As most of you know, the FTC is currently posting about grants going after people that are using Obama or Government Stimulus type offers, ads, and landing pages.  I know what some of you are thinking…they have every right!  Guess what?  I agree 100%!  I don’t agree with people that falsely promote offers, there are too many legit ways to make money in affiliate marketing that you don’t have to lie and cheat people!

However, I don’t agree with what Yahoo is doing and that’s the point of this post!  I think it’s crazy and if I was a stock holder in the company I’d be throwing a hissy fit right about now!

Yahoo is currently just going through and deleting all grant ads and stuff in people’s Yahoo Search Marketing accounts.  Now, I could understand if they were just deleting ads of people that are running Obama grant offers, or using Obama or government stimulus stuff in their ads, however, they are going after people that are running these grant offers 100% legit!  They are doing it by the books, but Yahoo is telling these people that they are cleaning house and they’ll be releasing new guidelines for affiliates that are running grants and once they do then these legit guys can have their stuff re-looked at and turned back on!

This is happening to several affiliates that I know are running Grants 100% legit, not just one or two!

Okay Yahoo, so how do you not realize that this is backwards?  Wouldn’t you think you’d release your new guidelines for grants, then give marketers say a week to make the changes and if they don’t then delete their stuff?  That would make a lot more sense!

Now of course, I realize mistakes happen and while companies are cleaning out house they sometimes accidentally affect legit affiliates, however, this number is too big and it’s simply being overlooked when these people call in complaining about it!  Yahoo reps are just telling people to resubmit their ads and they’ll look at them again.

Anyways, I think it’s ridiculous and honestly I just felt like getting it out there cause I know it’s happening to a ton of affiliates in the grant niche and I’m hoping…even if it’s a small chance…that some Yahoo rep that’s a little higher up reads this and checks into it!

Yahoo has done this before in other niches and they need to realize that they need to change it or people are going to stop using their system!

Have you been affected by the recent changes Yahoo has done with the grant niche?

Sometimes I think Yahoo, by Yahoo I mean Yahoo Search Marketing, is retarded. They do the stupidest things and without doing it properly.

As most of you have probably heard by now, Yahoo Search Marketing has changed the way the minimum bid works. It’s no longer fixed at $.10 like it has been, now it could be higher or lower for each specific keyword depending on two major factors according to Yahoo’s Blog and I Quote…

Quality—High quality generally means that your ads are being clicked more often, relative to your competitors. We try to reward quality with higher rankings and lower costs, and now, potentially, with lower minimum bids.

Value—We look at a number of things to determine what a keyword is worth: for example, how many advertisers are bidding on your keyword, and what they’re willing to pay for it.

Now, there are some people that are sticking up for Yahoo basically saying we have seen this coming, they are trying to be more like Google Adwords, etc… My response to them is…

Your just as retarded as Yahoo!!!

Here is why I disagree with what Yahoo is doing and people that support it!

First off, Lets take a look at the line about Value. They are basically saying that ads that are clicked more, are relative to competitors deserve to pay less for keywords so instead of .10 cents they may only pay .06 cents. Now, I understand this for the most part and yeah I’ll give points since this is kinda something similar to how Google Adwords works, however, there is one big flaw here!

I have yet to hear of someone actually paying less than .10 cents or even having a keyword where the minimum bid is less than .10 cents. Also, you must have a good enough algorithm to do this. Google’s Adwords algorithm isn’t perfect but it works for the most part, whereas Yahoo’s advertising algorithm blows balls! BIG TIME!!!

I’ve had ad groups that work perfectly in Adwords, however, when I put them into Yahoo I have ad quality scores of 2 or 3 bars out of 5 bars. Yet, I can just throw a bunch of keywords into an ad group and just make a bunch of general ads and have 5/5 bars for my ad quality score. Do they really feel their quality algorithm is good enough?

Let’s talk about the second part of that quote, the part about Value. To me this is simply stupid, it doesn’t even make sense to me! I’m not sure if they just didn’t explain it properly or if their really this retarded. Basically what I get from this statement is that they will set minimum bids on keywords if they feel they should get paid more for that keyword. Lets say for example the keyword Insurance, Yahoo is basically saying we feel that we should get at least .40 cents per click from the keyword Insurance so we are raising your minimum bid to match what we feel the keyword is worth.

ROTFL!!! Are you serious???

Again, I’m not really upset that they have taken away the .10 cent minimum bid, my problem is that they are not doing it correctly, you can’t expect something to work when your algorithms don’t allow for it. Yahoo needs to fix so many other problems before they start worrying about quality scores and all of that.

Yahoo is reminding me more and more of Ask.com everyday. They need to quit being retarded!

[/END RANT]

I would love to hear your opinions on this recent change that YSM has implement, so please leave a comment letting me know what you think.

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!

Microsoft Corp. made an unsolicited $44.6 billion cash and stock bid for Yahoo on Friday, a deal that could shake up the competitive and lucrative market for online advertising.

You can read the full article from CNN here.

I personally think this will be a good thing for Affiliates. Yahoo and Microsoft are both known for having better conversion rates than the Big G, however, alot of affiliates don’t take the time to work with all three search engines.

If Yahoo and Microsoft combine, it could make it easier for affiliates to work with only two major players than with three. Of course I have no idea if Microsoft would continue to have 2 separate advertising platforms or if they would combine them and only have one.

Also, if compnay is able to threaten Google, I would say Microsoft would be that company simply because of the size of the company and the amount of money they have.

This will definitely be something I’ll be hoping happens. Hopefully, Yahoo is smart enough to take the offer!

Well quite simply they are going to once again put it all on their advertisers. I mean come on, you didn’t expect to read that they were going to fix the problem them self did you?

Anyways, here is a piece of the email I received.

We have noticed a large number of keywords in account ########## with compliance/relevance issues. Yahoo! Search Marketing requires that Web sites possess substantial content that is clearly and obviously reflective of the keyword.

This notice is provided to you as a courtesy. If you continue to advertise under a large percentage of non-compliant keywords, we will be forced to set your account offline until you adhere to our policies.

So as you can see from the quotes above, I have a yahoo search marketing account that has keywords that I’m bidding on that aren’t relevant to my landing page.

Now of course in Google Adwords they simply would slap those keywords with high minimum bids and that would be the end of that.

Of course Yahoo can’t come up with a system that deletes bad keywords themselves so they have to contact their advertisers and threaten to close their accounts.

Nice right? So because Yahoo can’t come up with a system to deal with relevancy problems they stick it on their advertisers and then they wonder why they are having such a problem getting people to use their ad system.

This is why I spend tens of thousands a month with Google Adwords a month and hardly crap with Yahoo anymore. This is a company that can’t seem to do anything themselves when it comes to their ad system and always point the blame at their advertisers and publishers.

Just take a look through the digitalpoint webmaster forums under the YPN section and you’ll see how they cancel peoples YPN accounts because traffic from their sites isn’t converting well yet Yahoo is displaying Vonage phone ads on a site about video gaming.

There are a lot of problems with Yahoo’s Ad Network that needs to be fixed both on the advertiser and publisher side. The first major problem is that Yahoo needs to realize that they can’t always blame their advertisers and publishers for stuff and make it their responsibility.

Are you going to start testing your affiliate campaigns using YSM’s content network now? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

EDIT: I also just realized that Yahoo now has a Paypal Option if you goto your Administration Tab and Goto Funding Sources and then goto Add New Card, however, it doesn’t seem to be working yet. Anyone know when they added this and when it will become functional?

If you are an ad network like adsense or ypn and you had your ads on a site about dog training and for one of the ads it was displaying an advertiser for voip phone service would you think this is going to convert well? Well, apparently Yahoo does! This isn’t a one time thing, it has happened to alot of people, some banned, some warned but the bottom line is, Yahoo serves sucky ads and they then blame their publishers for the traffic not converting. So that kind of gives you an idea of how Yahoo thinks…Or doesn’t think… So moving on to what I really want to discuss.

If you use Yahoo Search Marketing then you most likely realize by now that you have a keyword limit of 50,000 keywords that you can upload into your account. Now in order to place more keywords in your account you must spend a certain amount per month in order to get upgraded to a Gold Account which will then increase your keywords by 50,000 giving you a grand total of 100,000 keywords that you may upload into your account.

Oh but wait, it doesn’t stop there, if you want more than 100,000 you must spend so much per month with Yahoo to get your account upgraded to a Platinum Account which allows you to upload 1,000,000 keywords into your account. Okay, so there’s a limit big deal…Adwords has a keyword limit as well and so does MSN. Okay just keep going with me on this one!

So you reach your 50,000 keyword limit and you beg and beg and beg Yahoo to increase your keyword limit so you can naturally put in more keywords. However, if your not doing the minimum required ad spend a month they won’t do it! You can beg, get angry, call again to try and get someone else, it doesn’t matter! No matter what you do, they won’t budge an inch! (99.9% of the time)

However, You may have Yahoo create another account under your main account, a sub account, which will use the same CC#, address, phone number, etc and you can once again upload 50,000 keywords under that account which can easily be accessed from your main account using a drop down box.

WTF Yahoo! Why would you have your users create more accounts under the main account when you could simply increase their keyword limit??? I mean do you guys see what I mean when I say that Yahoo has a brain the size of an ant!

//rant