Adwords Wants to Help!? – Unless You’re an Affiliate
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Google, Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, adCenter | Comments Off
I just got an email that confirms what I have been saying for a long, long time. Most affiliates know by now that Adwords hates affiliates. They do not like affiliate so-called “doorway pages”. They do not like the fact that affiliate marketing is a lucrative internet business that they do not control. They do not like affiliates…..period.Â
After Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick/Performics we have all been waiting to see how Google will deal with affiliates that are working “for them” and their advertisers. I digress…..now let’s take a look at the email.
Here is the exact email (don’t miss the bolded section):
Dear AdWords Advertiser,
We’d like to help you get the most out of your AdWords campaigns. We’re offering Google’s team of specialists to help with your AdWords account at no cost to you.
Tell us about your AdWords campaign and how you’d like it improved, and one of our specialists will create a detailed campaign proposal designed to meet your goals. This type of campaign optimization can include ideas for your keywords, ad text, campaign structure, bids, targeting settings, and more.
The goal of our optimization service is to improve your campaign performance and help you meet your advertising goals. You’ll stay in full control of your account and can accept or decline the campaign options we provide.
If you’re interested, all you have to do is request a campaign optimization. (Please note that this offer is not available for affiliate advertisers.)
Learn more about Google’s optimization service. You can also check out our optimization tips page at http://adwords.google.com/select/tips.html.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
The Google AdWords Team
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I do have to point out that Google is now offering this feature about 18 months later than Yahoo. Yahoo has been offering to help me with my campaigns for over a year and believe it or not they don’t care that I am an affiliate. My money is as green as the next guy’s at Yahoo, but not at Google.
Affiliates should make it a point to support Yahoo and their recent affiliate friendly initiatives. At least one major player is showing respect to a method of marketing that predates Google itself…
Microsoft Offers $45 Billion for Yahoo!
Filed Under Adsense, Affiliate Marketing, Google Adwords, MSN, Pay Per Click, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Yahoo Publisher Network, Yahoo Search Marketing, adCenter | Comments Off
In a surprise unsolicited bid this morning, Microsoft offered $44.6 billion for the purchase of Yahoo! Inc. This comes out to just over $31 a share, and it seems that Microsoft is attempting to take advantage of the soft stock market. As the news hit, Yahoo! stocks were immediately up almost 50%, but what does this all mean to the affiliate marketer?
Let’s take a closer look at the deal being offered first. Microsoft’s press release states:
Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) today announced that it has made a proposal to the Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) Board of Directors to acquire all the outstanding shares of Yahoo! common stock for per share consideration of $31 representing a total equity value of approximately $44.6 billion. Microsoft’s proposal would allow the Yahoo! shareholders to elect to receive cash or a fixed number of shares of Microsoft common stock, with the total consideration payable to Yahoo! shareholders consisting of one-half cash and one-half Microsoft common stock. The offer represents a 62 percent premium above the closing price of Yahoo! common stock on Jan. 31, 2008.
   “We have great respect for Yahoo!, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market,” said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft. “We believe our combination will deliver superior value to our respective shareholders and better choice and innovation to our customers and industry
partners.”   “Our lives, our businesses, and even our society have been
progressively transformed by the Web, and Yahoo! has played a pioneering role by building compelling, high-scale services and infrastructure,” said Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft. “The combination of these two great teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers that neither of us would have achieved on our
own.”
Let’s discuss how this all affects affiliate marketers. If this deal goes through it could decrease the competition within the search market, which is generally a bad thing in my mind. This means that the impact of one company’s change in policy could more severely damage affiliate marketers, as Google did with Google Slap #1 and Google Slap #2. No one knows if there will continue to be further slaps from Google.
That said, I would much rather see Microsoft purchasing Yahoo! Inc. than Google. At least there would still be 2 very large players in the search market. Microsoft would be able create a balance to the power of Google. Yahoo’s Publisher Network would enhance Microsoft’s attempts to expand it’s content network and technology.
One question that comes up on the practical side of things is whether Microsoft would attempt to consolidate it’s own search under the Yahoo brand or vice versa. Since Yahoo has a much larger market share than Microsoft, I imagine that would be the case. This makes less work for affiliate marketers who spend a good deal of time modifying campaigns for three separate search engines at present. The downside to this is increased competition within the PPC sphere driving costs up.
It still remains to be seen whether Yahoo! Inc. will take the unsolicited offer made by Microsoft, but they sure did try to make the deal pretty sweet! – a 62% premium on the current stock price will be a hard offer to decline. We will just have to wait and see.
Affiliate Radar Review
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Google Adwords, MSN, Reviews, Yahoo Search Marketing, adCenter | Comments Off
When I first heard about Affiliate Radar what intrigued me was the ability to manage reporting and convert Adwords campaigns easily into Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter’s bulk upload formats. I have been outsourcing the conversion of campaigns from Adwords into Yahoo and MSN formats for a long time. ‘If there was something that would automate this process that would be great’ I thought to myself. Well that was late in the summer of 2007. I just recently subscribed to affiliate radar and I am going to share some of my thoughts.
