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When "Google Cash" came out a couple YEARS ago,
there were some people making money with affiliate programs.
All you did was find places there were only 5 ads for that keyword, and you were on the first page of google for 10 cents.
Adwords is now causing 200 ads or more for a given keyword sometimes, so for a new guy starting out its a tough road. The same guy that did Google Cash is now coming out with a new software that all the fast buck internet marketing gurus are sending to their lists in hope of fast affiliate commissions. My advice is to wait on this and see if the software stands the test of time, because so many of these guys support the software for about 6 months, long enough to make a good profit, and then they drop the whole project. Of all the guys out there, there's just a handful that really support their software well.
The guys I have seen who are really doing well in adwords these days have a product or service that is really expensive, like 5000 bucks or more, which they deliver themselves. If your service costs 5000 bucks,you can handle paying higher click charges and laugh all the way to the bank.
But if you are trying to get these 10 cent clicks, hope they convert, and also hope that the click bank merchant pays you, and you don't have enough of a budget to REALLY see if your idea is going to work, I find it hard to recommend.
There are still some affiliate players out there, but they are REALLY REALLY good. I think picking the low hanging fruit to get started is better- if you have a friend that has something he wants to sell on the web, get an ebay account and sell a bit on ebay, if that goes well slap up a site and buy some keywords for it but not as an affiliate, as the person that actually delivers the product or service. That takes a lot of financial pressure off of success in the beginning, and its the beginning that is the hardest. After you have a little taste of success its then easier to go ahead and become an affiliate master, and internet marketer of other products.
My first successful "internet marketing" venture, was selling some laptop computers on ebay, which wasn't high profit, but it worked enough for me to quit my day job and get into
internet stuff full time, then I formed a company with 3 other guys and we took it public and the rest is history. But getting
that first taste of success is important and you want to stack the deck in your favor.
Rock on,
Steve
*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********
I have never done an Adword Campaign, but I have bought some e-books and I dunno what the hell their talking about! Am I just stupid?
I've been using a PC for about 15 yrs. now and have never made a dime. In the 90's everybody said it was hard to make a living online, but now all these gurus say it's easy.
Can your videos teach me enough to use Adwords and market Clickbank products? I don't have a company or anything, but I would like to work for myself and dump my crummy dead end job. Let me know what you think!
When I found your site I figured, no way it's gonna cost way too much but you say it's very affordable. I guess the KeyWord Phrase here is what is your definition of Affordable, and Steve I don't even have $50,000 in my pocket!
Nice looking site and blog by the way.
regards
Frank
Submitted by steveblom on Wed, 2007-04-25 15:54.
adwords help | free stuff | free stuff
New Adwords Search Engine
I am fooling around with a new search engine that I am going to try to hack to search for all things adwords which you can find here:
http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=011060711406498666089%3Auj0c__tldk8
It pulls most of its results from Google currently and it will be going through a lot of more tweaks and hacks in the future.
Submitted by steveblom on Wed, 2006-08-02 18:12.
adwords click through rate | Adwords Marketing
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Ok, I hate to break this to you guys.
I really do.
This is really, well, you just ain't a gonna believe this one, friends.
Here goes, because somebody has to say this. I know half the other posts in this blog are about increasing CTR, increasing CTR, increasing CTR, as kind of the Google holy grail. But one of the things that I end up doing is people come to me with Adwords accounts all the time that are messed up, for me to fix.
Are you ready?
Ok well here it goes....
By the way, this includes major advertising agencies, who pay my salary very handsomely and who therefore will remain nameless, as well as mom and pop smaller web businesses that are trying to get better results...
So for better or worse I get to look at a lot of accounts, which gives me a pretty interesting perspective. One thing I have noticed, is occasionally I find someone that does everything wrong in adwords, but they use the conversion tracking and in spite of having a messy account that makes me cringe in terms of everything I know, the person is still pulling off a really, and I mean REALLY good rate of return on their investment. In some cases they are getting a way lower cost per lead than I would expect. So they do everything wrong, but the end result is right.
