Google describes it thus:

Google acquired the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate operations in March 2008. Together, we’re creating new opportunities for monetization, expansion, and innovation in affiliate marketing.

Performics was founded as the first full-service affiliate network in 1998 and was acquired by DoubleClick in 2004. Today Performics Affiliate operates as Google Affiliate Network and remains committed to delivering affiliate channel growth for advertisers and publishers.

Google has been attempting to enter the affiliate marketing industry since early 2007. At the time Google launched its Referral Program within the Adsense network. This program offered lackluster results, and Google announced it will be closing the Adsense Referrals program soon.

Publishers have the option to replace the referral ad placements with traditional Adsense ads. Google is encouraging them to sign up for the new Google Affiliate Network.

It will be interesting to see how the Google search and Adwords platforms respond to the new Google Affiliate Network link technology. It is common knowledge in the affiliate marketing industry that Google penalizes naked affiliate links.

Uncloaked affiliate links will prevent affiliate pages from ranking well in the SERP’s. Google has been penalizing affiliate links, because it has stated that “thin affiliates” offer little value other than a “doorway page” to another site.

It is ironic that Google is now pushing a network of publishers who will be doing just that.

Google Adwords has also penalized affiliate landing pages with uncloaked affiliate links with its infamous “Quality Score” known to affiliate marketers as the Google Slap. This results in immediate bid requirements of $5 to $10 per click. The end result makes Adwords advertising impossible without using link cloaking and other methods.

 I will be watching and probably experimenting with whether Google will be applying their search and Adwords penalty to publishers using their own affiliate network. I ask all my readers the following important question.

Will Google’s enthusiasm for their new Affiliate Network skew their standard penalty against affiliates?

Feel free to let me know your thoughts on this question.

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.

 

Ads that are placed above the search results generate a much higher volume of clicks when compared to those placed on the right side of the search page. The clickthrough rate is also much higher if your ad takes the top position, but the conversion rate is not always as good. Top positions generate a lot of impulse clicks that are less likely to convert into a sale. Is Google planning on moving more people into the top positions? They describe the change as follows:

With this new formula, instead of considering your actual CPC, we’ll consider your maximum CPC bid, which you control. This means that your ad’s eligibility to be promoted is no longer dependent on the bids of advertisers below you. Therefore, if you have a high quality ad, you now have more control to achieve a top position by increasing your maximum CPC.

Your actual CPC will continue to be determined by the auction, but subject to a minimum price for top spots. The minimum price is based on the quality of your ad and is the minimum amount required for your ad to achieve top placement above Google search results. As always, the higher your ad’s quality, the less you will pay. And you will never be charged more than your maximum CPC bid. [read more]

The mention of “minimum price” says it all. Google is going to start setting a baseline max CPC for all ads that get listed in top positions. This is possibly as a result of the new information that Google now has access to with it’s recent purchase of DoubleClick/Performics. Many fear that as Google is able to follow each search all the way to the checkout process they will want to raise prices to compensate for those earning an extraordinary ROI. Could this be happening already?

It is not likely that they have already integrated conversion and ROI data into what they demand for click prices, but that situation might not be too far off. Click prices are going to continue to rise as they have for the last several years.

Hello,

Thank you for advertising with the Google AdWords program. As a
special thank you, we are pleased to offer you an enhanced level
of customer support for being one of our top AdWords advertisers.

AdWords continually strives to provide new and effective features
to enhance the Google user experience. We’re testing a new support
option that allows you to contact an AdWords Specialist by phone
with just the click of a button. We pay for the call and we even
do the dialing — all you need to do is pick up the phone and
talk.

Try it out by visiting our Help Center via the ‘Contact Us’ link
within your account. After clicking ‘Contact Us,’ follow the
prompts to identify your concern. You’ll then be offered the
option to speak directly to an AdWords Specialist by entering your
contact phone number and clicking ‘Call.’ When your phone rings,
answer it; you’ll hear ringing on the line as we connect you
directly to our AdWords support team. It’s that easy.

This service is completely free to users; Google pays all local
and long distance charges. However, if you give us a mobile phone
number, your normal airtime fees or other fees charged by your
provider for the call may apply.

AdWords Specialists are available by phone Monday – Thursday,
from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. PST (U.S.), or on Friday, from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m.
PST (U.S.).

We’re excited to offer you this new way to get immediate AdWords
help right when you need it.

Sincerely,

The Google AdWords Team

That sounds like a good idea to me. I have spent a significant amount of time on the phone with Adwords Support. I can appreciate the effort for them to make it a little easier to the end user. Just for the hell of it I logged in an tried it.

I clicked the Contact Us link on the upper right hand side of the account pages. I selected the category out of about 10 to choose from that my question fell under. “Other” in this case, because I am just trying it out. Then I get a field to enter my phone number. I enter it and click the “Call” button….

The Phone Rings….

 I pick up the phone and it says “…connecting” starts ringing and before I know it there is an Adwords Rep answering the phone. Nice!

The other major difference between AdSpyPro and UnderCoverProfits is that Ad Spy Pro doesn’t have a subscription fee or limits on the number of keywords you can monitor.

They can do this because they are releasing the software package for installation on the end user’s server. They will install it for you for $30 extra. This means you have to pay the server costs, but you will not have to pay $300 a month like those who are currently subscribed to UnderCoverProfits.

To tell you the truth I am one of those people who have been using UnderCoverProfits, but I just made a purchase of Ad Spy Pro. I am looking forward to saving that $300 a month in fees from Under Cover Profits.

