A question I received a lot after writing that blog post was how you could tell what sites your ads were showing up on while running on the content network.  The reason so many people are curious about this, is because if there is a certain site that your ad is showing up like crazy on, yet you aren’t receiving any conversions, it will suck your account dry!

Now personally, I only mess with the content network with Google, so I’m only familiar with how to get to it from within their interface, however, I’m sure the basic procedure is the same on most networks if they offer the feature.

First, you need to log in to your Google Adwords account.  After you have logged in, you need to click on the Reporting Tab, then click on Reports.

Next, click on Create a New Report.

Going off subject for a minute, this next screen will allow you to select from a ton of a different reports that you can run, each on has a small description as to the info you’ll receive.  I’d definitely recommend checking out some of the other reports, but since this post is specifically about finding sites your ads are running on when using the content network, lets move on…

If you scroll down just a touch, you’ll notice that one of the radio buttons says Placement Performance.  Click on the radio button next to Placement Performance.

There are a ton of options now that you can select like level of detail, date range, etc.  Pretty self explanatory stuff, so I won’t go in to detail on all the settings.  If you want more details on all the different settings and stuff you can visit Google’s page about Placement Performance Report Help.

Once you finish editing the settings, you’ll come to the last section which is called Templates, Scheduling, and Email.  This place simply allows you to name your report, save the report as a template for running it again later, setting the report to run automatically every so often, etc.

Once you finish that last section, click on Create Report and voila your done!

After you click on Create Report, it will take you back to the Reports Tab Section within your account.  If can take several minutes for your report to be processed.  You can either wait or feel free to move around your account till it’s finished.  It won’t affect it if you leave the page.

After it’s finished the name of the report (whatever you named it in the last section) will become a link and you simply click on the link and you’ll see all the domains/urls that your ads have appeared on.

There are two changes that are being talked about, the first one being…

Ad Position CTR being MORE precise.

More precise Quality Score calculation
Clickthrough rate (CTR) is the most significant component of Quality Score because it directly indicates which ads are most relevant to our searchers. As you probably have observed, ads in high positions typically earn better CTR than those in low positions, because ads in high positions are more visible to searchers. To calculate the most accurate Quality Scores, it’s important that the influence of ad position on CTR be taken into account and removed from the Quality Score.

CTR (Click thru Rate) plays a big factor in your quality score when it comes to PPC companies.  In fact, I believe it’s one of the most important things.  Also, you’ve probably noticed that the higher your ad position the higher your CTR…I know rocket science right???

Well, Google knows this as well and so they judge if your CTR is good enough or not based on what ad position you are in…They have improved this they are saying which will give us more precise calculations.  They are saying this will now allow for more fairness in their quality scores.

The second change will allow for more ads to appear above the Organic Search Results!

Higher quality ads above the search results
We’re also improving the way we determine which ads show in the yellow region above the search results. These positions are particularly valuable to advertisers because they are prominently positioned on the page. Given their prominence, it’s especially important that these ads be high quality; we therefore place extra emphasis on quality when determining which ads to show in this location.

To appear above the search results, ads must meet a certain quality threshold. In the past, if the ad with the highest Ad Rank did not meet the quality threshold, we may not have shown any ads above the search results. With this update, we’ll allow an ad that meets the quality threshold to appear above the search results even if it has to jump over other ads to do so. For instance, suppose the ad in position 1 on the right side of the page doesn’t have a high enough Quality Score to appear above the search results, but the ad in position 2 does. It’s now possible for the number 2 ad to jump over the number 1 ad and appear above the search results. This change ensures that quality plays an even more important role in determining the ads that show in those prominent positions.

Currently in order for an ad to appear above the Organic Search Results it must be ranked the highest and meet a certain quality score, however, now Google will be allowing ads with just a high enough quality score to jump over ads if it has to in order to appear above Organic Search Results instead of only on the right side of the page.  So in essence, ad 2 could now jump over ad 1 if ad two met the quality score requirements.

Honestly, I believe this is simply being done so that Google can earn more revenue and profits by giving more ads a shot a being displayed and clicked on.  I believe this is why they are going to allow more ads to appear above Organic Search Results.  I also don’t believe that the normal affiliate will see a huge change as many seem to think they will…I think this will only benefit top affiliates in top positions and I’m not even sure if it will benefit them!

I’ve never had much lucking being placed above Organic Search Results…I always seem to get a lot of “blind” clicks.

So what exactly am I talking about?  I’m talking about a technique that allows you to direct link to an affiliate offer yet receive the quality score that a major authority site in the niche you’re competing in would get!

It’s so easy you’ll kick yourself for not thinking of it, as I know I did when someone told me about this technique.  Anyways, without further adieu…

Most people recognize this screen inside Adwords.  It’s the screen where you enter in your ad details.  You enter in your Headline, Description 1 & 2, Display URL, and Destination URL.  You’ve probably used this very screen a million times by now!

So what is so special about it this time?  We’ll let me explain to you how this technique works now.  Your destination URL is the URL in which Google uses to give you a quality score.  Depending on how well the site is and how relevant it is to the niche the greater the quality score you’ll receive which allows you to receive lower bids yet also get your ads into the top spots for those lower bids.

In this technique what we are doing is simply changing the destination URL and display URL to that of a major company inside the niche.  For example, sticking with our auto insurance example that you see in the picture above, we would change our links to point to Allstate, StateFarm, Geico, etc.  Any of those sites will work.

So of course, the question is now…why would I want to send free traffic to any of these sites?  We’ll the answer is, you don’t!  After you setup your ads, you should have two of them per adgroup for split testing, you’ll then go your keywords that are inside that adgroup.  You’ll see an edit button to the right of the keyword, click it! (see in picture below, the link is purple)

After you click on the edit link for a keyword you’ll come to a screen that looks something like this…

If you notice, for the keyword you can change the Destination URL for just that particular keyword.  So what this means is that even if your ads point to Geico, Allstate, or whoever…if someone does a search and this keyword is triggered, it will override the Ad’s Destination URL and inside use the Destination URL that is listed for that individual keyword.

What this means is that you can link to a site like Geico, Allstate, etc and get the quality score that that site would get and then simply have all your keywords destination URLs point to your real landing page or direct link to the offer!

Of course this would mean a heck of a lot of work going though each keyword clicking the edit link and changing the URL…

Thank God for Adwords Editor!

Today, I wanted to bring to your attention one of those such things. Starting sometime around the middle of June of 2008, Adwords will be incorporating landing page load times into their quality score as a factor. Here is the except regarding this taken from the Adwords Blog.

In early March, we announced that we’d soon incorporate an additional factor into Quality Score, namely landing page load time — where load time is defined as the amount of time it takes for a user to see the landing page after clicking an ad. Now, we’d like to post with an update.

Starting today, load time evaluations will be displayed on the Keyword Analysis page, for your review. We suggest taking some time to evaluate and understand this information because, starting mid-June, landing page load time will be incorporated into your Quality Score.

So, if your landing page currently loads a little slow, you may want to start working on improving that before the middle of June hits and you take a hit in your quality score. Personally, I don’t feel this will any major factor in their quality score, but as most PPC affiliate marketers know, even the littlest boast or drop can make or break a campaign!

Instead, I would like to talk about Negative Keywords! These are keywords that if you are using they will increase your ROI significantly.

The problem with most keywords and keywords groups is that no matter how well you target your ad groups and weed out your so called bad keywords, your still running a campaign that most likely is using the broad option as the match type. What does running a broad match type mean?

Well, let me give you a little example. Let’s say that you run a site that sells Power Tools so in one of your ad groups you have the keyword Power Tools. Now with the broad match type your ad will actually show up for a lot more keywords then just Power Tools. Your ad will most likely show up for other keywords such as Buy Power Tools, Rent Power Tools, Repair Power Tools, etc.

So what doesn’t negative keywords have anything to do with this? Well, if your selling power tools and running a campaign using a keyword such as Power Tools, but you don’t rent or repair power tools, your spending money on keywords that just aren’t going to convert for you! That my friend is where negative keywords come to save the day!!!

In your negative keywords list you can place the keywords Rent and Repair for example and that will stop any keyword that contains those words from triggering your ads thus increasing your ROI (return on investment) in just a couple easy, quick, and painless steps!

Enjoy and don’t forget to subscribe to get more great PPC tips and tricks!

In the first part of this little series we mostly talked about some easy ways to increase your CTR and Quality Score by making sure your ad groups were very targeted, your ad URL was targeted, and also making sure you send users to the correct landing pages which is targeted.

Shall we get started?

Research Keywords That are Converting!

While this might sound simple enough, most people don’t take the time to do this easy step. Once you create your new campaign for lets say Dating you of course have your first set of keywords that you have researched and put together into some nicely targeted ad groups.

You shouldn’t stop there though! Once you start receiving data, you should be tracking keyword conversions, you will start to find out which keywords are giving you the most conversions and with the best ROI (return on investment). So let’s say that after a week of starting your new campaign you notice that the keyword Local Singles is converting really well for you.