Conversion of Campaigns to Other Formats
This is probably the best feature of Affiliate Radar to date. There has long been a need for a script that would automatically convert a CSV from the Adwords Editor format into YSM and MSN bulk uploading formats. The only problem is that both Yahoo and MSN have known this for a long time, and now they are both offering to convert them for you. Well, they claim to do it for you, but it doesn’t always work.
Yahoo’s conversion script certainly leaves the user wanting. In my experience the Yahoo conversion does not really work without assisting it with a lot of manual edits, thus making it useless. So there is a niche here for Affiliate Radar, which actually does a good job of converting CSV’s from Adwords into YSM and MSN formats.
MSN on the other hand just released this option and I haven’t had the chance to test it yet. It may be just like Yahoo’s or it may actually work.
I have tested this feature in Affiliate Radar and it works nicely. The upload into MSN adCenter went without a hitch, but you still have to set the campaign targeting and activate the ad groups manually, but that is not Affiliate Radar’s fault, it is MSN’s.
Apparently the most recent Adcenter update makes this possible in bulk. Meaning you can select all the new adgroups and activate them all at once, rather than one at a time. That in itself would be a huge improvement in the Adcenter platform, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
Reporting
The report functionality inside of Affiliate Radar was quite lacking for anyone running a significant amount of PPC campaigns. I thought someone had finally figured out a great way to track campaigns at the keyword level without requiring a vast installation of scripts on a server. It turns out that is doesn’t do all it claims to do, at least not yet.
The automatic generation of subid tracking for all of the major PPC engines is a great idea. This eliminates the need to generate unique tracking codes for each and every adgroup or for those meticulous people for each and every keyword.
Most affiliate marketers track on the adgroup level and not the keyword level, because it can become unmanageable to track every keyword. I bid on close to a million keywords. How am I supposed to track every single one? This is where Affiliate Radar is supposed to come in, and they largely do.
Once you upload a report from the affiliate network, AR quickly compiles a keyword report showing which keywords are converting and which ones are not. Awesome! I thought to myself until I looked for a place to upload my PPC report from Adwords. There was none. That is where my critique comes in.
It is nearly impossible to track and bid based on data that is generated purely from an affiliate network. The affiliate network data has to be reconciled with PPC network data. This is because there is always a discrepancy between the number of clicks an affiliate network will show in its reports and the number a clicks that are actually paid for.
Sometimes the affiliate network will report more clicks; sometimes they will report less clicks. This depends on which network you are talking about. But there is always a discrepancy, and if I am going to bid on EPC data that is reported it is the PPC network clicks that should be counted. This is for the very simple reason that: THESE ARE THE CLICKS YOU ACTUALLY PAID FOR!
You aren’t going to bid based on clicks that may or may not have actually happened. Most PPC networks filter clicks for fraud, and you usually pay for less clicks than you actually get. But in the game of PPC affiliate marketing it is the paid clicks that you want to account for. These are the clicks that you need an accurate EPC on. Not the clicks reported by the affiliate network.
So until Affiliate Radar adds the ability to reconcile reports from both ends: cost and commission; they will just be a nice way to convert Adwords files into YSM and MSN formats, which I have to admit, is probably worth the $97 per month, at least for the time being.
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Yahoo Search Marketing Launches Quality-Based Pricing
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing, MSN, Quality Score, Search Engine Marketing, Yahoo, Yahoo Search Marketing, adCenter | Comments Off
Yahoo just announced that they will begin offering discounts on clicks from their Sponsored Search and Content Match network of websites. They are going to discount clicks based on the quality of traffic their search affiliates and content network websites provide. They are calling this “quality-based pricing“.
“Quality” is calculated based on conversion rates and other measurements of the ability to deliver more interested and valuable customers to you from particular distribution partner sites. Discounts will be automatically applied to your account.
Apparently click discounts will start taking place today and they will be automatically credited. No changes by the end user are necessary. We will all begin receiving a discount on clicks. Who can complain about that? How significant that discount will be remains to be seen, but I hope some readers will post their experiences in the comments.
Those who extensively use the content network and Yahoo search affiliates will likely see the lion’s share of the discounts. Yahoo is recognizing that their search affiliates and content network do not provide the same level of quality that the standard search results offer.
Everyone who has done any significant search marketing already knows this, but it is interesting that Yahoo would come right out and admit it. I think it is a good move in the direction of greater transparency. Yahoo is continuing to roll out improvements to their Panama platform. Preliminary results are good, but whether or not they will increase market share remains to be seen.
I find myself thankful that Google is not the only game in town. Competition is good for everyone. Now if MSN could just get their search marketing platform in order, we might see some serious innovation.
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: