Under Cover Profits vs. X-Ray Domination
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, adCenter | 1 Comment
Under Cover Profits, perhaps the best affiliate marketing tool to be released this year, just went on sale about an hour ago. Only 300 of these subscriptions will be offered, so you better go get it if you want it.
This tool is very clever and it’s purpose is to take the guesswork out of finding the profitable PPC campaigns across the major affiliate networks. It does this by checking the PPC ads for any keyword you can think of for affiliate URL’s. It continues to check them every day for 30 days. Then it shows you the results. If an affiliate has been there every day for 30 days it is very likely a profitable keyword for that affiliate. Why else would he continue to bid on that keyword?
As a company we have invested a huge amount of resources into keyword discovery just to find the kind of niches that Under Cover Profits will find for you. We will no longer have to test each and every keyword we think of. We can just check to see which keywords there are other affiliates bidding on, and know these are the profitable keywords. This will save us a huge amount of time and money testing keywords that turn out to be losers.
Last week Rich Jerk also released a new database software called X-Ray Domination. The purpose of this software is to allow the affiliate to identify which of their own keywords are the most profitable ones. This is completely different. Under Cover Profits is for expansion of your current keyword list. X-Ray is to allow you to identify which keywords that you currently use are the most profitable ones.
X-Ray operates on the principle of 80/20: that 80 percent of your revenue is generated by 20 percent of your keywords. If you eliminate 80 percent of your keywords and maintain the same revenue, then your profit margin has grown exponentially. That is the idea anyway. As a company, we have developed our own database to allow us to track our spend and revenue.
Here is how Under Cover Profits sums it up:
 RJ X-Ray Software works after you set up your campaign. That’s important because with X-Ray Software, you’re testing on your own dollars. Sure, it helps speed up the process, but it still puts your money at risk in the testing process.
UnderCover Profits is different. First off, you use it before setting up your campaign. That way, all you do is copy and paste winning campaigns into your account AFTER our system does the dirty work. You aren’t putting you money at risk; but actually leveraging other people’s testing and money!
I am not affiliated with either product and I am not recommending either one. They each have their place and purpose. They are both quite expensive, so spend your money wisely. Here are the links to the 2 products:
Bid on Brand Name Keywords? Case Study Results
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Brand Name Bidding, Google Adwords, Online Advertising, Pay Per Click, Search Engine Marketing, Yahoo Search Marketing, adCenter | Comments Off
I just read a fascinating case study on brand name bidding across the big three search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN. Jonathon Mendez concludes:
Running the PPC ads alongside the natural results for brand keyword queries provides a huge lift in orders and revenue for our client. The paid search ads clearly have a tremendous influence on user behavior. The ads did not drive more traffic but they drove more traffic that purchased.
This study showed that having PPC ads alongside natural results, does not have a significant impact on the amount of traffic the site receives, but it has a dramatic impact on the amount of revenue each visitor generates. He shows in a chart that the RPV (Revenue Per Visitor) increases by as much as 47% when the PPC ads are present. I think this is because the ad copy is preselling the visitors before they enter the site. It is easy to write good ad copy for PPC, but it is not so easy to get the search engine to display snippets that increase conversions.
It is important to note that this study was on 30 different branded keywords. So if your company has been struggling with justifying the spend on the PPC ads when you are already number one in the natural results, you have to read this case study. It shows that having PPC ads for your branded terms is not only a good strategy; it increases conversions across the board.
How is this relevant to affiliate marketing? As I have been discussing on this blog, brand name bidding has been in the midst of hot debate for about 2 years now. Very few companies have run these kinds of tests to determine the efficacy of allowing affiliates to bid on branded terms. Jonathon Mendez’s study clearly shows that someone should be bidding on branded terms, either through affiliate marketers or through an in-house program.
One study I would like to see is one that does a cost-benefit analysis of in-house brand name bidding compared to open affiliate brand name bidding. I would predict the open affiliate brand name bidding would drive more conversions, because with so many affiliates competing with each other, only the best ads would make it to the top. It would have to take into account those affiliates bidding on branded terms, sending the traffic to their own site, preselling that traffic, and then sending that traffic on to the merchant site. This is the kind of traffic that many affiliate managers want, but they can’t get it without outsourcing the brand name bidding on their display URL as well.
It is extremely difficult to manage the policy that permits brand name bidding but prohibits the use of the merchant’s display URL.
Jonathon Medez will be presenting this data in more detail in his presentation Ad Testing Research and Findings at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies in New York on April 12th 2007. Check it out if you are interested.
Give Affiliates Landing Pages on an Alternative Domain
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Brand Name Bidding, Google Adwords, Pay Per Click, Quality Score, Yahoo Search Marketing, adCenter | Comments Off
Affiliates and affiliate managers have been distraught by the problems caused by the display URL policy Google implemented, what seems like ages ago by now, in January of 2005. Google stated:
With this new affiliate policy, we’ll only display one ad per search query for affiliates and parent companies sharing the same URL. This way, users will have a more diverse sampling of advertisements to choose from. As always, your ad will be displayed based on its Ad Rank for given searches, which is determined by a combination of your ad’s maximum cost-per-click (price) and clickthrough rate (performance).
The rest is history as they say. Many PPC affiliates lost their bread and butter virtually overnight. Ever since, affiliate managers have had to closely guard the use of their domain as a display URL, because if they didn’t their affiliates would outcompete them for the one PPC spot available for each search.
