New campaign kick-off technique

[artarmon42]

Over the past few days, I've been trying a new method of kicking off a campaign. My personal observations is that it is better (higher QS & more impressions) than the "normal" (newbie) technique. I would classify it as a "intermediate YSM technique".

I'm looking for PUBLIC testers. To qualify:
1) You need to have run a YSM campaign before. No newbies please.
2) You need to have completed the tuning process.
3) You need to have a NEW campaign that you're starting (or an OLD campaign that you've just rebuilt and haven't launched yet).
4) You agree to publish your results/thoughts of this technique, on this thread. You can say good or bad things, just leave it on this thread so people have one thread to look at.

I will share the technique on this thread, but before I do, I'd like to see who would be able to test this soon so that we can find out the PRACTICAL value of this technique, rather than making hypothetical guesses on whether it would work or not.

DISCLAIMER:
1) This is not a proven technique. If you agree to test it and screw up your campaign and have to rebuild it, don't blame me.
2) This is not a proven technique. If you agree to test it and your cat dies, don't blame me.
3) This is not a proven technique. If you agree to test it and aliens invade Earth, don't blame me.
To summarize, this is not a proven technique. Whether the results are good, bad or indifferent, don't even think about blaming me :)

[solution2u]

Sounds interesting & I am interested. I fulfill all except 2nd 1 as I just started tuning on 2 of my new campaign. Let me know, if I am qualify with it. I won't blame anyone if my campaign is screwed up. I will treat it as "tuition fees" :D Let me know if I qualify for this.

[pilkster]

I will check it out. So long as I can blame you :D

It is about time I re-launched my ringtones empire, think I probably fit the criteria.

[m0rtal]

Well I'm going to be redoing my payday campaign with a ton more keywords. 2 questions

"2) You need to have completed the tuning process."
Are you asking here if we have experience in tuning because I don't see how you can be starting a new campaign and "have completed the tuning process".

Does this involve grouping keywords? Reason I ask is because when I redo my campaign I want to go back to the "newbie" method. It seems like the best way to get the most impressions since you can stuff a ton more keywords in without worrying about grouping. With wordze you can divide them up nicely but I'm running keyword elite right now to gather more so it would be a huge mess to divide them up and not something I'm up for.

So if it doesn't involve grouping keywords I'll be the guinea pig :D

[nwitkoski]

I would like to help art. PM with details.

[Tom]

I am interested; I will be re-doing a bunch of my campaigns at the beginning of summer. Count me in.

[indieee]

I'd like to try this pls.

I'm not having much success overall (despite having followed the guidelines in the appropriate threads).

I'm in the process of getting a new campaign together to start afresh so that would work out well.

[KGL]

I'll give it a try.

[syns0r]

hey i don't want to be left out, i'm in too.

[tmoran]

I am very interested in this, I've done the above. (Although I am still refining my tuning process)

[artarmon42]

WARNING: This technique won't make any sense unless you've done the newbie technique (http://forum.clickconsultants.com/showpost.php?p=2287&postcount=5) _and_ practices tuning (http://forum.clickconsultants.com/showthread.php?t=436)

I was reviewing the YSM newbie technique, and it occurred to me that there are further efficiencies that can be gotten out of the process. Specifically, I believe the inefficiencies to be:

The difficulty of writing ads that can cover the full range of keywords.
In short, if your ad isn't "relevant" to the keyword, YSM will not give you many impressions. So you might have a "killer" keyword (one that has low competition, and high conversion rate), but if there is no ad that is "relevant" to that specific keyword, you'll get very few impressions for it.
Solution: Grouping is critical and mandatory for success. By grouping, you'll make sure that every keyword in that adgroup has at least one common word. Then it's as simple as making sure that those specific word(s) occurs in your adcopy. If you can get two (or more) common words, even better for your QS.
Caveat: It's widely recognized that Keyword Replacement does NOT help ad relevancy scoring. Just because you throw in a {KEYWORD} into your ad, doesn't mean you'll get any quality benefit. If you're grouping keywords, type the specific word(s) into your adcopy in rather than using {KEYWORD}.

Irrelevant keywords (even with good CTR) will hurt your bottom line
From tuning, we all know that irrelevant keywords simply cost you money (if they're clicked on) or lower your CTR (if they're not clicked on).
Solution: Tune BEFORE your campaign launches. If you spend time during the campaign building phase, you'll lose less money. AND (definitely) more importantly, you won't take that initial hit to your CTR.

Bids affect ad position, which affects CTR
The newbie technique states to bid only $0.10. While it "nearly" guarantees immediate profitability, it results in a campaign that cannot sustain itself over the long run. Its lifespan is limited simply because:

highly competitive keywords will damage your CTR (you'll get impressions, but they'll be really bad positions, so you'll never get any clicks).
you can't detect/delete these highly competitive keywords during the pre-campaign phase (see point above) because you don't know which ones are competitive until your campaign starts
you are unlikely to want to delete them, because the keyword looks legitimate to you and most people will rather write it off as "bad luck" and keep it in the campaign (where it will continue to hurt your CTR)

As long as those bad keywords exists in your campaign, you will get lower and lower and lower impressions until you give up the niche as unprofitable.
Hint: Don't believe me? Throw "viagra" (just that word) into your campaign (any campaign) and see how many impressions it clocks in an hour (and what your ad position is)!
Solution: You need to bid high enough to score a good position for as many keywords as possible.

