By now most people have heard of MSN rebranding their search to Bing. We have been playing around with the search engine, and are actually impressed with the features.  The left sidebar with topic categories, related searches and search history is very effective when searching.   I also like the pop up text preview of the organic listings.    When searching for people, Bing seems to heavily weigh social media results like Twitter accounts in their SERPS.

All this is great, but how can you use Bing to make more money as a marketer?   Timing for one thing.  Microsoft is throwing $100 million into a media blitz.   With this kind of hype, its a great time to take advantage of the increased traffic bump to the new service.

If you are using Adcenter, you are already on Bing.  Results from old PPC campaigns are shown automatically on Bing.  But you might want to check your Adcenter campaigns and see what this media push is doing to your campaigns.  Most of our campaigns are showing increased impressions and clicks.

Positioning has also changed a bit.   Some searches we have been testing show as many as 11 paid results on the first page.  They also display some highlighted main column listings at the bottom of the 1st results page.  That is a first for PPC.   With all these positions available, your campaigns could radically change as you ads shift around.  Again, its a good time to re-evaluate your current PPC ads to track the results of the Bing launch.

It’s still too early to tell how this will affect the bottom line of revenue, but so far results are promising.   What do you think of Bing?

People often ask “how can I possibly learn Pay Per Click advertising?”.  PPC is definitely a huge subject with a steep learning curve.  You may be tempted to think you need to buy a secrets guide or guru’s ebook.   Luckily that is not the case.

Absolutely everything you need to be successful at PPC is available for free, right from the source.  Each of the big 3 PPC sources, Google, Yahoo, and MSN (Bing) have full featured tutorials.  If you go through all of this material below, you will know more than probably 98% of the online advertisers.   As always, its just a matter of putting in the time and hard work to learn it.  Knowledge is free.

- Google Adwords

Google Adwords Learning Center

Adwords Step by Step PDF

- Yahoo Search Marketing

YSM Tutorial

- MSN Adcenter

Adcenter Tutorial

With all the pay per click spy tools out there now, even Yahoo is getting into the act. When using the manual campaign builder, they now let you see your competitor’s ads right in your own account.  This feature may have been around for a while, but I usually import spreadsheets to build campaigns so I didn’t notice.  It’s a very powerful feature though.

To use it, on the “Create your ads” step, it will show your keywords for the current adgroup.  Under which it says, “Click above to view ads that currently appear in response to a search on your selected keywords.”

When you click a keyword, Yahoo will pop up a new box showing the top competitors ads for that keyword.  You can see exactly which ads you will be up against.

Check it out next time you are working in your YSM account.

I had a reader email me yesterday to ask: “Do misspelled keywords still work?”  The short answer is yes.  I went back to try to quantify just how well they do work, and for one campaign I found a single misspelled keyword had generated $16,189 in just the last 12 months!   That’s revenue that would have been missed if not for adding misspelled keywords to the campaign.  So I would say they definitely are still working.

Even though services like Google show the “did you mean” line with the correct spelling of the searchers keyword, your ad still runs on the initial misspelled search.  That search is usually less crowded than the main keyword.  Google, Yahoo and MSN all recommends you should add misspelled keywords to catch more impressions and clicks.

How to run misspelled keywords.

I like to break out misspellings into their own adgroup, or sometimes even their own campaign.  Keep in mind misspelled keywords in ads are technically not allowed, so your quality score might be lower for these groups because the keyword won’t exactly match the ad/landing page.   That’s why its good to separate them from your main groups or campaigns.

Misspellings can run on any PPC service, but they seem to work best on Adcenter.  (I’m not sure what that says about MSN users).   The percentage of misspelled keyword clicks that actually lead to conversions is higher than Google or Yahoo.

How to find misspelled keywords.

Some services like MSN Adcenter have their own free tool.

If you search for “free misspelled keyword” there are many online tools that will generate common misspellings.

SEObook has a great example here.

I’ve been using Keyword Discovery for over 3 years now, and it seems to be the best at finding misspellings that actually convert.   The $16,000 keyword I found was generated by the program.

Misspelled keywords are no secret, they have been working for years and should continue to work in the future.  So don’t overlook this important staple of any pay per click campaign.

Tracking is essential to the success of any per click affiliate campaign.  In order to know what keywords are converting, you have to track down to the keyword level.  This used to be a fairly complex thing to set up, but now its very simple.  There are several options, both free and paid.

Free, built in systems

The easiest, fastest, and free way to setup keyword level tracking is use the tracking code built into the PPC service.  Let’s use Adwords and Neverblue and an example.

1. In Adwords click the “Conversion Tracking” link at the top of your account, then click “Create New Action”.  Enter your information and lead payout amount, then click “Save Action and Get Code”

2. Now go into your ad network, in this case Neverblue has a self serve tracking code placement tool.  If your network doesn’t have a tool, your account manager can place it for you.  These snippets of tracking code are commonly called a pixel.  Go to tools, add Pixel.  Enter the code from Google and hit submit.

That’s it, once this is installed you are tracking conversions at the keyword level.  Now you can look at your Google reports, sort by conversions, and see which keywords are actually converting for you.  By bidding higher for those keywords, and removing non converting keywords, your account will be eventually be highly optimized.