I have seen a lot of accounts where the ROI is fine, but Google just disables their keywords because they are just getting too good a deal- or at least that's the way it looks sometimes. I mean if you are in position 50, your CTR will be in the toilet, but you just might get some cheap clicks, and you just might have a pretty amazing ROI too, as long as you don't get disabled. But accounts like this are not very stable, and end up coming to someone like me to improve their CTR and re enable keywords that were once performing well.
But here's an interesting concept----drumroll please....
You don't really need CTR.
Google likes CTR because Google makes more money, and it is more "relevant". But lets say someone is searching for "blue widgets"
There are exceptions, but in general everyone searching on the internet wants everything immediately, for free, but the reality is stuff costs money.
So the ideal CTR ad would be something like "Hey, we've got blue widgets here- get this (benefit) now!
The only problem is that even if you use the word "free" and its variations to filter out people searching for "free blue widgets" as negative keywords, you will still have a certain number of people who are searching for "blue widget" and hoping to get it for free.
Ok, so you have a great ad, that has a high CTR, and you get a lot of people to your site, and you feel smart because Google loves your ad, and you can now get a lower CPC because of it.
But what if you just put in the ad itself- Hey, I've got blue widgets here, and they cost $399. Pay me!
That filters out people who want stuff for free, and eliminates people clicking on your ads who aren't qualified. So now your CTR goes in the toilet, and you have been a very, very bad Google boy. But look, if you had a 3% CTR ad before, and by changing this ad text your CTR goes down to .5%, so your CPC goes up, but your CONVERSION PER VISITOR goes up by 500%, who is the real winner here?
I am not going to go through the math exhaustively, and it will be different for every site, but I just want to point out that sometimes "relevance" involves filtering out visitors you really don't want to pay for, in your ads themselves, and not worrying so much about the CTR.
The bottom line is your cost per conversion, per lead, or per sale, not the amount of traffic, the cost, or your CTR.
The apparent equation Google wants you to do is:
1) really relavant keywords to your product
2) negative keywords that filter out people who really aren't looking for exactly what you have
3) super high CTR ads that make google a lot of money and offer free stuff
4)highly relevant landing pages that are information rich, help the world, support open source and answer peoples search query for free.
5) the advertiser is then supposed to convert this into money somehow
This is what I propose:
1) really relavant keywords to your product
2) negative keywords that filter out people who really aren't looking for exactly what you have
3) honest ads that filter out the freebie seekers and the casual shoppers
4)highly relevant landing pages that sell the darn thing
5) the advertiser converts these real customers into money better and enjoys a profitable website, and spends more time at the beach.
How do I do adwords?
Well, the same old way unfortunately, testing different ads, worrying about my CTR and the relevance of landing pages, lots of negative keywords.
But now I have a hope for something better, and I plan to monkey around with it, based on some accounts that break all the rules and still come out ahead.
This would be an interesting test if you can track conversions down to the AD, which is to test a high CTR ad, against a low CTR ad that filters out people more, and look at the difference in conversion.
The first person that gives me a good case study on this will win something very cool.
Submitted by steveblom on Mon, 2006-07-10 23:32.
adwords roi tracking | free stuff
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Ok I get the dork award. Nobody told me what I am going to reveal here, not one adwords guru, none of the countless ebooks I have purchased, nothing.
So I am going to give it to you here for free.
I already had another script made that will generate tracking urls that will work with almost any webstats type software such as hitslink, webtrends, clicktracks or whatever, but I have found a much simpler way to make them, and this also lets you track which AD gets you conversions. It is so simple, I can't believe that nobody told me this.
Here is the deal- a lot of people tell you about the google {Keyword} tag, which automatically inserts the keywords people search on in the title, or in fact anywhere you want in the text of your ad. What I didn't know, is that you can put it in the actual url of your adwords ad, and whatever people search on, will dynamically insert this into the query string of your ad.
Now, the other script at advertinfo.com generates tracking urls that generate the keywords you are ADVERTISING on. These keywords can be different than what the person actually types in.