So now that you understand the premise of the technique, this is the simple step-by-step for implementing it:

Group your keywords. Try to group by finding AT LEAST one common word. Then ensure that ALL the common word(s) are in each ad for that adgroup. With this technique, you should only need 1 ad, per adgroup. You can run more ads if you're doing split testing, but 1 ad should be all you need.
Talk to your Affiliate Manager, and find out what the eCPC for your offer is. Set your bid for ALL your keywords to be ONE-THIRD of that eCPC. This should give you enough margin to make some mistakes (and still eek out a profit).
Make sure EVERYTHING in the campaign is approved before turning it on. Yes, EVERY adcopy, EVERY keyword.
Set your campaign's daily spending limit to be 20 times your bid setting. So if you bid $0.20, then your spending limit will be $4.00. Thanks to Pilkster for that idea (http://forum.clickconsultants.com/showpost.php?p=4099&postcount=55)!
Start the campaign and come back to it once your daily limit has been reached (probably 1-2 hours for most niches I can think of). Review EVERY adgroup in the campaign (sort by impressions) to see if you have any crazy-high impressions. If they don't make sense, or are obviously not targeted, delete them straight away.
Reset your daily spending limit to something you're comfortable with. Resume campaign.
Proceed to do the normal tuning steps until the campaign is "stabilized". Additionally, check for the following:

If a keyword has low CTR, look at the Average Position. If the position is >10, then decide whether you are willing to bid more. If you won't increase your bid, then delete that keyword.
Obviously if the position is <10, and it still has a CTR, then it's an untargeted keyword (delete it) or your adcopy is bad (fix it).


Try it and report back your experiences.

[solution2u]

Nice post artarmon42! I just print out this post and I will ensure I follow what you said. Let's see how it goes.

[artarmon42]

I've gotten a few PMs about how to "easily" group keywords.

Click Consultants offers a free tool to help you group keywords. You can find it here: http://clickconsultants.com/toolbox/keysegment/keyword-segmentator.php


Me personally, I use Keyword Companion.
EDIT: I removed the link to KC, as I no longer support that company due to their spamming practices and non-existent support.

[pilkster]

Great post :)

[syns0r]

Talk to your Affiliate Manager, and find out what the eCPC for your offer is.


I don't have an Affiliate Manager =(
mine went on to bigger fish, any suggestions on who I should ask for/pick etc?

[theone]

Is keyword companion worth $247 that\'s alot for a program :eek:

[artarmon42]

I don't have an Affiliate Manager =(
mine went on to bigger fish, any suggestions on who I should ask for/pick etc?

Everyone should have an affiliate manager.
You might not know who it is, but call the company and ask.

[artarmon42]

Is keyword companion worth $247 that\'s alot for a program :eek:

Besides Wordze, it's the only other program I use.
Watch the videos about what it does and then you decide whether it's worth the money or not.

I'm not trying to push it... I honestly don't care whether people buy it or not. I just threw it out, because those are only two programs *I* know of that will help with keyword grouping. I'm sure there are more, but those are the only two I know of.

[m0rtal]

Great post will report with my findings.

[artarmon42]

Great post will report with my findings.

So I convinced you that you need to do some grouping eh? :D

[m0rtal]

So I convinced you that you need to do some grouping eh? :D

Sort of :p

I was doing grouping already but that was only with keywords from wordze so it wasn't that many and with wordze it's much easier. My problem seems to be not enough keywords and I should have a ton more now since running keyword elite for 2 days :eek: . It' just with KE it's a bitch because it's super slow once you get over like 15k keywords and the "remove phrases containing" and "only show phrases containing" isn't always accurate. I guess I'll export them to excel and then use the CC tool you just posted I had forgotten about :D

I was going to go back to the "newbie" method but after seeing your conversion stats for payday loans I think I'm convinced it's better to put in the work for grouping.

How did you finish off the rest of the day and how is today so far if you don't mind sharing?

(btw this forum is laggy as shit again )

[artarmon42]

I posted my stats here (http://forum.clickconsultants.com/showpost.php?p=5288&postcount=219).

Today looks good, but it's too early to call.

[syns0r]

Everyone should have an affiliate manager.
You might not know who it is, but call the company and ask.

I called Az and the guy said my AM quit a week or 2 ago and I was without one but he went ahead and took me in under him. His name is Frasier he said he is mystikal and supernova's AM so hopefully I am in good hands.

PS I have had the timing out issue just now, it always seems to happen when I am replying to threads. argh!

[TimUkaj]

Fraser is really good.

[syns0r]

Tim, is he your AM as well? He sent me an email with some landing page examples and a bunch of ringtone catalogs, that was pretty cool ,I will have to make a mysql db to use them

[mystickcal]

WARNING: This technique won't make any sense unless you've done the newbie technique (http://forum.clickconsultants.com/showpost.php?p=2287&postcount=5) _and_ practices tuning (http://forum.clickconsultants.com/showthread.php?t=436)

I was reviewing the YSM newbie technique, and it occurred to me that there are further efficiencies that can be gotten out of the process. Specifically, I believe the inefficiencies to be:

The difficulty of writing ads that can cover the full range of keywords.
In short, if your ad isn't "relevant" to the keyword, YSM will not give you many impressions. So you might have a "killer" keyword (one that has low competition, and high conversion rate), but if there is no ad that is "relevant" to that specific keyword, you'll get very few impressions for it.
Solution: Grouping is critical and mandatory for success. By grouping, you'll make sure that every keyword in that adgroup has at least one common word. Then it's as simple as making sure that those specific word(s) occurs in your adcopy. If you can get two (or more) common words, even better for your QS.
Caveat: It's widely recognized that Keyword Replacement does NOT help ad relevancy scoring. Just because you throw in a {KEYWORD} into your ad, doesn't mean you'll get any quality benefit. If you're grouping keywords, type the specific word(s) into your adcopy in rather than using {KEYWORD}.

