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    • Nexus One is Robbing You (Maybe)

    January 12th, 2010

    Just saw a thread at WMW about Nexus One ads usurping paid advertisers on AdSense Publishers’ sites (via this post about the Nexus One sales page at PPCBlog). If you want to get rid of them you can block google.com.

    But That Reminds Me…

    Are you an AdWords advertiser? Listen up.

    In the ‘Campaign Settings’ menu of AdWords there is an innocuous-sounding set of options titled “Networks, Devices, and extensions”. There are two subcategories within this menu: ‘Networks’ and ‘Devices’.

    ‘Networks’ is arguably one of the (if not the ) most important settings you can change on your campaigns. But it would take up an entire blog post of its own.

    ‘Devices’, on the other hand, has been a quiet and uneventful addition to the menu.

    But with the release of Nexus One and the wave of new ’superphone’ users sure to follow, it is important to think about what ‘Devices’ you want your ads to show on.

    Think about your product or service. Would someone really be using their phone to search for you? If not, disable the Mobile Phones option.

    They would? Great, would they be able to complete a meaningful action by visiting your site from their phone (call you, purchase something, download something)? If not, disable this option until they can.

    If visitors would be searching for you, and could complete a meaningful transaction with your site, then I would recommend you create mobile-optimized landing pages for those ads. Turn off Mobile Devices in your primary campaign, and make a separate campaign that targets mobile users.

    -1 – 1 Is -2

    It is important to remember in the AdWords world that every unprofitable click costs you not just the price of that click, but a (potentially) profitable click later on when your budget can’t support another click.

    Remember, AdWords decides to show your ad based on whether or not you can afford another click. So if your site is no use to mobile users, you’re only hurting profitable campaigns by leaving it turned on.

    Tags for This Post: mobile devices, campaign settings, wmw, mobile users, subcategories, settings menu

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    Posted in Sponsored Placement (PPC), Strategy | No Comments »

    Make New Friends via AdWords

    October 9th, 2009

    handshakeAdSense is the revenue source for the unimaginative.

    People see the Google brand and think that they will get more (or more-guaranteed) revenue from Google Ads than from other sources. Knowing that people would rather make more, but don’t have the guts or the skill to test it, you have the advantage in negotiating partnerships with websites using AdSense. Here’s a trick I have used to successfully negotiate premium listings on popular niche websites.

    Visit this script: http://www.untouchablemarketing.com/tools/adcrawl.php

    You can change the ‘?kw=’ variable in the URL bar to whatever you’re looking for.

    One quick note: I downloaded this script from ::emp:: of BlindApeSEO. He deserves credit for putting this out for the community.

    What happens next is that the crawler looks through the first 50 or so Google results for that keyword and locates pages that have Google AdSense code on them. Do this a few times with a few of your keywords to get a list of 20-25 URLs.

    Next, you take your URL list into AdWords and start a new site-targeted campaign. Use these URLs as the sites you want to target.

    Note: when you first start the campaign Google will only let you pick a root domain, not a specific page. Go ahead and use the root domain from one of your URLs to start with. When your new campaign is up and running, use the ‘Quick Add’ link in the AdGroup view to add the specific URLs from your list (remember to delete the root URL you added, adding HowItWorks.com or WikiHow.com can blow a lot of money!).

    Let the campaign run for a few days or weeks to generate some data. Once a URL has 100 clicks on it, evaluate its performance: are there conversions? If so, go to the next step. If not, evaluate whether the cost of the ad may be worth it from a PR or branding standpoint, then adjust your ad accordingly.

    If you have received some leads from a placement then it’s time to forge a partnership. This can be done one of two ways, and which way you go depends on if you have an established affiliate program or not.

    If you are already running an affiliate program (meaning you are the AM), then figure out how much money the website owner would have received for the conversions they sent you if they had been enrolled in your program, and send the owner an email. I suggest starting with a subject line like ‘Thanks for the Traffic!’ or ‘Thanks for the Clients!’ which will usually get people interested in reading your mail.

    If you don’t have an affiliate program, figure out a dollar value you’d be willing to pay for each lead and present it to the site owner as a business proposition.