As an example we’ll say that the keyword Local Singles is getting 8 leads a day at $4.00 dollars a lead and your spending $12.00 dollars a day to get those leads. 8 leads a day at $4.00 dollars a lead is $32.00 dollars. So you’re profiting $20.00 dollars a day with the keyword Local Singles.

The first thing I would do as soon as I realize this from my data is go back into my keyword research tool and punch in Local Singles to see what other types of keywords I may get from it. I would then put those keywords into ad groups and continue to do the above steps for all my keywords that I find are converting.

Again, fairly easy tip yet most affiliates don’t do this and they lose out on potential income and also they lose out on the ability to scale their business!

Research Keywords That are Converting!

As I said via the last post, please make sure you subscribe so that you get the next PPC Tip and you don’t miss out!

Make Sure Your Ad Groups Are Laser-Targeted

This is especially true when using Google Adwords, but what a lot of people don’t realize is that is also very important when using YSM (yahoo search marketing) and Microsoft Adcenter.

Laser-Targeted Adgroups simply means that you make sure your keywords in each ad group are closely related. For example if you have a campaign about “Widgets” you would want all your keywords about “Red Widgets” in one ad group, “Blue Widgets” in another ad group, and “Green Widgets” in yet another separate ad group.

You’ve probably heard about this in Google Adwords and why its important because of their quality score, but most people don’t think too much about it when it comes to the other two major PPC engines. So why do you need to worry about this when using YSM or Microsoft Adcenter?

While YSM and Microsoft Adcenter doesn’t have much a quality score one very important thing that they do measure to determine what spot your ad is placed and how much that spot costs you per click is your CTR% (Click Through Rate).

Naturally if your ad groups are laser targeted, its going to mean that your ads are going to be targeted better also as each ad will relate to a specific set of keywords. This means, that your ads will have a higher CTR% because people know from your ad that they are getting exactly what they are searching for.

Use Your Display URL Wisely!

Another mistake I see people do in PPC is not using their ads display URL to their advantage. Let me explain what I mean.

So according to the last tip above you should now have your ad groups tightly targeted. So why aren’t your ads? Most people write their ads to go along with their keywords, for example again, if you have a group of keywords for “Green Widgets” then your ads for that ad group would also contain the keyword “Green Widgets” but what about your URL?

I would say 95% of affiliate would make their display URL for that ad Widgets.com when really they should have their URL as Widgets.com/Green-Widgets. Again, not only will this make your ad stand out a little, but it will also let people know they are getting something fulfilled that they were looking for so it will also increase your CTR% which we all know is very important if you’ve read the first tip of this article!

Avoid Your Homepage As Your Landing Page

Again continuing with the above tip, don’t send all your PPC traffic to the Homepage of your website. Instead you should have a separate landing page for each set of keywords. So as we said above if your display URL is Widgets.com/Green-Widgets your actual URL should lead to that page as well.

You should have a separate landing page for each group of keywords so you would end up with something like this for your URL’s if you use the example we have been using thus far in this article.

Widgets.com (Your Homepage)
Widgets.com/Green-Widgets (Your Green Widgets Landing Page)
Widgets.com/Red-Widgets (Your Red Widgets Landing Page)
Widgets.com/Blue-Widgets (Your Blue Widgets Landing Page)

Again by doing this simple step you can instantly increase your conversion rate and also convince your users even more that they are on the right site to fulfill their needs.

Remember this simple phrase…

Land People In The Relevant Place!

So that wraps up the first part of this article and I truly hope you’ll subscribe to our feed in order to make sure you’ll receive the next article as well!

If you have any suggestions or questions you’d like to see answered in the next part of this series please feel free to leave them in the comments below!

The question is what can you do about this phenomenon to help increase your ROI (return on investment)? The answer is actually quite simple and easy, Dayparting!

First lets start off with the basics…

What is Dayparting?

Dayparting is a tool that is currently available in Google Adwords, as well as Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft Adcenter, that allows you to set bids automatically depending on the day of the week, hour of the day, or both!

A definition of dayparting would be something like:

“Dayparting, the practice of adjusting pay-per-click campaigns based on time of day or day of the week.”

How does dayparting work?

Dayparting is currently available in all of the major search engines PPC program. In Google, dayparting is actually referred to as Ad Scheduling.

To make this alot easy let me give you a few examples of what you can have dayparting do for you and your search campaigns.

Let’s say that you are running an affiliate offer for Payday Loans. Now, we have found out by tracking that between the hours of 1:00 A.M. to 6:00 A.M. we don’t get any conversions at all.

