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

It seems everyone and their brother has a content network now. After MSN’s launch a few weeks ago, now Ask.com is about to join in the context game. Here is what they have to say about it:

“On May 14^th, The Ask Sponsored Listings Team will roll-out an exciting new feature – contextual targeting. With contextual targeting, you can seamlessly extend your pay-per-click search campaigns to sites in our content network.
Reaching over 34 million unique users each month, the ASL content network includes premium content sites such as Match.com, Citysearch, Evite, and Ticketmaster and more. Ads are targeted to publishers’ web pages by matching ad content and keywords to page content so the ads displayed are highly targeted to the reader’s interests.”

It should be interesting to see how these sites convert for affiliates. I’m willing to test anything once. Look for a review in the future from me….