Irrelevant keywords (even with good CTR) will hurt your bottom line
From tuning, we all know that irrelevant keywords simply cost you money (if they're clicked on) or lower your CTR (if they're not clicked on).
Solution: Tune BEFORE your campaign launches. If you spend time during the campaign building phase, you'll lose less money. AND (definitely) more importantly, you won't take that initial hit to your CTR.

Bids affect ad position, which affects CTR
The newbie technique states to bid only $0.10. While it "nearly" guarantees immediate profitability, it results in a campaign that cannot sustain itself over the long run. Its lifespan is limited simply because:

highly competitive keywords will damage your CTR (you'll get impressions, but they'll be really bad positions, so you'll never get any clicks).
you can't detect/delete these highly competitive keywords during the pre-campaign phase (see point above) because you don't know which ones are competitive until your campaign starts
you are unlikely to want to delete them, because the keyword looks legitimate to you and most people will rather write it off as "bad luck" and keep it in the campaign (where it will continue to hurt your CTR)

As long as those bad keywords exists in your campaign, you will get lower and lower and lower impressions until you give up the niche as unprofitable.
Hint: Don't believe me? Throw "viagra" (just that word) into your campaign (any campaign) and see how many impressions it clocks in an hour (and what your ad position is)!
Solution: You need to bid high enough to score a good position for as many keywords as possible.

So now that you understand the premise of the technique, this is the simple step-by-step for implementing it:

Group your keywords. Try to group by finding AT LEAST one common word. Then ensure that ALL the common word(s) are in each ad for that adgroup. With this technique, you should only need 1 ad, per adgroup. You can run more ads if you're doing split testing, but 1 ad should be all you need.
Talk to your Affiliate Manager, and find out what the eCPC for your offer is. Set your bid for ALL your keywords to be ONE-THIRD of that eCPC. This should give you enough margin to make some mistakes (and still eek out a profit).
Make sure EVERYTHING in the campaign is approved before turning it on. Yes, EVERY adcopy, EVERY keyword.
Set your campaign's daily spending limit to be 20 times your bid setting. So if you bid $0.20, then your spending limit will be $4.00. Thanks to Pilkster for that idea (http://forum.clickconsultants.com/showpost.php?p=4099&postcount=55)!
Start the campaign and come back to it once your daily limit has been reached (probably 1-2 hours for most niches I can think of). Review EVERY adgroup in the campaign (sort by impressions) to see if you have any crazy-high impressions. If they don't make sense, or are obviously not targeted, delete them straight away.
Reset your daily spending limit to something you're comfortable with. Resume campaign.
Proceed to do the normal tuning steps until the campaign is "stabilized". Additionally, check for the following:

If a keyword has low CTR, look at the Average Position. If the position is >10, then decide whether you are willing to bid more. If you won't increase your bid, then delete that keyword.
Obviously if the position is <10, and it still has a CTR, then it's an untargeted keyword (delete it) or your adcopy is bad (fix it).


Try it and report back your experiences.

Hey art, great post but not so correct. While alot of the stuff mentioned is just that newbie stuff, bidding 10 cents will not hurt you in the long run or cause your campaign to die out. Neither will the fact of not grouping in Yahoo. I have plenty of campaigns that have been up for 6 - 8 months still bidding 10 cents on them and they have never been grouped, I agree that that stuff does help, but it isn't necessary. It all depends on the niche. In a really competitive niche, you are going to have to increase your 10 cent bids I mean thats common sense, if you want to increase your revenue, and also some niches do require you to group keywords, however most 9/10 don't need to be grouped in Yahoo to be effective.

However there is one important reason to group your keywords that you did mention and that is to help your quality score and targeting of keywords to ads.

That is the only reason I group keywords in yahoo is to improve my ad to keyword quality. However using the keyword replacement for alot of stuff works and there isn't a need for this unless there are words you can't bid on.

So grouping keywords for ringtones WOULD be a good idea, grouping for dating in my opinion NOT worth the time.

[mystickcal]

I called Az and the guy said my AM quit a week or 2 ago and I was without one but he went ahead and took me in under him. His name is Frasier he said he is mystikal and supernova's AM so hopefully I am in good hands.

PS I have had the timing out issue just now, it always seems to happen when I am replying to threads. argh!

He's not my AM, he is Sup3rnova's AM though.

[m0rtal]

mystickal and what's your opinion on payday loans?

[TimUkaj]

Yep, he's my AM too. I also think that trypp @ DP has him as AM, not sure though :).

[mystickcal]

mystickal and what's your opinion on payday loans?

I've never personally run payday loans, i know sup3rnova was going to try it with you, I don't know if he found the time to do so or not.

[artarmon42]

bidding 10 cents will not hurt you in the long run or cause your campaign to die out.


Does that assume deleting keywords with low CTRs (because the ad position is too low)?

Specific to Payday Loans (and I presume that would have to be the same with competitive Ringtones keywords), some of my keywords that convert the best for me require bids (much) higher than $0.20 to get to average position of <10.

When I didn't bid high (like in my original Payday Loans campaign using the $0.10 technique), I had to delete those keywords because of low CTR.

I'm not saying that EVERY keywords need to be at position < 10... some highly competitive ones just cost more than I'm willing to pay and I delete those.

I believe that bidding up to $0.20 and deleting low CTR keywords, will prune your keyword list down to only "long" long-tails (those words that not many people bid on). That will maintain profitability/ROI, but I don't believe that will get sufficient volume by itself. To scale that success, I think you'd need to add more and more keywords.

