I have long suspected that Google may be using their analytics for more than we know. Ever since watching Matt Cutts pull up every domain a guy at Pubcon had ever registered, live in front of an audience, I have been worried. Call me paranoid, but I just have to wonder what information they are gathering and compiling into some huge database by all of us happily placing their tracking code on our sites.

Now this may or may not be a coincidence, but something very funny happened with a new site I had launched recently. This site was created to send leads to an affiliate offer. It’s more than just a landing page, but that’s the general idea of the site. I was running an Adwords campaign with some good results. All my bids were in the range I wanted, all keywords active. Then I installed Google Analytics tracking code on all the pages. Within 3 hours of doing that, ALL my bids for every keyword in the campaign went to $10 and switched to inactive. Now this seems like quite a coincidence like I said before. Is Google using analytics to determine landing page quality and relavancy?

You be the judge.

Things change so fast in the PPC and affiliate world. What’s true one day is not the next. Case in point, my comments on the content network. I wrote somewhere before that I never use it. That was true up until a few weeks ago. I decided to give it another shot for 1 of my campaigns. To my surprise, I actually started making a profit off of it. I applied super tight adgroups and with targeted keywords, and although my CTR is not great, the clicks I do get are actually converting! I plan to expand the content network testing to some other campaigns now to see if I can get similar results.

If you are thinking of testing out the content network, make sure you create a separate campaign and run only content on it. Don’t just turn on the content network in your search campaign. It will be much easier to track your stats and see exactly what is going on that way.

Ok this is 2 rant posts in a row but here goes:

I get tons of spam everyday.  I could probably do a better job blocking it, but I just don’t have time to mess with it.  So my question is why are these guys so dumb?  I mean if you are going to send out 500,000 emails, make sure it makes sense and doesn’t have simple words misspelled.  I realize that they intentionally misspell certain words try to get around spam filters, but how to you misspell the word “the”?  Seriously.  Even if English isn’t your language, run it through an English spell/grammer checker before misspelling your keywords.  You’d think if you are going to blast hundreds of thousands of people, you would take 5 minutes on the front end to check your spam.

You are slowly losing me Adcenter.

Most things get better with age, Adcenter seems to be getting worse by the day. The interface is pretty much unworkable for any large scale campaigns. Everytime I ask them about it, I keep getting that an update is on the way, but it never gets here.

The upload tool is terrible. There HAS to be a way to upload muliple groups for large campaigns. Or better yet a way to upload whole campaigns like nearly every other PPC service has, even 2nd and 3rd tier.

The constant rejected keywords, followed by rejected keyword emails are annoying. It’s to the point now where I don’t even care to go in and see what was rejected. Perhaps if the interface was workable, it might not be so bad. But the thought of having to navigate around in there just isn’t worth it. I am sure they are losing massive amounts of money by having a poor interface/upload system. I know they are from me.

This brings us to yesterday, when I logged in to my account and found $2k in spend for the previous day. Clicks that had a max CPC of .10 were racking up $80 a click. OK, there is clearly a problem that I hope they can resolve. But there needs to be some communication. They could have posted it on their blog, or better yet sent out an email alert. If they no there is a huge system wide problem, communication is key. You’d think a company with the backing of the most profitable company on earth could have the resources to be a little proactive about things like this.

MSN, you need to pull it together quickly!

Now that I am officially a full time SEM/SEO/Affiliate/Webmaster, I have finally established a daily routine. (I am officially using this acronym as my new title - SSAW Feel free to use it with backlink of course). It’s not at all like I thought it would be after leaving the world of regular employment. One thing that is different is that I work every single day. Everyone thinks that since I don’t have a “job” that I can just take off and do whatever. The fact is, I will NEVER have a day where I don’t have to do at least some work. I am totally OK with that, because it’s up to me to decide when that is necessary now.

It has been a little tough for me because there is no distinction between home and work, so I feel like I have to work all the time. I have gotten a little better about this and actually turn off the computer several hours a day and do stuff. But the thought is always in the back of my head that if I don’t work I don’t eat.

That being said, I probably average around 11 hours a day of work. Since I get asked “what the hell do you do all day” a lot, here’s a breakdown of how I spend my time on an average day:

40% Developing new campaigns (keyword research, landing page tweaking, stat analyzing, ad copy tweaking)
20% Managing ongoing campaigns (same as above)
20% Working on various website development projects (Non-affiliate stuff)
10% Responding to emails
5% Chatting on IM/Talking to people on the phone
5% Checking out forums/blogs to stay on top of the industry and trends.

My affiliate manager told me some great news the other day. Out of 12,000+ affiliates at Azoogle, I am in the top 10! That’s a pretty nice group to be in, especially considering I have only been into affiliate stuff for about 6 months. I guess I am doing something right! I plan to try to give as many tips as I can on this blog to help other people improve their results too.

One of the stats I have been tracking recently is how ad positioning (Slots 1-8) affects overall ROI. An interesting trend that has come out of the data is that there is a definite “dead zone” in positions 3-6. Of course slots 1-2 are going to be great for ROI, that is expected. But it was a little suprising to me that slots 7-8 were better than 3-6. When you consider how people look at a page of information though it does make sense. They tend to look at the top and bottom, while glazing over the middle sections.

Click to enlarge

So what does this mean for the PPC advertiser? Personally, I try to either up my bids or lower my bids to get into these prime positions. Lower bids to get a better return, what a concept! Positions 1 and 2 will alwaysbe the best, but if they are out of your reach, shoot for the bottom. Just don’t too low, or you’ll be out in the weeds on the second page.

(Another lesson to learn: notice the guy in 4th position? Don’t use dynamic keywords if you don’t understand how they work!)

I’ve seen on some blogs people post pics of their home offices so I thought I would do the same. Then I started thinking how boring it is to see a picture of a bunch of lame LCDs lined up. So here is my office, where my “real work” gets done everyday.

One of the greatest things about being self employed is having time to get out everyday for some exercise and fresh air. Oh it’s not always easy when you are a workaholic and get bogged down in projects all day. But when I quit my day job, I set a routine that every day around 3pm, no matter what is going on, I turn off the computer and head outside. Either a mountain bike ride on my trusty Titus, a hike up some mountain, or even paddling a bit in my kayak at a nearby lake. This time is as crucial to my day as checking my PPC stats. All my best ideas have come to me during these activities. My advice to everyone is to get out an do something everyday, no matter what it is. The Internet will wait for you to get back!

As most people know, the new Yahoo ranking model was launched on Monday. Basically it’s their version of Google quality score, while not quite as opaque as Google. They actually provide some visibility into your quality score by a ranking of 1-5 in the form of blue bar. I am looking forward to this change, as I think it will help weed out some of the people jumping into niches with high bids and throwing everyone off. You will actually have to do some work to rank well, which is always a good thing for the long term search engine marketers.

According to Yahoo, your quality index is determined by:
1. The ad’s expected performance - which is determined by various relevance factors considered by Yahoo’s ranking algorithms.
2. The ad’s historical performance - its click-through rate relative to its position on the page.

So it would seem they are taking the view of how the ad group performs as a whole, rather than individual keywords. I checked out some of my campaigns this morning and was pleased at how they are running so far under the new system. I saw quite a few of these babies!

Booya!

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