Like if you are advertising on "free software" and the person types in "free software for me", and results in a conversion, it is "free software" that got you that in your adwords account because you were advertising on the phrase, You won't find "free software for me" anywhere in your adwords account in this example.
So these are two different things sometimes, what keyword you are advertising on, and what the person actually types in that results in a conversion.
Lets get on with this keyword tag tracking url though. Its unbelievably simple, and I can't believe I've been doing adwords all these years without knowing this. The {keyword}tag you just put at the end of the url like this:
http://mysite.com?source=adwords&campaign=44&adgroup=54&ad=3&keyword={keyword}
You can make all these things shorter to keep things simpler if you want, and put the whole code in one paramater like this:
http://mysite.com?source=awc1ag2ad3&kw={keyword}
In this example you just use one paramater source,which puts aw for adwords, c for campaign 1, ag for adgroup 2 ad3 for, uhhh ad number 3, and still puts the keywords in
Again, this gives you what the people are typing in, not what you are advertising on, which is a subtle difference. If you don't like that, then use the other way of making adwords tracking urls here
Rock on,
and get some sleep for a change
Submitted by steveblom on Fri, 2006-06-23 23:18.
adwords account management | Adwords Tips and Tricks | adwords tools
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Ok This is my greatest friend in Adwords, and I don't hear many Adwords gurus talk about it.
In my videos I mention to keep checking back often in the "tools" section under the Campaign Management tab in Adwords.
I take my own advice, and always check out when the Google Engineers are making some new kind of tool. Sometimes I try them and I am not that impressed, but there are two that you should really check out the power of.
The best one is the advanced search and edit tool. By using the filters, I am able to spend a fraction of the time I was before doing account tweaks. Lets say you want to find all the keywords that are lower than position 8, regardless of where they are in your account, and raise them all by 10 cents. it takes just a couple seconds to do this with this tool. How about deleting keywords that have consistently gotten poor CTR over the last month? You can either perform mass edits on them, or just see what they are to get a better idea of what is actually going on.
There is another great use of this tool that I use a lot. Lets say that you made a mistake in the url of several ads and now want to change the landing page, or like me, start making campaigns and ads before you have even settled on the final domain name you want to send people to. You can go throughout the entire account in all your ads and change the destination url en masse, or you can change just certain ones in certain ad groups. Its nice to be able to hit a button and change the destination url for 50 ads at once and is a real timesaver.
The other tool is the mass move/copy ad text. I actually hired a company to make a similar tool for me using the Google Api, but I end up just using the one that is built in to the Adwords interface more and more now. What it does is let you "clone" an ad group, with all the keywords and ads, onto another ad group. So lets say you want to separate out some keywords into different adgroups, but you don't want to lose the CTR history of your top performing ads. Just clone the ad group, and leave your top performing keywords in the origional one, and experiment all you want with the new one. The only thing I am waiting for is the ability to mass clone entire campaigns with all their ad groups at once, so that you can quickly add an additional website or for split testing a proven winning campaign.
There's always news of stuff, Like now google is trying day parting, position preferences, and now even testing cost per action and people have asked me why I don't comment on all these things. The reason is because for this blog I am concentrating only on proven stuff that has actually worked for me, and I ignore the bells and whistles until they actually prove out. These two new tools definately prove out for sure.
Ok kids, that's my two cents for the day.
Submitted by steveblom on Wed, 2006-06-21 16:14.
adwords bidding strategies | adwords education
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The Google content network has finally come of age. At this point I have a lot of clients that get 20% of less of their clicks on Google, and 80% from the content network. BUT, the conversion is still highly variable, and very bad in a lot of industries. So, the traditional advice still holds true for me.
Start at Google.com only, or add the search network if you know what you are doing, and then once you have your CTR up, the account stable and a baseline for conversions you can live with, add the content network in at that point, and see what you get.
If you are a B to B business that isn't in the mortgage or financial industry that doesn't have super expensive clicks, and your product or service is high priced, most of the time you'll do just fine.
Most of the fraudulent activity on the content network is aimed at the super expensive clicks, especially mortgage and medical type terms. I am sure the same is true for the adult and gambling industries but I don't touch those. Life is too short.