Whereas this technique (of bidding up to your threshold) will maximize your revenue per keyword. My ROI won't be as good, and you'll really need to know what you're doing to maintain a profit, but it should get more absolute-dollars-per-keyword. And then I can STILL add more keywords go scale revenue.

One truth that I've learnt, is that there are many methods to do affiliate marketing. Not saying this system works (that's why I'm looking for people to test), but it's something to try :)

[mystickcal]

Does that assume deleting keywords with low CTRs (because the ad position is too low)?

Specific to Payday Loans (and I presume that would have to be the same with competitive Ringtones keywords), some of my keywords that convert the best for me require bids (much) higher than $0.20 to get to average position of <10.

When I didn't bid high (like in my original Payday Loans campaign using the $0.10 technique), I had to delete those keywords because of low CTR.

I'm not saying that EVERY keywords need to be at position < 10... some highly competitive ones just cost more than I'm willing to pay and I delete those.

I believe that bidding up to $0.20 and deleting low CTR keywords, will prune your keyword list down to only "long" long-tails (those words that not many people bid on). That will maintain profitability/ROI, but I don't believe that will get sufficient volume by itself. To scale that success, I think you'd need to add more and more keywords.

Whereas this technique (of bidding up to your threshold) will maximize your revenue per keyword. My ROI won't be as good, and you'll really need to know what you're doing to maintain a profit, but it should get more absolute-dollars-per-keyword. And then I can STILL add more keywords go scale revenue.

One truth that I've learnt, is that there are many methods to do affiliate marketing. Not saying this system works (that's why I'm looking for people to test), but it's something to try :)

No I totally agree that you need to raise bids, but there are ways to do this and still test the market first to see if you are going to have problems getting the offer to convert. The best way is once you get Gold account and import feature. Then what you do is make your campaign start off the bid at .10 cents to make sure you are going to profit or whatever and then delete the campaign and use teh import feature to reload the campaign and make the changes in the import file before uploading. Increasing bids, deleting keywords etc. It works great. For google use the adwords editor tool.

Also I don't always just bid .10 cents I've mentioned in the forum that the way I start it is to start with assuming there will be a 1% conversion on the offer. So lets say the offer pays out 14.00 then my start bid would be 14 cents per click. If it pays out 20.00 then .20 cents to start.

I agree you need to raise bids, I'm just saying not for every market do you need to, nor is it worth it for every market. Takes testing.

Also, you could be right in what you are doing, as you said there are tons and tons and I mean tons of different techinques and many of them work great. So please don't stop me from you sharing info with the members, I was just giving my view, doesn't mean my way is the only right way. Only that my way is my view :D

[artarmon42]

Oh, I wish I had Gold. Every time I call, they insist my account must be 3 months old (no exceptions for daily spend).

[mystickcal]

Oh, I wish I had Gold. Every time I call, they insist my account must be 3 months old (no exceptions for daily spend).

Yeah they are full of crap :D Just call and keep talking to a rep till one of them does it lol. Thats what I always do.

[m0rtal]

Waiting on my keywords to be approved..

[syns0r]

waiting on my keywords to be approved as well, I was up late last night (~3am) getting all this setup (ringtones) hope it works out for the best!

So has anyone else done this yet? If so what are your results?

[artarmon42]

I've used this technique on 3 niches, and I've seen similar results across the board. Basically, I don't get ANY dip after the initial surge of impressions, and then it goes up slowly (as my QS goes up).

[syns0r]

that will be great to have that initial surge stay constant, can't wait, I am so excited... =)

[m0rtal]

Some early results since last night:

YSM:

Impressions 9,043 CTR 0.48 43 14.78

Azoogle: 12 2 $1.22 $14.60

Total = - $ 0.18

Ok so I'm in the hole, shitty CTR buuuut, it is slowly increasing, it just happened that some keywords got through and racked up the impressions and since they sucked also resulted in a crappy CTR on the landing page, those are now gone. I think I also started off my bidding a bit too high.

It does look promising though once I tune the heck out of this one.

[artarmon42]

Yup, focus on standard tuning process.
You should be able to bring this back in line at this stage...

[m0rtal]

No wait! I only spent $10.66, the other figure was total for my campaigns...oops, so that means I'm in profit $3.94, definately better than -0.18 :D

[syns0r]

9k Impressions in one night is a whopper of a stat! Well it is for me anyway (for now =) ) Anyways, why do people click on ads they aren't interested in?

The CTR still the same or was that for all of your campaigns?

[m0rtal]

Yeah I messed up posted wrong stats. These are the actual stats for the payday campaign since late last night till now 3:30pm EST. I actually just got another lead after making my last post.

YSM.
imp 8,658
ctr 0.39
clicks 34
cost 10.84

Azoogle:

13 3 $1.68 $21.90

Profit: $11.06

[m0rtal]

Looking better by the minute got 3 more leads...guess the new technique won't kill your cat and the aliens won't invade earth :D

I had a previous payday campaign that wasn't getting too much traffic and here's why I think:

Had less keywords, this new one doesn't have nearly as many as artarmon but it's about 11-12k keywords, the previous campaign had <10k.

I waited till all keywords/ads got approved first, even tho all pending keywords got declined :mad:

I caught the high impression keywords early on and my CTR is starting to recover slowly.

Previous campaign used keyword insertion in 1 ad this one doesn't use any keyword insertion. Just making sure I have the main words in my ads.

So here's what I got so far

YSM
Imp - 9,437
CTR - 0.42
Clicks - 40
Cost - $12.14

Azoogle

Clicks - 15
Leads - 6
eCPC - $2.92
Revenue - $43.80

Profit = $31.66
ROI = 261%

[artarmon42]

That's great!

