I definitely have issues with Google’s quality score and the constant battle to keep campaigns running on their network, but one thing I can’t fault them for is their interface. It is simply the best out there, hands down. When you are handling large scale campaigns, their offline adwords editor is a huge time saver. Here are a some tips you may or may not know about in the editor.

Tip #1 Using the editor to build campaigns for other networks

With the Adwords editor, it is very quick and easy to build campaigns with multiple adgroups, ad copy, and keywords. I have found that it’s the fastest way to build up a campaign and get it into CSV form so you can work with it on other PPC networks.

Just build the campaign in “draft mode” then go to File > Export to CSV > Export Current Campaign. Now you have a campaign in spreadsheet format that with a little massaging, you can upload into other engines like MSN or Yahoo.

Tip #2 Copying text ads to other adgroups

If you do a lot of ad copy testing (which you should!), you often want to move ads from one group to another. Or rather than writing a whole new ad, copy an ad from on place to another, then tweak it. In the Adwords Editor this is a piece of cake.

Just click on the adgroup that contains the ad on the left panel, then click the text ads tab on the top. Now highlight the ad in this view and do a control –c. Now navigate to the new adgroup and do a control –v. The ad will now be ready under the text ads tab to run or edit with your changes for A/B testing.

Tip #3 Whole campaign inactive keyword bid edits

This is probably my favorite feature. With Adwords, keywords are constantly going “inactive for search” and you may need to up edit your bid amounts to activate them again. If you have a campaign with 200 adgroups, it would be a tough task to check each one and then go in and edit each keyword with a new bid. With this technique, it’s a 30 second task no matter how many adgroups you have.

In the Adwords Editor click on the main top level campaign on the left panel (not an adgroup). Now click on the keywords tab. Then click the status bar (usually twice) to sort by inactive words. Now you will see all the inactive keywords in all of your adgroups. To change the bid amount you scroll down to find the last inactive word, do control-shift-home to select only the inactives, change the bid, and bam, you are done. When you look at your adgroup list now, you will see the change icon in all the adgroups where keywords were changed. That would have taken hours on a large campaign with the web interface.

Just a note to any PPC networks like Yahoo, MSN, Miva, Looksmart etc. who might be reading this. If you really want to increase your network usage and spends by your advertisers, build an offline editor! The easier it is for people to run their campaigns, the more money they will spend with you.

If you are going to be in affiliate marketing for any length of time, you are going to experience ups and downs. It’s just a fact of life. One day you are the king of the world and trying to decide what color your new sportscar should be, and the next day you are wondering where your next meal will come from. That may be exaggerating a bit, but everyone experiences big swings.

I’d say the biggest frustration for me with affilate marketing is tracking issues. No matter how hard you try, it’s just not possible to reconcile the number of clicks shown by the PPC engine, against what you show in your landing page logs, against what your affiliate network says. There will never be an exact match. I actually attended a session at pubcon where the guy did a whole hour about the life cycle of a single click from PPC to affiliate. It was pretty amazing, and I really wish I had taken better notes. Basically the summary of his lecture was that due the nature of the Internet, clicks can never match up. It’s a hard thing to come to terms with, especially when you are talking your hard earned money. But it’s just something you have to get comfortable with I suppose and build into your margins when running calculations.

In the last week I have had to make some drastic changes in how I do things. I have implemented a totally new tracking system, which should keep tracking issues to a minimum and allow me to better see what is actually happening with my PPC campaigns. Then when the ups and downs come, I should be better suited to figure out why.

This post is keeping with the contrarian theme of the last post.  When people talk about keywords these days, all you hear about is long tail keywords.  These generally refer to the low volume, low cost, higher word count keywords in a niche. I am all for using these words to your advantage; I certainly do.  But it seems people have forgotten the importance of the “short tail” or top keywords.  There is usually a group of 10 terms or less that account for 95% of the search volume for a given niche.  So much time and energy is given to working that long tail, that some people seem to ignore that the vast majority of money to be made in a niche is in the top keywords.  They are definitely harder to rank well in, and more expensive, but you can make your margins in sheer volume working the “short tail” keywords.

So my advice for the day is, let everyone talk about the long tail, but don’t forget about where the real money is made = the “short tail”!

You really do need to think outside the box to be successful in affiliate marketing. Sometimes copying what others are doing does work, but that will only get you so far. To truly break out from the pack, you need to think differently about what you are doing.

Part of thinking outside the box, is constant testing. For me that means testing totally crazy stuff, because you never know what might hit. Sure, most of it will fail miserably, but occasionally you will get a winner.

Here’s a funny example of something I tested that was off the wall. I don’t like to give specifics of what is converting well from me, and what niches I am in (can you blame me?), but ringtones are always safe to talk about. Everyone does them. So I got to thinking about the standard boring, “pick your carrier” landing page that everyone uses. I asked myself what would be the opposite of this landing page? This is what I came up with.

Yes, that’s the whole landing page, no need to reload your browser.  Just a white background with 2 small words. The amazing thing is, the bounce rate was about the same as the page I was running at the time! Conversions were a little lower probably due to a few lost carriers not supported by the offer it was going to, but surprisingly it worked pretty well. Since then I have hit on something that works way better, but at the time it worked great. I found my current landing page by “crazy” testing, just like this.

So get creative and stop following the pack!