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.

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”.

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’s Friday, I’m in a giving mood, so I’m going to drop a pretty big secret here.  I’m sure most successful marketers use this all the time, but this will be new for the newbies.  The secret is…. Drumroll please……

Niche Cross Promotion - You can bid on cheap keywords not in your expensive niche, to drive traffic to your niche.  What does this mean?  Say your PPC niche was totally saturated and all the keywords were too expensive.  You need to think of a category of keywords that is not in your niche, but somehow tangentially related to your niche.

An example may help:

Say your niche was fireplaces.  So you research all the terms like woodburning fireplaces, gas fireplaces, stone fireplaces etc.  But you find out all these terms cost $2.00 to be in the top 8, and you need to pay $.50 to make a profit.  Time to look for another niche?  Maybe not.  Now is the time to come up with a related niche that may have cheaper keywords, yet drive similar traffic.  After brainstorming you find that people searching for terms like home remodeling or home refurbishing may be interesting in fireplaces as well.  Plus those keywords are competitive at $.50.  You have just cross promoted your niche!

It takes a lot of work to do this, but on super saturated and expensive niches, it’s worth it.

Ps. This works really well with ringtones

If you have been doing affiliate stuff for long enough you have probably seen a phenomenon I call ‘conversion creep’. Basically it is the gradual decrease in the number of conversions over time. It’s important to note, I’m saying the number of conversions, not conversion rate. Why does this happen? Well in scientific terms, you can relate it to the second law of thermodynamics, whereas in a closed system, unless acted on by another force any system will increase in entropy. In layman’s terms that means: if you don’t get off your lazy ass and work on your campaigns occasionally, you will lose money.

So what are some sources of conversion creep?

• Loss of keywords: This is the main problem. In Google they go inactive, in Yahoo the are removed, and in MSN you get the annoying emails. All these need to be acted on, because you are losing valuable keyword real estate all the time.
• Landing page leaks: Once you have a landing page running, things can pop up over time that you wouldn’t expect. Php/sql errors can happen, hyperlinks can stop working, and redirects can fail. It’s a good idea to check your landing pages often as well as your server logs for errors that could be costing you conversions.
• Ad fatigue: This one may be a small factor because you would think that searchers for a specific term are always new people, but that’s not always true. If you shake things up a bit by changing ad copy you can often bump up conversions that have slipped off.

Running a PPC to affiliate campaign is definitely NOT a set and forget system, like some people seem to think. You may get lucky right off the bat, but it takes constant work and tweaking to stay successful.

Ok, so I know I have ranted about MSN Adcenter in the past, but they just seem to keep making things worse.  They seem to have the reverse Midas touch (everything they touch turns to crap).  Here are my latest gripes:

Lack of alternate text for dynamic keyword insertion over 25 characters.  You guys really need to get on the ball and fix this.  I don’t want to run 2 ads so one can fail over, or set up ridiculous {param2} fields for each term.  Please just fix this issue so we don’t have to take 10x longer than it should to do a simple dynamic keyword insertion.

Capitalizing the display URL.  Again, this is something you need to fix in your system.  Adding extra parameters doesn’t cut it.

Import/Export.  We still need a system to export keywords/adgroups/campaigns.  Then we can make our edits an import them back in.  You have the import feature on the beta interface, but it pretty pointless without an export feature.  All the other PPC services have this ability.  Even Looksmart and Ask have it in their interface.

Content Network.  When you upgrade advertisers to the content network, don’t turn it on by default.  No one is going to run in hybrid mode because we need to track the content network separately than normal search network.  Sneaking the content network into people’s campaigns is not going to win you any points.  Especially when people who aren’t on the ball about their stats suddenly see their conversions tank and delete their campaigns.

I am trying to be patient MSN, but please listen to your advertisers and work with us here. We are trying to give you our money!

For about the last 6 months I have been #1 in a very competitive niche at Azoogle. From what my AM tells me, I completely dominate this niche. So how did this happen? Very simple: hard work. You can’t just slap together a campaign in a few hours or days and expect to do really well. You may get lucky for a while, but eventually your earnings will dip. It’s difficult to keep a campaign profitable over the long term. Without giving away my offer, here is how I did it in general terms.

1. Keyword research and structure. Of course a good keyword list is very important. Start with a great tool, and then add every variation you can think of. More important almost than your master list, is how you break your KWs out into groups. Correct adgroup structure is a huge factor in your campaigns success. The more targeted your ad is to your keywords, the better your CTR will be and conversion rate.

2. Make a good landing page, then keep making more and split testing. You just never know what will convert until you test it.

3. Know your seasonal trends for your niche. Everything has seasonal patterns. Even the most non-seasonal product has peaks and valleys than you can exploit.

4. Buy more traffic. Once you have a well converting campaign, try it out on every possible network you can. If you don’t you are leaving money on the table. Don’t believe what you read in forums about PPC networks. Test them for yourself. One of my best converting networks is one that everyone in the forums calls crap. To me it’s gold though.

5. Know your niche. This is the most important tip I can give. Research everything you can about the product and market. Know the demographics of the target customers. Know their age, sex. geographic location, marital status, income level, browsing habits, and what they ate for breakfast this morning. Read the trade journals for the industry. Find out everything you can, because every piece of info you learn will help target your campaign. This is a step that many affiliates skip when just going for the quick buck, but if you really want to do well it’s essential. Think of yourself like a marketing contractor for the publisher’s company. They are paying you to know as much as possible about their consumers so you can better market their product to them.

I think if you work hard enough, you can eventually own any niche you want, even the most competitive ones. It’s just a matter of how hard you want to work.

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.