Just one comment... you seem to be losing alot of people between YSM and Azoogle. Check your page design with both IE and Firefox, check your load times, etc.

[m0rtal]

Seems to load fine in Opera, FF, and IE, I think it's the keywords that were duds that I've now deleted.

Hey, what do you think of copying the campaign to a new one since I've deleted the crappy keywords to boost CTR?

[artarmon42]

I don't think <1 day's of bad CTR will throw off your campaign enough to justify that work. But that's just lazy me talking ;)

[syns0r]

how long does it take to get everything approved? Seems to be taking a long time. But I can finally say something good about the editorial process because they found some of my destination urls incorrect. :)

and what is a good load time?

[artarmon42]

Depends on alot of factors...
How busy they are, status of your YSM account, etc.

Generally it takes somewhere between 2 to 5 days.

[artarmon42]

Oh!

I think I may have discovered another step in this new technique.
If you haven't kicked off your campaign yet, don't do it yet.

I need another 1-2 days to verify this finding, at which point I'll post it.

[syns0r]

what do you mean 'kicked off'? I haven't turned it on yet if that counts =)

[artarmon42]

yeah if you haven't unpaused your campaign, then wait a bit longer.

if you HAVE started your campaign, do NOT pause.
I've founding that pausing during campaign kick-off (when you get the surge) is a BAD thing.

BTW, I believe these are "bugs" in the YSM system.
It's a problem with their calculation system.
The new step I'm verifying relates to one of these calculation bugs.

[m0rtal]

I'm willing to be a guinea pig again heh...I haven't had any more conversions since yesterday afternoon. Spent about $27 still at $43 revenue so $16 profit :/

[syns0r]

so I guess it's just us 3 that are doing this?

[artarmon42]

so I guess it's just us 3 that are doing this?

Some people just don't like to post ;)

[m0rtal]

umm is it just me or is azoogle down?

[artarmon42]

umm is it just me or is azoogle down?

Off topic, but yes, it's down for me right now.

[m0rtal]

Yeah the jumplinks seem to be dead too or extremely slow.

[syns0r]

Some people just don't like to post ;)

like your friend prodigy, lol? I know he has to be doing it.

[artarmon42]

like your friend prodigy, lol? I know he has to be doing it.

Actually he isn't.

I'm teaching him from the ground up with the newbie technique, so that he can learn the process.

[m0rtal]

I'm thinking of redoing this a 3rd time ..:(
if my spending catches up to my earnings and it's not very far

[artarmon42]

m0rtal, i think your problem is that you're catching too many people... or losing too many people on your LP.

Specific to Payday Loans, 80+% of the people who click on my ad, end up going to Azoogle. And of those that go to Azoogle, I'm converting 1 in 3.

So, if you're using this technique and getting a bad ROI, I might suggest:
1) You're using Keyword Replacement (which gets you high CTR, but not necessarily very targeted users... so your click costs will be inflated). Using this method, I'm now very confident that you don't need Keyword Replacement (for high CTR) in order for YSM to give you more impressions.
2) You're targeting very broad keywords. On the Payday Loans thread, someone indicated that "personal loans" converts. Well, it does "convert"... but at a rate of about 1 in 30 clicks. That kind of conversion will kill you with this method (of bidding high). Kill those keywords, or they'll kill you.
3) Your LP sucks. Given that I'm using the freebie LP, that shouldn't be happening for you, unless you've really hacked the graphics or thrown up a bad article. PM me your URL if you'd like my feedback.
4) You're bidding too high.

[Andrew]

artarmon42,

may I ask how much are you bidding?

[artarmon42]

may I ask how much are you bidding?

For what? ;)
(seriously, please post this in the right thread so people don't get confused).

[artarmon42]

yeah if you haven't unpaused your campaign, then wait a bit longer.

if you HAVE started your campaign, do NOT pause.
I've founding that pausing during campaign kick-off (when you get the surge) is a BAD thing.

BTW, I believe these are "bugs" in the YSM system.
It's a problem with their calculation system.
The new step I'm verifying relates to one of these calculation bugs.

OK, I've tested this "bonus" step three times, and believe that it does work.

To recap...
1) Following the newbie technique, what happens is that there's an initial surge of impressions (as YSM tries to gauge the quality of your campaign), and then the # of impressions drops (to whatever level your quality is).
2) Tuning a campaign will minimize/stabilize the drop, and then increase the impressions again over time.
3) Following the steps I outlined earlier in this thread, I have been able to maintain the # of impressions after the initial surge. And in fact the # of impressions goes up over time, as my QS naturally goes up due to good CTR.

Recently, I've also discovered what I'm convinced is a bug with the way YSM calculates how many impressions you get for that initial surge. Now, like any bug or exploit, it's only as good as long as very few people know of it. If everyone knows about it, you lose your advantage. Worse, if YSM finds out, they'll fix the bug and everyone loses the advantage. So keep this to yourself... the more people you tell, will only end up hurting you!

Probably like most people, I had assumed that because the initial surge lasts 24-48 hours, that's the time YSM allots to calculate the quality. But that is in fact wrong! What I've discovered is that YSM determines the # of impressions you get for that "surge", in probably even less than 12 hours. Once it figures out the "surge number", it keeps you that level of impressions for the initial 24-48 hours.

Why do you care? Consider this example...

Two campaigns, both with the same keywords, similar domain names, etc.
Campaign 1: Initial surge is 10,000 impressions/day. Following this technique, the 10,000 impressions/day is maintained for the first week. The impressions go up slowly in line with their QS improvement. When QS reaches max, in 1 month, they've doubled their impressions to 20,000 impressions/day.
Campaign 2: Initial surge is 15,000 impressions/day. Following this technique, the 15,000 impressions/day is maintained for the first week (at which time they've gotten 35,000 impressions more than Campaign 1). The impressions go up slowly in line with their QS improvement. When QS reaches max, in 1 month, they've doubled their impressions to 30,000 impressions/day.