Some affiliate programs have just prohibited the use of the keywords that the in-house search engine marketing team uses. Under this model, the affiliates are allowed to use the remaining keywords and variations. But that has caused trouble with broad matching, and it requires using the prohibited words as negative keywords. Unfortunately, many affiliates are unaware of how to do this. So, affiliates get a bad name for bidding on keywords they are not supposed to be bidding on. Affiliate managers get frustrated and the search engine marketing team is livid.
Now if we fast forward to the most recent “slap” Google has given to affiliate marketers, we have to talk about landing page quality score. Now Google is not only interested in the CTR, ad copy, trademark use and display URL; they are also interested in the content of the landing page. Many believe, and I have to agree with them, this goes beyond just the landing page. Google Adwords now evaluates your entire site and gives it a quality score based on the relevancy of the content to the keywords you are trying to buy. The end result was that affiliates who were enterprising enough to develop landing pages so their display URL would be different from the merchant they are promoting, again lost a majority of their PPC traffic overnight. Google called affiliate landing pages “doorway pages” and expressed the opinion that they brought down their overall user experience.
The simplest solution I see to this problem is for affiliate programs to start buying a single domain to host landing pages specifically for use by affiliates for PPC marketing. The landing page would not be considered a “doorway page” by Google if it was owned & operated by the merchant and it did not have any affiliate links on it.
Now affiliates would have to compete for that one display URL but it would not interfere with any in-house search engine marketing by the merchant. This method would also help eliminate competitors from the results by preserving top spots on the search results pages for in-house and affiliate efforts.
Let me know what you think.
Build an Online Media Business that Earns $50 million
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing, Multivariate Testing, Online Advertising, Search Engine Marketing, Split-Testing | Comments Off
How do you build an online media business that earns $50,000,000 in revenue each year? Tim O’Reilly has a post titled The Economics of Online Advertising that points to a blog post by Jeremy Liew titled Three ways to build an online media business to $50m in revenue. It is a simple matter of math:
At the $1 RPM (CPM/CPA/CPC) level achieved by most general sites, you need 4 billion page views/month. At the $5 RPM level achieved by demographically targeted sites, you need 800 million/month. At the $20 RPM level achieved by highly targeted sites, you need 200 million/month.
For me this underscores the need to have a site that converts a large percent of its visitors. With a sloppy site that does not convert well, you need 4 billion page views per month. With a medicre site you need 800 million per month. That is a huge difference! That is a difference of 3,200,000,000 page views. Simply because the second site converts it’s traffic 5 times better than the first. Let’s take a look at the highly optimized site that converts 20 times better than the sloppy site. For this site to earn $50 million dollars in revenue per year, you only need 200 million page views per month.
Well those are the numbers but how do you get there? Testing, testing and more testing. The key to this formula is to develop a highly optimized site. Obviously you also need the traffic, but we will discuss that in another post.
In this post I am going to recommend multivariate testing. Multivariate testing is an accelerated version of A/B split testing. A/B split testing will test on page element against another. These 2 elements could be different headlines, different colors of links, or even different margins. What makes multivariate testing so amazing is that you can test multiple page elements at the same time. I have used one called Split Test Accelerator that is amazing. It will literally test 7 elements with 7 possible values on a single page. So, you are effectively able to test 49 elements all at once. It would take 25 A/B split testing iterations to do that!
 Another multivariate testing product I can recommend is from a blogger who specializes in statistical testing of just about everything related to internet marketing. His name is James Brausch. The name of his mutlivariate testing software is MuVar.
If you get a significant flow of traffic and you are not using any testing software like this, you will see dramatic results as you implement the winning combinations of factors. You could double your revenue just by increasing you conversion rates. So go get testing!
Latest Version of Adwords Editor Released
Filed Under Google, Google Adwords, Google Adwords Editor, MSN, Pay Per Click, Search Engine Marketing, Yahoo Search Marketing | Comments Off
PPC Blog recently announced the latest release of Google’s Adwords Editor. Adwords Editor is a desktop software that allows you to make changes to Adwords accounts locally and then upload them directly from your desktop. It is an awesome tool that has completely changed the way I operate Google Adwords accounts. This tool has almost immediately become a crucial to my management of over 10 Adwords accounts. If you want to use it, you can download Adwords Editor here.
 The latest version has many new features. These include:
- Site Targeting
- Negative Site targeting
- The ability to edit one account while another uploads
- Selection row counting
- Change the status of all selected rows at one time to either paused, active or deleted.
- Export the account listings to HTML files. This is particularly useful for displaying an account to someone who does not have Adwords Editor installed.
- The ability to paste to multiple selected adgroups at once.
There are just 2 things that are causing me problems with this new upgrade.Â
First, Google has lowered the number of campaigns you can have in any one account. The latest version of Adwords Editor is enforcing this, and preventing me from adding any more than 15 campaigns per account. This is a strict limitation that has been causing me some headaches lately. There are workarounds of course, like combining campaigns together.
Second, the multiple account upload has not worked very well and it is giving me errors. The Adwords Editor uses a lot of computational power and my computer can slow significantly when I have a lot going on in the Adwords Editor. It does this more than any other desktop program I run, including notorious resource hogs like Adobe Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Large Access databases, etc…
Nevertheless, Google has once again innovated the PPC market immensely with the original release of the Adwords Editor program. Yahoo and MSN will be trying to catch their coattails if they can.