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

 

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…

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.

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.

 

“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.

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:

• X-Ray Domination
• UnderCoverProfits

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.

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.

Inability to Search

MSN adCenter makes it very difficult to find an adgroup by name unless you know which campaign it is in. They offer a search interface, but if you try to search across the whole account, it does not allow you to. The only way to search is within each campaign. To further complicate things, they do not allow you to view all the adgroups in a campaign on one page. You can only view 30 adgroups per page, and when you have a large account like we do, this is very inconvenient. Not surprisingly, Google Adwords has the best search interface by far, allowing you to search by any keyword and generating a list of adgroups and keywords that match your search. All pay per click networks should aspire to do the same.

Bulk Uploads?

This is perhaps the worst bulk uploading interface I have seen. They separate the keyword uploads from the ad copy uploads, and you have to upload at the adgroup level. You cannot simply create a sheet and upload an entire account like you can in both Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. Adwords is again the leader in this arena with their Adwords Editor. Adwords Editor is a desktop program that allows you to work locally, make changes, create new adgroups, create new campaigns, adjust bids, and more. When you are done with all your changes you simply upload them to your account and they are live in a matter of minutes. Yahoo has a somewhat more complicated system, but it works, and though I haven’t tested it yet, they now offer an Adwords sheet converter that offers to take your Adwords account and copy it into your Yahoo account. This is a great idea if it actually works.

MSN adCenter has nothing of the sort, though I was told a desktop interface like that of Google’s is in the works. Knowing Microsoft it might be years away. It is badly needed to say the least. To upload anything into MSN adCenter you have to manually create your adgroup in their interface, then navigate to the upload page, upload your keywords, then upload your ads. There are 2 separate sheets for these. I have been asking myself in disbelief for months: there has to be a better way. They must offer some sort of conversion system. That brings me to MSN adCenter’s “Quick Launch”.

Quick Launch?

I called adCenter support to ask for their help in moving my many Adwords and Google accounts into MSN. I thought they would be happy to help, as we would be spending thousands each month as a result of the move. After telling me there is no bulk upload that can be used across the entire account, they told me about their QuickLaunch program. This is a program the MSN offers to new advertisers for the first 30 days to help them setup their account and to move Adwords and Yahoo accounts over to their interface. Perfect! Well that is what I thought at the time. So I got on the list. About a week later I was contacted by someone from the Quick Launch team. She wanted to setup a time to meet when we could go over our needs and get started. We setup a time to meet. The day before the meeting she cancelled because she was sick. Another week passed. Then the following week she attempted to contact me again, but I was in the middle of a week of meetings…Next thing I know the 30 days had passed and I no longer qualified for their Quick Launch because I was no longer a new account holder. In the mean time I had several employees adding adgroups to their system manually.

I contacted them again about 2 weeks ago, and I explained my situation. This time I got a really nice woman who sympathized and promised to reinvoke my status into the Quick Launch program, due to the circumstances of the expiration. She has put in requests to the Quick Launch team 4 times so far with no response. Apparently they are treating her, a Microsoft employee, as poorly as they were treating me. They basically ignore her. She contacts me every few days to let me know she is still working on it, but frankly, I doubt she will ever get me any help. It is quite ironic that the system named “Quick Launch” turns out to be anything but…

Open Discussion of MSN adCenter experiences

I want to open up a discussion of people’s experiences with MSN adCenter, whether it has to do with Quick Launch or just work with it in general. Perhaps I am the only one having these problems, but I doubt it. Please share your experiences in the comments section. Perhaps someone has some tips on how to make it work, or perhaps it is a lost cause.