    In the body of the email, respectfully convey to the site owner that you recently used Google to put an ad on their site, and via your tracking you have determined that you paid $x per lead for y number of leads (you can sandbag this number a bit, they won’t know what the actual dollar value is).

    Since Google takes a cut, you know that they made less than that from AdSense, but the good news is you want to offer them $z (where z < x), and if they had been enrolled they could have earned (y * $z) instead of whatever AdSense gave them. Let them know that you will happily continue running the ad on their site, but you’d prefer to deal with them directly.

    Upon reading your email, your prospective partner is going to check their AdSense earnings, realize that they didn’t make anything near what you’re offering, and immediately write back to partner up.

    Once your partnership has been established, you can now make all kinds of suggestions to the site owner about how they can better advertise your program. This works especially well with niche directory sites. I once got a prominent banner, button and link on the homepage of a topically-related site, and an interior full-page with copy about my service and website, and I only paid when the traffic was worth it.

    Tags for This Post: adwords, root url, google, revenue source, emp, crawler, root domain, standpoint, google results, url bar

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    Posted in Affiliate, Sponsored Placement (PPC), Strategy | Comments Off

    Misinterpretation of Marketing

    August 13th, 2008

    I was doing some searches for a problem I’m having with Firefox 3 randomly logging me out of AdWords when I came across this article.

    From the article:

    Stevens bought the drive-by-download.info domain, set up a server to display a “Thank you for your visit” message and to log the requests. No PCs were harmed in this experiment, he emphasizes. Then he started the Google Adwords campaign, using combinations of the words “drive-by download” along with the ad. His ad was viewed 259,723 times and clicked on 409 times, for a click-through rate of about 0.16%. The experiment cost him $23, or 6 cents per click/potentially infected machine.

    What some people don’t understand about the AdWords system is that the primary traffic sources are not (as was the case in the late 90’s, early 00’s) banner advertising seen by an equal cross-section of tech-enabled humanity. The giveaway to the “success” of this experiment is revealed in two facts from the above paragraph: “combinations of the words ‘drive-by download’” and “6 cents per click.”

    Because of the way AdWords works, his ad would only have been seen by those searching for “drive by download” or those reading content about “drive by downloads” (or, more recently, content related to those topics). Given that the only people searching for or reading about that type of activity are those who are already somewhat informed, or are becoming more informed, I would guess that had an actual virus or other malware been installed, there would be very limited damage overall.

    And factoring in the 0.16% CTR, and low CPC, I’d say his ad was more than likely running alongside tech articles on the content network, where it would primarily be seen only by tech-savvy users on both sides of the fence.

    Certainly, in my younger days when I was first exploring the world of hacking, if I saw someone advertising the download of this type of software, I would take them up on it just to capture their methods and code. Most of the “advanced users” I knew back then not only sat behind fortresses of firewalls and virus checkers, but many of us also browsed via ‘bottles’ where viruses could be trapped. Of the 409 clicks achieved by the experimenter, I’m guessing only a handful of those would have resulted in successful infections, and only a subset of those would have real results.

    These type of misunderstandings are what lead to so many small business owners opening their wallets to AdWords and getting taken to the bank. I can’t count the number of times I have tried to dissuade people from adding keywords like “weather” to the keyword list for their golf club, dating, or business portal site in order to get more eyeballs.

    The world of online marketing requires more lateral-thinking than any other advertising medium ever invented. If you don’t have the time (or the ability) to answer “Why?” 100 times a day, then you should seek assistance with your Web Marketing efforts.

    Tags for This Post: younger days, banner advertising, exploring the world, savvy users, content network

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    Posted in Sponsored Placement (PPC) | Comments Off

    Walking Among the Searchers

    November 30th, 2006

    To be good at any job, you need to like doing it.  Not just the ivory-tower, CEO-stuff.  But the boots-on, factory floor part, too.

    An SEO should always be conscious of search.  Trying to find a new restaurant, looking for a specific book, or in the case of my next example: looking through an online help guide.