Also being able to separate the bids is a must, and remember to line out sites that don't convert. As always, your mileage may vary. I am having some great luck with some of my clients at the moment.
Submitted by steveblom on Sat, 2006-04-22 18:19.
ad archiver | adwords competition analysis | adwords software
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Adwords Competition research
Introducing Adsnatcher
Ok guys, I have been working on this for about the last 4 months, and its almost ready for public consumption, although still not quite yet. So I am going to give you an adsnatcher tutorial in avi format here, and an adsnatcher tutorial in Flash here. These are videos that explain how this script works.
They video is about 18 minutes long, and in both formats runs about 35 megs, so if you don't have broadband you are kind of out of luck. Here is the secret of adsnatcher......
I also made an adsnatcher tutorial version in windows media format, that runs 9 megs, but I really recommend the first two as windows media format really is lame,
but for a dialup user, it will have to do.
I built this script to use with Adwords clients for campaigns we manage as my own personal secret weapon. Franky I kind of want to keep it that way, but my partners want to release this to people to use, for free, and who knows, maybe turn this into an adsense supported free app, a commercial app, or whatever. Here is the secret:
Ok so what is adsnatcher all about? How does it work?
Adsnatcher works on the most simple principle you can think of which is this:
People that are advertising a lot, over a long period of time, with Google Adwords are either crazy, or they are making money.
That's the long and the short of it, if you want to know the truth.
Here's the down and dirty way to use it, followed by a little more lengthy explanation for those people who need to answer the question, why does it work?
The down and dirty quick way to use adsnatcher
The campaign detail page:
1) Go to the campaigns page. You will find a few different campaigns for a number of different industries there. Click on any campaign/industry that interests you.
2) You will see on the left the main keyword(s) of that industry, and on the right the ads and advertisers sorted by "coverage", which simply means how often throughout the day that particular ad is showing up.
3) From this point, if that campaign has more than one keyword in it, you can click on that keyword on the left and see a detail of the advertisers for just that one keyword.
4) Regardless of whether you are looking at a campaign page or the keyword page, the data is presented the same. You will find all the ads listed in order of coverage, along with their average position. You can then change the dropdown box to view the data for the past 7 days, the past 30 days, or the past 90 days.
If you see the same advertisers in all 3, then you know that they are top competitors, because their ads are showing up very consistently. It means either they are stupid, a fortune 500 company, or a smart advertiser.
If you scroll below, this information is put onto a graph, which shows visually where most of the competitors are at. Look first, to the coverage column. The top competitors in any market will be close to 100 percent. After you have identified the top competitors in terms of coverage, look at their position. Position 0 means they are actually above the "regular" search results and are highlighted, which means for sure Google likes that ad and it is getting a high click through rate, but just because a person is number 1 does not mean they are smart.
Especially look for some competitors that are showing close to 100% of the time, down in positions 6,7,8. This means that they are enjoying a very low cost per click compared to the other guys, and buying all the traffic at that price they can get their hands on. This is definitely cause for more investigation.
Once you find an an ad headline that interests you and is getting high coverage, click on it, and you will get to an ad detail page.
The ad detail page
5) Once you have identified who is an interesting advertiser and clicked on their ad, you will get to the ad detail page, which gives you the keyword that was searched at Google, the ad headline and body text, the display url, which is the url that is displayed in the Google Adwords ad, and the actual url, which is where they are really sending their traffic to.
If you see that they are using a tracking url, like http://www.mysite.com/?=uheiiuhawr+llihe&oiweroiajf or whatever instead of just www.mysite.com, you have further evidence that they are a sophisticated advertiser and they are tracking their results.
There are a couple other goodies added just for fun here, neither sites of which adsnatcher has any relation to. But since these other sites approach this research in a different way, we just embedded a link to make it easy to research your smart advertisers a little easier.
Url trends updates a database once a month with alexa rank, link popularity in the big 3 search engines, Google pagerank, trends of these links, and also gives information about their possible links in furl, delicious, and icerocket, which gives you a snapshot about the overall power of the site you are researching.
