We are moving on to bigger and better things and expanding this blog. Please update your bookmarks and feeds at the new address:

http://www.cdfnetworks.com

I am 301′ing all the posts and redirecting the feeds to the new blog so hopefully everyone will find their way over eventually. As I said in my post on the new blog, the content we blogged about (PPC, Affiliate stuff mostly) never really fit with a directory. So it only seemed natural to move it over to our PPC and affiliate services site:)

This page should remain up for a while until all the bots can find the new location, but all the content is now at the new site so head on over!

Continuing on the organization theme, another good thing to keep track of when you start a new offer is the expiration date of the offer. I use Outlook’s calender to set all my reminders for everything, so I just set a reminder of the offers’ end date. This habit came, like most things, from a hard lesson learned. An offer I was running expired without me noticing, and I ended up paying for 10 days of PPC traffic to a dead offer. Not good. So learn from my lesson and set yourself a reminder of when your promotion is going to expire.

This is definitely not a “sexy” topic, but it’s important nonetheless.  When managing a PPC campaign it’s critical to track all the changes you make.  It seems obvious, but it’s often overlooked by people starting out.  It’s so important because when you make a change and suddenly your stats improve or decline, you need to be able to go back and see what you did.  When you start making changes to tons of adgroups and campaigns, it’s impossible to remember everything, so documentation is key.

So what do I do? I just keep a simple spreadsheet with the all my campaign names and adgroups and the date.  Then I make a note on that row like “increased bids on XYZ adgroup to .42″

It does take more time to stay organized and document everything you are doing, but that discipline will help you out in the long run.

Ok I am admit it, I have really slacked off on posts.  I am making a mid-year resolution to try to do at least 2 posts a week from now on.  I have some really helpful posts planned so stay tuned.  This post is just a bunch of random thoughts, endorsements and rants:

• Vacations are great.  I was away from my home base for about 10 days and managed to only work about an hour a day on my laptop.  Coming back from vacation however - sucks!  I have been putting in some long hours this week getting back up to speed.
• My Azoogle account manager, Alex, is leaving to change careers and pursue his dream.  I am happy for you Alex, I know you will do great no matter what you do.  Stay in touch bro!
• I hate Fry’s Electronics (not giving them the benefit of a link), and vow to never shop there again.  The hassle of their checkout system and long lines, indifferent employees, and generally crappy service is just not worth the low prices.  Spending 40 minutes in 2 different lines to return something this week clinched it for me.  Never again.
• I love Namecheap for domains.  I have tried them all, and have been exclusively using them for about the last 6 months.  They rock!
• Google - you are now officially my 4th favorite PPC service.  Yes you have slipped 2 spots in my book.
• Yahoo - Keep up the good work, you are my #1

Nothing is permanent in affiliate marketing. People seem to be lulled into a false sense of security that campaigns will continue to run, offers will continue to pay out, conversions will continue to happen, and so on. But you can’t count on anything. It’s like the standard disclaimer on every investment and stock, past performance is not indicative of future results. Yet, people always seem shocked when a hot offer suddenly stops, or a well running campaign is shut down. Count myself in that group. Even though you know it can happen, it’s always surprising when it happens to you. A few weeks ago, my top performing, longest running campaign on Google Adwords was effectively shut down. This campaign had been running nonstop for over a year, yet the algo change Google made totally killed it. I tried every trick I know to get it back up and running, but to no avail. It’s kind of sad that Google makes no effort to retain a “good customer”, but search relevance rules over customer loyalty it seems. At any rate, it just goes to prove my point that at any time affiliate income could all go away. So be prepared.

So Yahoo “officially” launched their Quality Based Pricing a few days ago.  According to Yahoo the key points to this system are:

• We’ll evaluate the quality of traffic from our distribution partners’ sites.
• Your click charges can be discounted based on the value of that traffic.
• Discounts will automatically be applied to your account.

To me this is pretty much a non announcement. For one, it’s a totally black box system.  Advertisers have no insight to the conversion rates of the various sites and partners that are used to calculate the quality rating.  We are just supposed to wait and hope for discounts occasionally based on Yahoo’s calculations. We can’t make any changes to where our ads are displayed to react to quality issues.  This seems to be an effort by Yahoo to say “Hey, we care about quality, especially on our content network, so please use it”.

Google’s keyword suggestion tool now is able to suggest negative keywords for your campaign.  As most people know using negative keywords is very important to further target your campaigns and reduce the number of non-converting clicks.  The tool works in 2 ways: either by generating negative keywords based on the current keywords in your adgroups, or you can manually enter words and it will generate negatives.  If you haven’t checked this feature out yet, I highly suggest it.

With a PPC text ad, 4 lines are all you get to make your impression. Yet most people give little thought to the display URL, which is 25% of your ad’s real estate. The display URL should be a major concern when writing your ad. I would venture to say that it’s more important that your description even.

Buy a new domain:
This is one place not to cheap out and try to save a few bucks by using a bad domain name. Go ahead and register a new one, or even multiple new ones to test a new offer. Using an old domain that you had lying around, that kind of fits the offer is a recipe for failure. Besides, 1 conversion could recoup the domain cost for a year.

Buy a good domain:
For some reason I don’t have any trouble finding good domains. I never buy .NETs or .ORGs, only .COMS. I hardly ever use hyphens or weird punctuation either. Remember, you are buying the domain to instill confidence in the searcher, not for SEO purposes. Obviously, the shorter the better, but multiple related words are better than punctuation I find.

Test display URLs

I like to run multiple ad copies in Google with the only difference being the display URLs. I have seen big changes in CTR from various URLs tested. Once you find the best converting URL you can switch everything over to that URL.

It’s getting harder and harder for advertisers to get refunds for fraudulent clicks these days. Gone are the times when you could send in a simple spreadsheet with click times, numbers, IPs, and referrers, and get credits back. I think the main reason it is tougher is that the search engines are getting serious about their built in tracking systems. Which, in theory, is a great thing for affiliate marketers. If they can accurately track clicks and removed the fruadulent ones, that’s just one less task we have to worry about every day. I don’t think they are to the point yet where we can trust them without our own tracking systems in place though. I still track clicks and send in fraud reports. But I’m hoping for the day when the big 3 can do it on their own.

So what are the search engines using to track? That is, of course, totally proprietary info, with patents pending. But Yahoo for example claims to track each click based on 20 to 50 different data points. Among those are:

* IP address

* User session information

* User cookie information

* The network to which an IP belongs

* The user’s browser information

* The search term requested by the user

* The time of the click

* The rank of the advertiser’s listing

* The bid of the advertiser’s listing

* The time of the search

* The time of the click

It’s been said a million times before, you need to keep testing in affiliate marketing. You just never know what may or may not work until you actually commit some money to testing. We’ve all heard it before, but here’s an interesting case in point.

I was testing a campaign that has been running on Google for about 8 months now, just chugging along. I had 5 ads that I was testing for a particular Adgroup, and in one ad I noticed that I had accidentally left out a word in the description that made it read like total nonsense. It had ran that way for about 2 weeks and the funny thing is, that ad performed about 23% better than the other ads. I have no explanation for why that is, but you can bet I left that messed up ad in place