    I was busy converting some old Overture campaigns to the new Panama system recently.  I was using their online help system to find out what [match type] meant (in the relative terminology of the system).  I found the information I was looking for in the 3rd result, titled: “Importing Campaigns”, which contained a concise definition for every field name used in the importing process.

    Every time I needed to refer to that information, I searched for [match type].  But eventually, I realized how stupid it was to keep using that term, despite the fact that I knew the title of the article I wanted was “Importing Campaigns”.

    So, the next time I needed that information I used the search term [importing campaigns].  It took me about 3 times as long to find the information I needed because my first expectation was that the page I was looking for would be SERP #1.  Nope.

    Well, it couldn’t be any lower than #3.  Nope.

    Result #6 was the page I was used to seeing.  So I went back to using [match type] to find the information I needed on importing.

    What’s the takeaway? Well, if someone at Yahoo! was watching the logfiles, they’d probably see me importing campaigns, and searching over and over for [match type].   They’d think to themselves: “Wow, this guy is sure having trouble understanding match types.  But he’s must be having a pretty easy time with importing, because he only searched for it once.”  They might then conclude that I am new-ish to the SEM world, and that I don’t undertsand match types.

    The course of action then is to improve the information on match types, and neglect the information on importing campaigns.  When all I really needed was for someone to rearrange the SERPs for the latter.

    It’s subtle, but it’s something to think about.

    Tags for This Post: ish, help system, seo, takeaway, campaigns, concise definition, ivory tower

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    Posted in Sponsored Placement (PPC) | Comments Off

    Finalist at MarketingPilgrim.com

    November 10th, 2006

    So it turns out the article I submitted to the MarketingPilgrim SEO Scholarship Contest was chosen as a finalist. This means my article will also be judged by a panel of professionals for the grand prize.

    I had hesitated to enter the contest, but I’m glad that I did. I wanted to go a different direction than the previous entries, and talk less about why SEO is important and general, and tackle a specific issue that I had noticed causing problems for people. As I say in the article, I talked about the same thing at an AdWords conference and I had the whole table listening intently.

    Anyway, if you’re arriving here for the first time, please be aware that I’ve recently taken down much of the content on this site and I’m gradually replacing it with better, more informational articles. I decided that since the guys over at MP were good enough to give me a big fat link to this site, I’d better make it worthwhile to visit. Bookmark my site and stop by later.

    Or you might see me again in future articles!

    Update: So I tied for second in the final round. One of the judges had this to say of my work:

    I’ve got to give it up for the direct, hands-on learning and image integration shown by Ryan Bell in Instant PPC Success.

    Thanks for a fun contest guys!

    Tags for This Post: success thanks, informational articles, ryan bell, thing, image integration, Bookmark, mp, scholarship contest, grand prize

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    Posted in Organic Placement (SEO), Sponsored Placement (PPC) | 2 Comments »

    Laying the Groundwork for a Successful Site: Part 1

    November 9th, 2006

    You’ve just completed your site. You have a unique offering to the public, but how are you going to get the word out?

    If you’re going to get the maximum benefit from your future SEO activity you need to lay the proper foundation. Step one in the process is getting the proper URL structure set up.

    The first decision you need to make is to decide whether you want your site to appear as www.mysite.com or just mysite.com in search results. There isn’t necessarily a difference, and it’s a matter of personal choice.

    One factor that might help you make your decision is that less computer-savvy folks might be more inclined to add the www. before your address, whereas “techie” types will be more likely to use just mysite.com.

    If your website is hosted on an Apache server, you can add this code to your .htaccess file:

    RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}  !^www.example.net$       [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)         http://www.example.net/$1  [L,R]

    For an IIS server (with isapi_rewrite), you can use the following code:

    Add this to your httpd.ini file:

    RewriteCond Host: ^mysite.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mysite.com$1 [I,RP]

    If you want to rewrite your URL to the non-www version your Apache code would like:

    RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mysite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

    Next up, creating the proper URL structure for your navigation.

    Tags for This Post: maximum benefit, techie types, rewriterule, savvy folks, proper url, url structure, proper foundation, www version, www mysite com

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    Posted in Laying the Groundwork, Organic Placement (SEO), Sponsored Placement (PPC) | No Comments »