s podcast is with Kieron from UK Offer and this time we are taking a look at affiliate marketing from the affiliates perspective. Kieron shares some useful advice about how he has built his business around PPC advertising with Google Adwords.

Podcast Links

UK Offer
Kieron’s Blog
A4uforum
Google Adwords

This is the second of three ‘pilot’ episodes and in the next podcast I’ll be having a discussion with one of the affiliate networks. It would be great to get feedback from people to know if it’s worth producing more podcasts or which subjects people would like to hear more about so please leave a comment, even if it is just signing your name to let me know you listened.

You can also email me fraser@affiliateblog.co.uk

Google Adwords Editor First Impression

Fraser — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 11:34:15 +0000

I’ve just started using the Adwords Editor software and so far I think it’s pretty handy. For adding a few adgroups I still think it’s faster to just login to the account but this morning I’ve been doing some tidying up, renaming a bunch of adgroups, deleting old stuff etc and it’s a great tool for that kind of thing.

I still need to try out the bulk upload options but I think that could be pretty handy too. The only fault I can see with the tool is that it’s pretty slow. It’s supposed to be working offline but it seems like it stops every so often to check something online and then starts responding again. All in all it’s well worth a try but it’s still got a bit to go before I never need to login again.

Google Video Ads

Fraser — Tue, 23 May 2006 07:58:32 +0000

Google has just announced that video ads will soon be released to be included as part of an AdWords campaign. It’s a logical progression from standalone Google Video and will be really interesting to see how it works out.

My bet is that video is going to be huge, not just in Google Ads but as a marketing tool anywhere on the net. Video is going to be the way to tell your story and communicate effectively about your products. I’m hoping to try a few experiments in the use of video from an affiliates perspective so if I have anything interesting to write it will be here.

Take a look at this example where they have tripled conversion rates by leading with video.

Renaming AdWords Groups Could Be Easier

Fraser — Mon, 15 May 2006 09:50:19 +0000

The AdWords blog had a recent post about spring cleaning your AdWords account which is all good advice. My only question is why don’t they make it easier to rename an Ad Group?

If I am currently working on an Ad Group then to rename it I have to go back to the Campaign overview then scroll down to find the Ad Group I was working on, it could be number 95 of 100 then I need to scroll all the way back up again to click rename. I would love if they could just add a simple option as in my mock up below

p.s. I realise this is probably setting myself for up for someone to tell me there is a much easier way to do this than the way I described above!

Oh and another thing, this isn’t a tip to promote Sound Control as it never converted for me.

Click Fraud – Adsense Bowling

Fraser — Tue, 02 May 2006 15:33:20 +0000

Just finished reading an interesting and scary article about Adsense Bowling. This is the practice of deliberately trying to get a competitor kicked off the adsense program and have their account closed. A quick search on the web definitely shows that this seems to be happening to a lot of people and I can see that it would be very difficult for Google to control. Adsense is just a chunk of code that could be lifted from any page displaying it and easily misused.

I suppose they will be using some of the same tactics that they use to fight click fraud on Google Adwords but they have always been pretty vague about what techniques are used. I’ve read a few interesting articles which are listed here

The adwords blog disputes the 30% fraud stat but The Register article lists fraud as accounting for between 10-20% of clicks and it’s scary to think that this could well be true. For every £1000 spent on adwords, £200 of it could be going to people who are defrauding the system and have no intention of buying your products.

As this scales up it’s hard to see how Google are going to stay on top of it and I wonder if advertisers will eventually begin to turn their back on PPC unless it can be controlled.

Affiliate Services

Fraser — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 11:21:42 +0000

What services does an affiliate need? Well I can only tell you what this affiliate uses but there might be something of interest amongst this. In other posts I’ll take a look at what software I use and how I work but for now here are some services that I pay for each month.

Hosting - you need a decent web host who isn’t going to let you down and preferably based in the country you are targetting. We use a dedicated server from Dedipower for the important stuff and I host some other sites with Hostroute, DSVR & Webtapestry. I’ve been using them all for a while now and while none of them are prefect they are all pretty good. I always use a Linux host with PHP & MySQL. cPanel is a handy control panel too which is available with the Hostroute package
Domains - the affiliate addiction problem is buying way more domains than you have time to use and so I like the low prices at 123-reg which means this is never too much of a mistake. £6.09 for a .co.uk for two years is a good price including the flexibility that their control panel gives.
Clipart - I subscribe to clipart.com which offers me some inspiration from time to time. The cartoon clipart is pretty poor but I like the Photo Objects.
VOIP - from Gradwell. I don’t get many calls so the reduced line rental compared to BT makes a difference. Call quality isn’t always great but I like the flexibility. I can just unplug my VOIP adapter from my router and plug it in to a router anywhere in the world and still use the same land line number.
Google Adwords – it’s kind of a love/hate relationship. Adwords is my biggest monthly expense and on one hand it’s the key to making money each month but I do feel there are doing what they can to squeeze out affiliates

Strange Adwords Trademarks

Fraser — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 21:01:56 +0000

Due to trademark reasons, we do not allow advertisers to use ‘fresh air’ in their Google AdWords ads. This term may be trademarked either for a certain product or service category and may apply only in certain countries.
Due to trademark reasons, we do not allow advertisers to use ‘mission’ in their Google AdWords ads. This term may be trademarked either for a certain product or service category and may apply only in certain countries.
Ad text: “1 Hour Photos”
Unless verified by a third party, your ad text cannot contain comparative or subjective phrases such as ‘Best,’ ‘Lowest,’ or ‘#1.’ This verification must be clearly displayed on your website. Please remove ’1′ from your ad.

I think they seem to enjoy making life difficult…