So how to you achieve Campaign 2's performance?

Here's the trick: Because YSM judges the # of impressions you get for the surge in the first few hours, your campaign start time has a huge impact to the overall performance.

Campaign 1 & 2 are real life examples. I started Campaign 1 at 9pm and Campaign 2 at 9am (both in US Pacific timezone).

Bottom line: Kickoff your campaign at the time that you expect maximum number of impressions. Consider not only the hour of the day, but also the day of the week!

You know how some people complain of getting less impressions that other people, when they've followed similar campaign setup techniques? Now you know why!

PS: And remember, keep this trick to yourself :cool:

[syns0r]

Brilliant!; // end guiness imitation

thanks Art I will definately try that out, if not on this new ringtone campaign then I will redo my payday campaign

[m0rtal]

Interesting, since I'm re-doing my campaign again I will definately keep this in mind, thanks again for sharing!

[solution2u]

OK, I've tested this "bonus" step three times, and believe that it does work.

To recap...
1) Following the newbie technique, what happens is that there's an initial surge of impressions (as YSM tries to gauge the quality of your campaign), and then the # of impressions drops (to whatever level your quality is).
2) Tuning a campaign will minimize/stabilize the drop, and then increase the impressions again over time.
3) Following the steps I outlined earlier in this thread, I have been able to maintain the # of impressions after the initial surge. And in fact the # of impressions goes up over time, as my QS naturally goes up due to good CTR.

Recently, I've also discovered what I'm convinced is a bug with the way YSM calculates how many impressions you get for that initial surge. Now, like any bug or exploit, it's only as good as long as very few people know of it. If everyone knows about it, you lose your advantage. Worse, if YSM finds out, they'll fix the bug and everyone loses the advantage. So keep this to yourself... the more people you tell, will only end up hurting you!

Probably like most people, I had assumed that because the initial surge lasts 24-48 hours, that's the time YSM allots to calculate the quality. But that is in fact wrong! What I've discovered is that YSM determines the # of impressions you get for that "surge", in probably even less than 12 hours. Once it figures out the "surge number", it keeps you that level of impressions for the initial 24-48 hours.

Why do you care? Consider this example...

Two campaigns, both with the same keywords, similar domain names, etc.
Campaign 1: Initial surge is 10,000 impressions/day. Following this technique, the 10,000 impressions/day is maintained for the first week. The impressions go up slowly in line with their QS improvement. When QS reaches max, in 1 month, they've doubled their impressions to 20,000 impressions/day.
Campaign 2: Initial surge is 15,000 impressions/day. Following this technique, the 15,000 impressions/day is maintained for the first week (at which time they've gotten 35,000 impressions more than Campaign 1). The impressions go up slowly in line with their QS improvement. When QS reaches max, in 1 month, they've doubled their impressions to 30,000 impressions/day.

So how to you achieve Campaign 2's performance?

Here's the trick: Because YSM judges the # of impressions you get for the surge in the first few hours, your campaign start time has a huge impact to the overall performance.

Campaign 1 & 2 are real life examples. I started Campaign 1 at 9pm and Campaign 2 at 9am (both in US Pacific timezone).

Bottom line: Kickoff your campaign at the time that you expect maximum number of impressions. Consider not only the hour of the day, but also the day of the week!

You know how some people complain of getting less impressions that other people, when they've followed similar campaign setup techniques? Now you know why!

PS: And remember, keep this trick to yourself :cool:

Wow. Interesting theory. This explains why I get only so little impressions lately. I started my campaign at 6am (US Pacific timezone). Who is going to search payday loan while everyone is sleeping? :p Thanks for the tips.

One more question, what is the most suitable time to start campaign? Maybe evening? 7pm?

[artarmon42]

Depends on the campaign.
For Payday Loans probably something like 8-9am PST.

[tmoran]

Wow thanks Art.. that changes a lot for me.. I am usually up late launching these at around midnight-2am. Probably the worst possible time now I read this.

I am very interested to see what the difference will be.

[artarmon42]

Good luck!

Don't forget to consider the day of the week either.
Basically you want to time your campaign start time to match the top 6 hour of peak Yahoo searches.
Disclaimer: that "6" number is just my guess... I don't know what the real number is, except to say that it's probably a number less than 12.

Oh, one more thing. It can take YSM somewhere between 15 minutes to 2 hours (based on my personal experience only) for a campaign to start getting traffic. So you have to factor that lag time into when you actually enable your campaign...

[artarmon42]

I thought I'd post some stats of the Payday Loans campaign that I built using this method.

If you read the Payday Loans Workshop thread (http://forum.clickconsultants.com/showthread.php?t=551), you'll recall that I rebuilt my campaign using this technique on May 29th (http://forum.clickconsultants.com/showpost.php?p=5154&postcount=177).

The first attachment below is a graph of the # of impressions I've gotten since the campaign was built ~1 week ago.

While the graph looks "bumpy", look at the scale on the right. The variance is between 6k and 7.5k, which is not much in the grand scheme of things.
Notice that the # of impressions starts high (~7k) and stays there. There is no drop-off after the initial surge.
There was a drop in # of impressions around May 2 (which was a slow day for Payday loans, given that it was a weekend after payday).
Otherwise, the trend is generally upwards.


The other attachment below is a screen capture of today's stats.