Additionally, you have a link to googspy, which takes a larger number of keywords, but doesn't query Google as often, so you can find other sites advertising on that same term, but more importantly, find other possible terms your competitor may be advertising on so you can add them to your account.
The other keywords that you sometimes find listed below this are the additional terms that googspy found.
So there you have it. In just a few seconds you identified the probable best ads for any given keyword, and found the top competitor for that keyword or industry, analyzed their site further, and possibly identified additional keywords that you didn't think of. Yes you could have found all this information on your own, but it would have taken a lot of Google searches over an extended period of time to find this information, and time is money right?
MORE INFORMATION FOR PEOPLE THAT ARE CRAVING TO KNOW
Why does adsnatcher work? Why should I check it as an advertiser?
Lets get into what this means for you as a potential advertiser. How do you identify your competition and beat them at their own game? How do you find out who is really the dominant player in a market that you are researching?
What adsnatcher does, is it takes a keyword you are interested in, goes and searches Google with that keyword, then takes all the ads, noting what position those ads are in, and puts them in a database. It does this with a lot of keywords, then when the cycle is complete does it all over again.
Once a week, Adsnatcher crunches the numbers and sorts all these ads by their "coverage" which is how often the same ad appears over and over again.The highest possible coverage you can get is 100%, which means that every time we come to Google searching that keyword, we see the same ad in the same position. Over time, this means those advertisers are either very rich and stupid, or very rich and smart.
By looking at both their coverage and position, you can then determine which it is. Once you have the top competitors and ads, there are a couple other tools included to rapidly analyze that "smart advertiser" to see what they are doing right, see what ads are really doing well, and get additional keywords you might not have thought of.
In Adwords the whole amount of data people usually look at, is all within their own account. They look at how their ads are doing, how much the advertising is costing them, and trying to improve. But your own account could be one of thousands of advertisers out there and you need to have a picture of the whole market and what ALL the advertisers are doing, for you to make the best possible decision.
Many of the keywords in Google have thousands of advertisers, and depending on their budgets, are rotated throughout the day at Google. It is possible that you might have a really killer account and some ads that are the ultimate, that might not show up as high coverage because your advertising budget is 10 dollars a day and your ads are only showing up here and there.
Google rotates your ads throughout the day depending on your budget, plus the quality score of your ad. So if your budget is 100 dollars, and the term gets searched on a lot, your ad, along with thousands of other advertisers will be shown throughout the day, but may get only a small percentage of the possible ad impressions that are available.
So adsnatcher can miss some of the potentially good ads out there that are getting great click through rates. BUT, most of the time, when someone gets their site conversions up, their ads are working, and they start making money, they up their budget to the maximum. When you are making $100 from every 200 visitors, it makes sense to make $1000 from 2000 visitors instead, which is what most people do, until they hit the maximum of Google traffic they can get, which is different for any given keyword. Then they look for other keywords.
Hundreds of new advertisers enter the keyword market for your keywords each week, and the vast majority of them fail.
But there are some advertisers you see in the same place, every day, for years. They must be something right. Especially the ones that are not fortune 500 companies but small web businesses. They don't have huge fortunes to draw from, so their advertising must make a profit for them, or they wouldn't keep advertising.
You don't need adsnatcher. All you have to do is just take a list of all your keywords, search Google one by one, clear the cookies from your browser, and do it all over again, all day and all night, for about 2-3 weeks. You'll know who your top competitors are, and what their best ads are. Adsnatcher just does all the grunt work for you, and lets you do this for all the different industries that it monitors, so you can have a life for a change.
HOW TO IDENTIFY THE REAL PLAYERS IN ANY MARKET
Ok listen up- here is what the real Adwords pros know. The real players in any keyword market usually have the following characteristics:
1)They usually are constantly split testing different ads
2)They usually show up with the highest coverage out of all the advertisers, meaning their ads are showing a lot
3)They aren't in the number 1 position most of the time.