I am not sure if it will have all the features of UnderCoverProfits, but at that price it doesn’t have to. If you want to check it out here is the link: http://adspypro.income-booster.info/

As we have discussed on this blog, affiliate marketers have been scrambling to regain their Google paid traffic ever since Google implemented it’s infamous quality score algorithm. There is no fighting it. The quality score algorithm is here to stay. Mike is pointing the way search engine marketing is now headed.

Search Engine Marketing is Dead…at least as we have come to know it in the past. The days of bid power have dwindled, and a time of synergy has emerged. Synergy between account structure, keyword bids, ad copy and landing page quality is now the undeniable recipe for search success.  Never before has a thorough understanding of the mechanism or funnel of search been more important. In fact, not being an expert on the various pieces of search will leave you in a constant state of bewilderment: Why can’t I get to the top of the listings for my best converting terms? Why does the chart mapping my ROI show a continued movement toward higher CPC’s and less profitability?

The answer is easy…its called Quality Score Optimization (QSO), and it’s the only way to professionally approach search engine marketing in 2007.

The problem many smaller search engine marketers face is the amount of testing it takes to optimize a paid search campaign with QSO. Paid search is no longer the easy entry point for those who know nothing about SEO. Search engine marketing is going the way of SEO. SEM’s will have to chase after Google’s newest algorithm, which like their natural one, will likely continue to change.

Search engine marketing is an ever changing landscape. At times we get a glimpse over the horizon and see where we are headed. Mike Jones at Pepperjam Search just had one of those moments and shared it with us all.

It was a Monday morning and like any other Monday morning I was logging into my affiliate network accounts and my pay per click accounts to check on our numbers over the weekend. Upon logging into our main Adwords account I was surprised to see a total spend over the weekend of $30,000!

My adrenaline started to rush and my mind raced to figure out if I had turned a bid up too high and charged over $30,000 in clicks in 2 days. I checked the date range. It was correct. I checked the affiliate network to see what kind of earnings spending $30,000 in a weekend brought in. Nothing was out of the ordinary, and there certainly wasn’t enough to cover that kind of spending.

So I dug deeper to see which adgroup might have taken off, all the while I was wondering how my budgeting could have been blown out so badly. I keep a reasonable budget limit on all of our Adwords campaigns to keep a handle on runaway adgroups.

I opened up the campaign and immediately noticed that the campaign budget had been changed to $20,000/day. I saw which adgroup it was, and realized this was an adgroup that had been virtually inactive for several months. I checked on the ads and found that the ads that charged all those clicks were not my ads. They were not affiliate ads at all. They were driven directly to a forex site. I checked the bid and the keywords and found that both had been changed. The bid was set to $20.00 a click and the keywords were forex based. My keywords had been deleted.

 My nerves started to calm as I realized my Adwords account had been hacked. I thought surely Google would have a record of the hacker who accessed my account. They would be able to tell it was not me who made those changes. At that point, I knew they would credit my account for the charges in question.

I immediately contacted Google. They had never heard of any account being hacked, so my issue was escalated to the top level team for a click fraud investigation. The next day they gave me word that they were still investigating but the preliminary result was a confirmed case of an account hijacking. They shut down my account, and advised me to move everything over into a new account. Thank god for the Adwords Editor! You’ve got to love copy and paste.

I contacted my credit card company and they cancelled my card and established a new one to be sent out in the mail.

Upon completion of the investigation Google informed me that the account had indeed been hijacked, and advised me how to avoid such a hijacking in the future. I asked if they had the IP address of the hacker, but they said they did not.

I was curious because I do have several employees with access to that account and I wanted to be sure they were not responsible. In the process of communications with Google, they accidentally leaked an internal email that had the IP address in it. I looked it up and it was in the Netherlands. No surprises there. At least I know my employees are honest.

So how can you protect your Adwords account from being hacked? I have put together a few tips

1. Have everyone who works in your account use a separate username and password. This way if one password is compromised you can just eliminate one user’s access. This also simplifies things if you have to fire an employee, because you just take one user’s access away and everyone else’s passwords stay the same. This was the main thing Google advised us to do in the future. You can give other users access to your account under the Account tab through the Access link.
2. Use randomly generated passwords like those that are generated using Roboform. The password that was compromised was one of those made up ones that are easy to remember. Even though it had 2 numerals in it, it was much easier to break than one that is randomly generated.
3. Keep your budgeting in place. You should set your campaign budgets about twice what they usually spend. This way you will not lose money by hitting your budget, but nothing will run away from you. (unless the hacker raises your budget like mine did, but budgeting could protect you from a lazy hacker who forgets this step)
4. Have someone check on your account on a daily basis. The person who hacked our Adwords account clearly planned the change over the weekend to maximize the traffic he would get out of it. It was changed late Friday night, and I did not discover it until Monday morning. He also chose a forgotten campaign in the hopes it would not be noticed. It had not received any clicks in over a month.

In looking back on this event, I realize that it did not turn out so badly. Google recognized the account was hijacked and credited the account. The Adwords Editor made it relatively easy to move all our campaigns into a new account. The credit card did not get compromised before it was cancelled. It was not that bad for me, but it could have been much worse.

What if the hacker had simply replaced my affiliate ID with his own across all of our campaigns? I might have been managing his campaigns for a week before I even noticed, and I doubt Google would have given us credit in that scenario.

Advertisers beware and protect your account access. Even Google gets hacked now and then.

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