Notice that today (which was not over when I grabbed the screenshot) has the # of impressions already well over 8k. Alot of my adgroups got a bump up in QS today (most are now 4, with ~20% at 5). This is after running the campaign just over a week.


I'm not posting this to "show off". I'm just sharing the results after a week of using the technique described in this thread.

[m0rtal]

Good stuff, I'm in the process of loading up 50k keywords will report back :D

[Junkyard Dawg]

Kick ass, Ian - nice work! How are your Azoogle conversions holding up?

[artarmon42]

Kick ass, Ian - nice work! How are your Azoogle conversions holding up?

Conversions have remained roughly the same.
Maybe gone up a little, but my earlier conversion rate could have just been a statistical variance.

[doomgmc]

^ who is better then you?

[syns0r]

argh! I just realized I don't have my article links redirected (I had them logged though lol). All those people that actually read and clicked the article went nowhere =(

[artarmon42]

argh! I just realized I don't have my article links redirected (I had them logged though lol). All those people that actually read and clicked the article went nowhere =(

I feel for you!

Bet you got a good number of clicks via the article right?

[syns0r]

there was over 10 clicks, which is a good portion of my new campaign, I don't get very many clicks =(

:edit:
after looking again it was just 9 clicks, from 6 different ip's; some must have tried to click a few times cause it went nowhere, lol.

[m0rtal]

waited 3 days just for yahoo to decline all my keywords :mad:
Anyways I'll be re-launching my campaign tomorrow :)

[syns0r]

ringtones or payday?

[m0rtal]

If you are referring to me, payday. Not all the keywords, just the ones that were pending which was like around 1400 or so.

[syns0r]

yea i was. They give a reason for the decline?

[m0rtal]

Brand: Insufficient Content
The landing page has insufficient content related to the brand.

stoooopid

[syns0r]

i wonder if we set the bids when we set up the campaign to ungodly amounts that they would just accept any keywords? or maybe they have a system to figure that out an maybe we have to find a happy medium point maybe $7 / click? Then after they get accepted we lower the bids and start the campaign

[m0rtal]

Someone could give that a try but I doubt it will make a difference, money is still money.

[m0rtal]

I was just thinking, is it really necessary to wait for the campaign to get approved? It seems when you first set up a campaign 99% of the time all the ads are automatically approved. The keywords that are pending well, 99% of the time they all get declined. So why not just let her rip?

This is just from what I've seen anyway.

[artarmon42]

I've found those keywords and ads that get approved later (after the initial surge) don't seem to get as many impressions. Just my personal experience :)

[volknet]

I've found those keywords and ads that get approved later (after the initial surge) don't seem to get as many impressions. Just my personal experience :)

I'm starting a campaign this week. Going to try and see if your experiences match mine. :) Waiting for all of them to be approved this time around. I'll report back. (This is the second time I'm doing this campaign)

[rideswitch]

I am building a campaign today using the tips in this string. I will report back once i launch as well.

[volknet]

Forgive me for sounding stupid but, just to make sure:

Do you insert all your KW's before you click the "Activate" button? Any tips? Or by turning on do you just mean activate then pause directly after?

[artarmon42]

Forgive me for sounding stupid but, just to make sure:

Do you insert all your KW's before you click the "Activate" button? Any tips? Or by turning on do you just mean activate then pause directly after?

If you mean the initial setup:
1) I create new campaign with dummy adgroup.
2) Pause the campaign
3) Delete the dummy adgroup
4) Insert my KWs (in various adgroups)
5) Wait until all KWs and ads have been approved
6) Activate the campaign

[volknet]

To Pause the campaign dont you have to click the "Activate" button when creating a new "Campaign"?

I guess your above post answers my question. :) Thanks very much!

[santokki]

I totally agree that you need to raise bids, but there are ways to do this and still test the market first to see if you are going to have problems getting the offer to convert.

The best way is once you get Gold account and import feature. Then what you do is make your campaign start off the bid at .10 cents to make sure you are going to profit or whatever and then delete the campaign and use teh import feature to reload the campaign and make the changes in the import file before uploading. Increasing bids, deleting keywords etc.

It works great. For google use the adwords editor tool.

I'm trying to understand Mystickcal, but why do you delete your campaign and re-upload it to make your changes (increase bids, delete keywords)... Why don't you just make the changes directly in your YSM account?

Is there some benefit to re-uploading your campaign and basically starting it over from scratch with new bids and a different keyword lineup?

[mystickcal]

I'm trying to understand Mystickcal, but why do you delete your campaign and re-upload it to make your changes (increase bids, delete keywords)... Why don't you just make the changes directly in your YSM account?

Is there some benefit to re-uploading your campaign and basically starting it over from scratch with new bids and a different keyword lineup?

Well when you first put in your campaign, lets say that you are doing really well biding 10 cents in yahoo on keywords, so you realize you can up your bids to lets say 30 cents and still make a nice profit. At least you assume. You also now realize that there are keywords that you should remove that had tons of clicks and no conversions or whatever. Well since that has happened, your campaign has already been adjusted to those reasons. So basically your Quality Score in Yahoo isn't as high as it could of been just because well you were sure of the niche yet. But now that you know and know what to change if you delete the campaign and reupload it using the import feature, the new campaign will start with a new quality score and won't be the same as the last. Note that is only for Yahoo, Google is smart enough to realize if you are doing that.

[santokki]

So by deleting and re-importing your campaign, basically you're just resetting the (low) quality score of your campaign, because Yahoo thinks it's a brand new campaign? Sounds like a good deal.

In Adwords, can't you do the same thing by changing the destination URLs... doesn't it reset your quality score. Maybe it does only if you have a positive quality score, I dunno.