To understand why, lets do a little math. Lets say that you are a mortgage broker, and you want to buy the keyword "mortgage", and you figure that having a great ad and being number 1 is where its at. but your budget is 200 bucks a day. I am also going to assume that there are 100,000 people searching for the word "mortgage" at Google each day for the purpose of this exercise.
So if your budget is 200 bucks a day, and you have a fantastic ad that has a 3% Click through rate, and you are willing to pay 20 dollars a click to be number 1 (although your average actual cost per click is 5 dollars in your particular account) you now are going to be able to get 40 clicks a day at 5 bucks a click. Not bad.
But look at this, Google has 100,000 potential clicks you could get. And you got 40.
Now lets say you are going to let someone else be number 1, you are shooting for position 6, and now your 3% click through rate ad in position 6 costs you $2.50 a click instead of the $5.00 you are paying. Bingo. This means you doubled your traffic, for the same advertising cost.
In the real world it doesn't work out exactly like that, because with Google, that $200 advertising budget is actually part of your "quality score" You will have to raise your budget, until it eventually gets up to the maximum allowed, in order to get your share of those clicks. And also the higher the position, the easier it is to get good click through rates. But the basic principal is this:
If you increase your advertising budget, make better ads than your competition, and reduce your cost per click, you will find the your sweet spot for the lowest possible cost per click, and the most possible clicks. By further optimizing your website for the highest possible conversion, you will dominate your market.
And adsnatcher will then find you.
Submitted by steveblom on Wed, 2006-04-05 15:37.
adwords click through rate | free stuff
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So when do you stop testing two ads and declare a winner, in order to optimize your click through rates?
Here's a nifty free little tool that you can plug your numbers into, and it will tell you how much confidence you have in declaring a winner. Adwords has a default rotation, but sometimes decides way too soon which ad is the winner.
Adwords basically uses 1000 impressions, but I am not comfortable with that at all. I have had lots of ads I though were not so hot at 1000 impressions go way up in the click through rate, and some potential winners go way down. Most of the variance is plus or minus 3% CTR in my experience, but that can be HUGE depending on what market or industry you are working with. Here it is.....
When using this tool, keep in mind that you can't be LESS than 50% certain. If you know nothing at all about which ad is better, you are 50% certain, so if you use the tool and it says you are 60% certain, that is not really a great level of certainty!! My advice is look at the 85% range as an absolute minimum.
Ok, enough already, here is the tool:
http://www.splittester.com
Check it out when you are looking to "pull the plug" on one of your ads and determine a winner.
-To your adwords success,
Submitted by steveblom on Tue, 2006-03-28 17:40.
Keyword Research
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For you guys that are looking for an alternative to the
standard wordtracker/overture keyword resources and hoping to find something from Google, check out:
http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
And then fool around with the drop down boxes until you have displayed worldwide search term data with the relative amounts shown.
This is basically a tool for adsense publishers but it is great for adwords, and serves as a reality check from overture and wordtracker, plus an excellent resource for additional keywords and negative keywords.
Submitted by steveblom on Tue, 2006-03-21 15:41.
free stuff
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Adwords is fundamentally about your marketing process, and should include optimizing not just your ads, but your landing pages as well. I am finding that the Taguchi Method might be very useful in this, and am working on getting some software made to test my own landing pages to see if this works.
I came across a couple other interesting things in my Taguchi research today:
1) It looks like the good old ad comparator is up at:
http://www.adcomparator.com
This free site uses the taguchi method to tell you which advertisement you should use after you plug in the results of your tests.
Of course I am too lazy to do this, I want my software to do it for me!!!
Also of interest if you are a do it yourselfer and into excel is:
http://www.qimacros.com/free-lean-six-sigma-tips/design-of-experiments.html#doetemplate
These guys have figured out the math and put it into excel, and it looks like you can buy their whole package for 500 bucks, which is a lot less than some people are charging for it.
If you go to their freestuff.html page, you can download an evaluation copy of their software which should help you quite a bit.
This is a bit more complex explanation of how the taguchi method works:
http://www.statease.com/e6ug/DE05-Taguchi.pdf
If anyone finds some more resources, please send them to me and I will add them here.
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