I like to test every possible paid traffic source. It doesn’t matter if people say they work or not, I like to try it myself and get my own results. Like in the 13 PPC challenge, I am always testing new sources. This has led me to find some really good and cheap clicks. I have also lost a lot of money, but I think you have to commit yourself to losing money to be successful, especially in internet marketing. Even if a test is a total failure, the data and experience gained has some value.

That being said, a couple weeks ago I tested a new source for me, Casale Media. This is one of the larger media networks, that a lot of the high traffic sites are publishers on. If you aren’t familiar with media buying, it’s basically a banner campaign that you can run on a CPC basis rather than CPM (usually). Essentially its content advertising. I have had hit and miss results with buying media. This type of advertising is LOT different than PPC, but I had a rock solid converting campaign that I wanted to try pushing some serious traffic to.

Setup

There is a lot of front end setup with this type of campaign. First, you don’t just sign up self serve style like PPC. You have to contact them, get an account manager and an ad setup person. Then you have to supply them with at least 4 different sized creatives, and they prefer to have 3-4 sets of each of these. So if you aren’t good with graphics, you have the expense of having someone make 16 creatives for you. You also “negotiate” a CPC rate that you will pay with your account manager. Then before they will even start uploading your campaign you have to send in a $5,000 minimum deposit. Once they receive your $5k, it usually takes about another week to get your campaign uploaded and running. During this time you have to place pixels on your primary, and final landing pages for tracking.

Results

This test had disappointing results. As I said, the landing page/offer I sent this traffic to converted very well on PPC, but I actually had 0 conversions on Casale. Of course I expected and planned for a lower conversion rate than PPC, but it was clear this wasn’t going to work on my campaign. I only needed to let the test run a 1 day to get a statistically valid sample size. The troubling part to me was that people were abandoning the initial landing page, before even clicking through to the offer page.

This type of adverting isn’t for the faint of heart. The setup time is long, you have a lot less control than PPC (you can’t even pause or resume your campaign, your account rep has to), the deposits can be large, and the traffic can come fast and furious. I have had success and failures with media buys, so I thinks its definitely worth continued testing. Obviously, your results will vary with any network, but for this particular test it didn’t work out for me.

This one is for all the publishers running Adsense out there. Ever wanted to know who your competitors were in your niche, and the approximate volume they are doing compared to you? Well, that info can be easily found, courtesy of Google itself using Adwords.

Here’s how to do it: (click to enlarge images)

1. Log into your Adwords account.

2. Click “New Placement Targeted Campaign”

3. Enter a bogus campaign and adgroup names (you will just be deleting this). Add the countries where you want to check your competition and where your site is targeted.

4. Enter a fake ad, and continue.

5. Here is where you want to be: “Target your Ad“. Now click the “List URLs” button, and enter your URL in the box. Click “get available placements”. In this example, the niche we would be checking out is cars and our site is cars.com.

Google will then display your competitors under “Placements” with their average daily impressions. Sweet huh?

After you are done checking out all the data don’t save any of this, or you will start a new placement targeted campaign. If you share this tip, a link back would be appreciated!

Conventional wisdom is usually not wise. That’s why thinking outside the box is so important in PPC affiliate marketing. Take for instance, the content network. I don’t know how many times I have heard “experts” say don’t use it whatever you do. The fact is, the content network can and does work.

Case in point:

I have an education offer that I have been experimenting with for about 3 months now. I have 2 identical campaigns running on Google; same keywords, adgroups, and ads. All is the same except 1 campaign is on the search network and 1 is on the content network. The results are surprising.

Search 3 Month Conversion Rate = 8.23%

Content 3 Month Conversion Rate = 13.87%

The content network sends about same volume as the search network. But the content network is converting 5.6% better than the search network. That’s right, content is converting better than search! Plus my bid prices are about 40% less for the content network. Of course every single offer and campaign is different, which is why testing is key. If I would have paid attention to the “experts” I never would have found this little goldmine. In this particular case, my results clearly disprove the notion that the content network doesn’t work for affiliate campaigns.

This is a first for CDF networks - we have been banned from something! I received the following email from Yahoo publisher network (YPN) last week.

I have never used YPN much due to their poor ad targeting, but I had tested it on a few sites and even on a few client sites that we are doing some work with. Nothing shady at all, these are legitimate business sites. So I am guess the “suspicious click activity” reason does not apply. According to the form letter, “poor traffic quality” is the reason they axed us. Unfortunately my email to YPN for further explanation has gone unanswered so all I can do is speculate. I’m not terribly upset either way, because I have never been a huge fan of YPN and even contextual advertising in general (from the publisher side that is). We will see if they ever respond and provide an exact reason.

Has anyone else been banned from YPN?

It seems everyone and their brother has a content network now. After MSN’s launch a few weeks ago, now Ask.com is about to join in the context game. Here is what they have to say about it:

“On May 14^th, The Ask Sponsored Listings Team will roll-out an exciting new feature – contextual targeting. With contextual targeting, you can seamlessly extend your pay-per-click search campaigns to sites in our content network.
Reaching over 34 million unique users each month, the ASL content network includes premium content sites such as Match.com, Citysearch, Evite, and Ticketmaster and more. Ads are targeted to publishers’ web pages by matching ad content and keywords to page content so the ads displayed are highly targeted to the reader’s interests.”

It should be interesting to see how these sites convert for affiliates. I’m willing to test anything once. Look for a review in the future from me….