[Choller]

okay i've done my ringtone campaign using this technique and this is after running it with the 20x daily ad limit. After running it for around 8 hours.

Here are my stats:
YSM:

Impressions 17,597 CTR 0.26 46 13.43

Copeac: 17 1 $1.03 $17.50

Total = + $ 4.07

So now i'm going to tune it and i'm thinking i'll run it again with the 20x the ad limit to see.

I already found a stupid keyword i've been using that isn't really targeted and sucked up $9 :(

[artarmon42]

It's amazing the stuff you find while tuning :)

Aim for an overall campaign CTR >1%.
I've found that anything less will result in gradual decrease of impressions over time.

[mystickcal]

Just to also throw in my 2 cents, but after you have tuned your campaigns don't forget also that you should try raising your bids some. As someone said two posts ago they spent 9 dollars on a keyword that sucked :D What that means is your going to drop your adspend which means you can raise your bid per keyword up as you tune. It may decrease your spend vs revenue ratio, but just going up that extra .10 cents a click can increase your traffic 2-fold or even 3-fold.

Just my 2 cents as I see you all talking about tuning but no one ever mentions what you should do after you tuned. I'm sure artarmon has mentioned this before, but just thought I would remind everyone :D

[speed100]

So how is this technique going so far for the original testers?

[JasperP]

Is this the new technique to use now?

1.) Collect a broad range of 20k+ keywords
2.) Group keywords logically with common 1-3 keyword phrase
3.) Use common keyword in text ads
4.) Unpause campaign at the peak hour of searches (Pause your campaign until all keywords and ads are approved)
5.) Bid 1/3 - 1/2 of the EPC
6.) Set daily budget to 20x of the CPC bid
6.) Tune keywords

Does that sum it up?

I really love artarmon's detailed approaches. No wonder he's so successful. I'm sure there's more going on his head that he hasn't written down on paper that are worth thousands of dollars!

[mystickcal]

That could be a quick wrap of of course. However, there are tons of little stuff in between, but you got the gist of it.


Is this the new technique to use now?

1.) Collect a broad range of 20k+ keywords
2.) Group keywords logically with common 1-3 keyword phrase
3.) Use common keyword in text ads
4.) Unpause campaign at the peak hour of searches (Pause your campaign until all keywords and ads are approved)
5.) Bid 1/3 - 1/2 of the EPC
6.) Set daily budget to 20x of the CPC bid
6.) Tune keywords

Does that sum it up?

I really love artarmon's detailed approaches. No wonder he's so successful. I'm sure there's more going on his head that he hasn't written down on paper that are worth thousands of dollars!

[artarmon42]

Yup as Mystickcal said, that's right.
There's a thread I created about how to tune as well, so make sure you read that for point (6).

[JasperP]

Thanks for the replies guys!

What would you say is the success rate of that method right now?

If I were to 5 niches right now using the same technique would 1 and 5 be successful?

I'm feeling that the more I do, the more likely that I'll be successful. Just want to know your experiences on it.

I'm taking as many notes as I can!

[artarmon42]

My opinion is that you will be most successful in niches are you can relate to.
That's why you should try many niches, and find which ones you "click" with.
You may not succeed in the niches that I am successful because we're have different experiences and outlooks in life.

[smaxdot]

Artarmon - Do you recommend this technique for AdWords as well, or just YSM?

Thanks,

- Dave

[artarmon42]

Artarmon - Do you recommend this technique for AdWords as well, or just YSM?

Thanks,

- Dave

This thread covers a fair amount of topics.
What do you specifically mean?

If you're referring to the original post, of maintaining good CTR, then yes it actually applies even more to Adwords. Google is not as "dumb" as YSM (because it factors in the ad position with the CTR, whereas YSM only cares about YSM regardless of ad position) but you'll need good CTR in both cases.

[smaxdot]

This thread covers a fair amount of topics.
What do you specifically mean?

If you're referring to the original post, of maintaining good CTR, then yes it actually applies even more to Adwords. Google is not as "dumb" as YSM (because it factors in the ad position with the CTR, whereas YSM only cares about YSM regardless of ad position) but you'll need good CTR in both cases.

Sorry, I should have been more specific...

I'm asking whether the Campaign kickoff technique as laid out by you in one the earliest replies in this thread (and summarized in a recent reply by Jasper) is applicable to Google as well as Yahoo, or just Yahoo? Specifically the part about setting an initial uniform bid across the board (1/3 - 1/2 of the EPC) and the daily budget formula...

Also, as I am just getting back into the game with Google, I was reading a bit about their "expanded" broad match...no good! So I was thinking of only doing phrase and exact, at least initially... (that way I don't have to worry about negatives as much as if I was using broad)... Does this sound like a solid strategy to you?

Appreciate your help!

- Dave

[artarmon42]

For Google, the technique is fundamentally the same. The exception is that you'll probably have to start you bids at 100-200% of eCPC (yes I know that means you will definitely be making a loss). The high bids are required to be competitive initially. After 3+ weeks of good CTR, you should see that the aCPC should have dropped drastically as your campaign history score kicks in.

If you follow the tuning steps I posted in the Tuning thread you might be able to reach profitability before the 3 week campaign history discount kicks in.

[obiwan]

would you say this tactic / technique applies to both

a Content and a Search campaign in YSM?

any changes since you defined the technique?

your help is much appreciated.

[jakelarson]

Yeah I messed up posted wrong stats. These are the actual stats for the payday campaign since late last night till now 3:30pm EST. I actually just got another lead after making my last post.

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[miketaylor12]

I'm not having much success overall (despite having followed the guidelines in the appropriate threads).

I'm in the process of getting a new campaign together to start afresh so that would work out well.

*************
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