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…

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/

Ebay pays high volume publishers a much better percentage of sales than they pay to lower level publishers. Shoemoney estimates they are generating about 400,000 clicks per day through their new AuctionAds platform. That is an incredible amount of volume.

If you sign up as an eBay affiliate on your own here is the commission structure you will be faced with:

Revenue Share Compensation

eBay Revenue Compensation
$0 – $99.99 50%
$100.00 – $4,999.99 55%
$5,000.00 – $199,999.99 60%
$200,000.00 – $699,999.99 65%
$700,000.00 – $2,999,999.99 70%
$3,000,000.00 + 75%

Active Registered User (ACRU)

ACRUs Compensation
1 – 49 $25.00
50 – 1,999 $28.00
2,000 – 29,999 $31.00
30,000 + $35.00

This in itself makes it clear why Auction Ads is such a good idea. By pooling many affiliates traffic together AA (AuctionAds) are able to maintain the top tier commission payout of 75%. That is 25% better than what someone starting out on their own would earn. This is one of the reasons why AA has over 17,000 users at just 90 days running.

Ad Widgets

To make things simple for publishers who are used to running Adsense ads, AA has provided ad blocks that are formatted in all the same sizes as adsense advertisements. There is no need to reformat your Adsense site to incorporate AA or a combination of AA and Adsense.

Referral Program

To make the deal even sweeter for publishers, AA has integrated a referral program into their ad units. Most everyone knows that Google’s Adsense has benefitted from free advertising on all of its publisher sites by incorporating a link to a sign up page on each and every Adsense unit. That notorious “Ads by Gooooooogle” is really just a link to get other publishers to sign up. Google has never offered it’s publishers any compensation for this referral program. Yahoo Publisher Network does the exact same thing.

Auction Ads explains how their referral program is different:

With AuctionAds, we don’t want you to worry about the loss of revenue caused by the branding we use to identify the ad units as ads on your site. So we have implemented a referral program that is imbedded right into your ad units. So anytime anyone clicks on the “Ads by AuctionAds” and signs up for the program, you will earn 2% of those new publisher’s earnings. Pretty sweet deal. This means every single click made from our ad units, even the clicks on the “Ads by AuctionAds” gives you the potential to earn money.

I will be testing AuctionAds on this blog over the next few weeks to see what my readers think. I am not sure if the products offered will be useful to you all. As in everything, you will all vote with your wallets, and in time I will report to you if AuctionAds are really a money maker or not.

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.

Google is looking to expand their advertising network capabilities, and this is perhaps another move by Google to get into the affiliate marketing space. I have long thought they had larger plans than the simple entry into the CPA space they announced a couple weeks ago. Google wants a piece of the affiliate marketing pie, and apparently they just got themselves one. It only cost them $3 billion.

The official reasons for the acquisitions are as follows:

The combination of Google and DoubleClick will offer superior tools for targeting, serving and analyzing online ads of all types, significantly benefiting customers and consumers:

• For users, the combined company will deliver an improved experience on the web, by increasing the relevancy and the quality of the ads they see.
• For online publishers, the combination provides access to new advertisers, which creates a powerful opportunity to monetize their inventory more efficiently.
• For agencies and advertisers, Google and DoubleClick will provide an easy and efficient way to manage both search and display ads in one place. They will be able to optimize their ad spending across different online media using a common set of metrics.

I have no doubt that Google will greatly expand their advertising network and publisher content alliances through this acquisition. I have to ask myself where Google is headed. In light of their recent attacks on the affiliate marketing space in both Adwords and through their search algorithm: Is Google out to kill affiliate marketing once and for all? Are they going to disband the traditional form of affiliate marketing that Performics currently engages in and replace it with their own proprietary “affiliate technology”? Somehow, I doubt it.

I think they are more interested in keeping the network as it is and collecting the revenue share from merchants. But parent companies and affiliate networks don’t always share the same viewpoint. The last time a large affiliate network’s interests clashed with it’s parent company was at Commission Junction. It is widely thought that ValueClick was behind the ill-advised Javascript Link Initiative that caused so much outrage in the affiliate marketing space. It took thousands of complaints, a petition, and several large merchants considering leaving the network before CJ backed down from requiring the transition to javascript links. Let’ hope Google does not have similar plans in their takeover of Performics.

 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. 

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.

Adwords Site targeting is a feature that allows content match advertisers to choose which websites they want their ads to appear on. This is especially important to advertisers with a high level of brand consciousness, because they generally want control over where their ads are displayed. Traditional content match does not allow the advertiser to choose where their ads appear in the content match network, but site targeting does.

This is not going to be open to the public at first. They are now accepting interested advertisers to sign up for the Beta phase, which is set to start in about 3 weeks. Check it out and sign up now if you are interested:
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2007/02/test-cpc-site-targeting.html