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What Are Your Experiences With Bing?

August 21, 2009 By 18 Comments

Microsoft-Bing-logoIf you know me at all, you know that I’m a big advocate of using the other search engines besides just Google, for several reasons that I’m not gonna list in this article but that you can find if you do a search or two on this blog.

Anyways, while this won’t be an article that really lists tons of helpful advice, or give you a long list about some great things you can do in Bing, I would like to point out a thing I’ve been noticing with my own affiliate stuff lately…

The amount of traffic that I’m receiving from using the MSN Adcenter is growing and it’s particularly growing on with Bing.  It seems that more and more people are using Bing and the conversion rates for me are definitely higher on Bing than on both Google and Yahoo.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see my traffic coming from Bing continuing to grow in these last couple months and I really feel the need to blog about this and tell you guys, that if you’re not using Bing and you’re just promoting your stuff on Yahoo and Google, then you’re missing out on some great opportunities.

Of course I’m not saying that Bing is going to take over either of the other two search engines anytime soon in terms of volume and traffic, but I am saying that they are growing and getting in early in this business seems to never let me down!

I’d definitely recommend checking them out!  If you have any tips or experiences with Bing that you’d like to share, I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Tips, Microsoft

Easy and Quick to Implement PPC Tips & Tricks – Part Three

April 17, 2008 By 1 Comment

In the third section of this little series I’m doing I want to talk about keywords. However, I’m not interested in talking about how to get more keywords, how to scale your campaign, or anything like that.

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!

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Google, Keyword Strategies, Microsoft, PPC, Yahoo

Easy and Quick to Implement PPC Tips & Tricks – Part Two

April 15, 2008 By 5 Comments

Welcome back kiddies and for those that have stumbled upon this post make sure you check out the first part to this little series for 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!

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Google, Keyword Strategies, Microsoft, Yahoo

Easy and Quick to Implement PPC Tips & Tricks – Part One

April 13, 2008 By 3 Comments

Hey guys, so I was reading an article on some PPC tips today and when I was reading some of the tips and tricks that the blog had listed I realized a lot of them just wasn’t true. Then I noticed the day, May of 2005! So I figured I would give a couple of my own PPC tips and tricks that are easy and very quick to implement.

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!

Filed Under: Google, Microsoft, PPC, Yahoo

Instantly Increase Your ROI With Dayparting

April 11, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Most affiliates that have been running any type of profitable campaign know that there are certain hours when customers will convert better than other hours.

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!

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo
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