We can now go into Google Adwords and go into our campaign and click on edit campaign, now look for ad scheduling and turn it on and we can now go in and completely turn off our payday loans campaign during those hours. So from now on between the hours of 1:00 A.M. and 6:00 A.M. our campaign will automatically pause and then resume once it hits 6:01 A.M.

Lets say that we notice instead though that between the hours of 1:00 A.M. and 6:00 A.M. we are still getting conversions only not as many and we have a lower ecpc because of a lower conversion rate during those hours. What we can do is go inside of Google Adwords and the ad scheduling and instead of pausing our campaign during those hours, we can instead just lower the bids by 20% across the board and then they will automatically go back up after 6:00 A.M.

So by now you should be seeing the picture and understand why dayparting can significantly increase your ROI, because not only can you lower your bids during certain times, but you can also raise them during certain times. If you notice between the hours of 4:00 P.M. and 6:00 P.M. your conversions really pick up, you can then raise your bid 20% across the board during those times.

Again, the great thing about this is its all automatic. Once you set it up, you never have to worry about it again, it will continue to do it everyday as long as you have it on!

Now there are tons of ways to track keywords and its not as hard as most people think, its just hard to find good information on how to do it. So, in light of that, this topic has been born. Now this post is specifically going to talk about tracking which keywords are converting in your Google Adwords account. Again there are other ways, including using PHP, subid’s, in house tracking, and more.

This method is completely free and very easy to setup which is why I wanted to show it. Your going to need a few things in order for this to work.

First and foremost, You need to be advertising an offer where the advertiser allows you to place a pixel on their website. Most CPA companies now allow this including, Azoogle, NeverblueAds, Copeac, and others. The best way to find out if your Affiliate Company does or not is to simply ask your Affiliate Manager.

Secondly, you will need to have a Google Adwords account obviously hence the blog post title!

To get started Log into your Adwords Account. Once you log in at the top in the navigation bar you’ll see a link that says Conversion Tracking. Click on that Link and you’ll see the following screen.

From the Screen above, you’ll want to check the box that says Other and hit Continue. The next page you’ll see after you hit continue is this.

On this page you are able to choose how the Google Sites Stats button will look on the offer page. I normally always just choose a white background with black text. After you have chosen this you can go ahead and hit Continue again.

On the next page you are able to select the Language, Site Security (meaning http:// or https://) and also your code is displayed that you’ll need to copy and give to your Affiliate Manager to place on the site for you. Every time I have used this it has always been http:// security. However, make sure to ask your AM first to make sure. I’m honestly not sure if it makes a difference or not.

Here is a screenshot showing the part on the third page of language, site security, and the code.

Now go ahead and give your pixel code to your Affiliate Manager and have them place it on the offer page. They will know where it goes. After they have it placed go ahead and press continue and you’ll get a screen that says “Your new Adwords tracking setup is complete. Now, test the results.” Now of course the only way to test the results is to wait until someone clicks one of your adwords ads and completes the offer. However, if you did it the way instructed above and your affiliate manager placed the pixel on the correct page you should have no problem.

Disclaimer: Some people don’t like this type of tracking as Google has all your data on which keywords are converting. I use this method on a lot of campaigns that have been running for months and I’ve never seen anything bad happen. Its totally up to you whether you track your keywords this way or not. However, it is a FREE and EASY way to track which keywords are converting for you and if you don’t have the PHP know how or don’t wish to pay for another piece of tracking software, it’s definitely better than not tracking your keywords at all.

Also, Adwords Conversion Tracking allows you to setup tracking for your Non-Adwords Campaigns which you’ll see the link on the last page. Its called Cross-Channel Tracking. I’ve never personally used their Cross-Channel Tracking so I can’t vouch as to if its good or not, but if your not tracking Yahoo or MSN with another means its definitely worth a look!

Last but not least, here is an example of how it looks with the conversion tracking on in Adwords.

Up until now, you could only bid on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) model. This allows you to take sites where you were getting alot of impressions but no clicks for example and now only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad. So you may find a site converts really well when the user clicks on your ad from that site, but because your ad doesn’t get clicked a lot, for example maybe they have their adsense ads all the way at the bottom of their page. With the new interface you could make the site become profitable now.

I haven’t fulled around with it too much, so I’m not quite sure how it works yet as I just haven’t had the time yet. You can bet I’ll be doing some major testing with this though, and I’ll be doing that testing very very soon!

For more information please visit the following link: Google Announces CPC bidding for Placement Targeted Ads