If you aren’t working with a network, this tracking code from Google would go on your ‘thank you’ or ‘success’ page after a conversion.  Yahoo, MSN, and almost all PPC services have tracking code that can be installed.

3rd party tracking systems

The other easy option is to use a third party tracking system.  The most popular and best example out there is Tracking 202.  Wes Mahler and the guys at Tracking 202 are very involved in the industry and have great tools especially designed for affiliate marketing.  Their new Tracking 202 Pro software integrates all your tracking results from all the PPC services and affiliate networks into one console.  Once you set up their system, tracking converting keywords is a breeze.

PHP coded systems

Another option, if you are proficient in PHP, is to insert code into your landing pages that will pull the search term used and then echo the query into to the subid of your affiliate link.  Your affiliate reports will show the keyword as your subid, which you can use to see which words converted.   This is more difficult but can have its place if you are building a custom system for yourself.   I used to use this extensively back in the early days, but with all the easy systems in place now, most people don’t go this route.

With all the options out there today, there is really know excuse to run a campaign without keyword level tracking.   That data is just too valuable to miss.  By setting up keyword tracking you have access to the holy grail of stats, the cost/conversion per keyword.

Adcenter just finished their big spring update. Some much needed changes have been implemented to make the interface easier to work with.  Some of the update to the desktop tool are:

• Ability to work with 100,000+ keywords
• Import/export of ads to allow bulk edits
• Update bids at the adgroup level (Finally!)

You can go get the MSN desktop tool here

I have been posting a lot about the benefits of running private offers lately. That may have given the impression that I think there is no value in running network offers.  But there are definitely positives and negatives to both types of affiliate marketing. Which one is best for you? Let’s take a look 7 main criteria for running an offer.

Upfront work:

Advantage - Networks.  Running a CPA offer on a network is as simple as picking the offer and setting up a campaign.  They have negotiated everything with the merchant, the landing pages are set and ready to go.

Backend work:

Advantage - Networks. They handle all the lead or sale tracking, lead scrubbing and confirmation, and merchant billing.  Everything is taken care of for you.

Types of offers:

Advantage - Private offers. Network offers are mostly limited to the same type of offers on all the networks.  A lot of re-bills and other low quality offers are common.  With private offers you are unlimited in the type of business you want to promote.  As long as you can find a company and sell them on your affiliate services, you can enter virtually any niche.

Payouts:

Advantage-Private offers. This is one of the biggest benefits of running your own offer.  There is no middleman to take a percentage of the profits.  You negotiate and set your own payment which is usually higher than a network can offer.

Longevity:

Advantage-Private offers. Offers on networks can have short life spans due to many factors beyond your control.  Offers that you have privately set up can be more stable and long term.

Competition:

Advantage-Private offers. With the ease of start up and almost zero barrier to entry, network offers have tons of competition.  Private offers (especially locally targeted) often are much less crowded.  This leads to lower bid prices, and higher conversion rates.

Risk:

Advantage - Networks. CPA networks assume most of the risk with running offers.  You will almost always get paid by a network, regardless of the payment status of the merchant.  They also assume some of the legal risk for you.  When you are running a private offer, you take on more risk.

Summary

Your choice to run network or private offers depends a lot on the amount of work you want to put in upfront and on the backend.  It also depends on your risk tolerance.  Both types of affiliate marketing offer the chance for great success.   Its just a matter of what fits best with your business style and plans.  Often, affiliates will start on network offers then transition to private offers.  But the choice is up to you.

Let me preface this post by saying that while there are general “best practices” for lead generation landing pages, you never know what might work the best for your particular niche and traffic source. So testing of every option is always the key to making the best landing page.

I thought I would look at 3 lead generation landing pages in one of the most competitive industries around - mortgage leads. I Googled “home loans” and took the top three results. By the way, if you want to see mainly good landing page techniques, check out super competitive keywords as those have usually been optimized to the highest degree.

Landing Page #1

This page from Lending Tree uses the approach of putting the whole mortgage lead application on the landing page.  The visitor doesn’t have to go through multiple “next page” steps, but with 17 fields on the page its a daunting task to fill out.   On the plus side, you have the smiling happy family and dog, the next steps preview, and the trust symbols above the fold.  Overall, I would think this page would have a very low conversion page.

Landing Page #2

This landing page uses the simple 3 field gateway form.  This gets users “hooked” into filling out the longer form on the next page.  Once they start the process, its human nature to keep going until you are done.  In theory, this should lead to higher conversions that putting the whole form on the first page.   On the negative side, this page is all business.  No smiling people or nature scenes.  Just hard numbers with tables of mortgage rates.  While this might give the visitor the information they are looking for, it might be too much data all at once for the visitor to absorb.  Overall, I would think this page would have a medium conversion rate.

Landing Page #3

The last landing page uses the minimalist approach.  Only a 3 field form to hook the web visitor.  There’s a simple line drawing of a house and trust symbols above the fold.  On the negative side there are 20 links on the bottom of the page for the user to click without starting the form.  This landing page is from lowermybills.com so its understandable they want to get users to other sites in their network.   Although I am not crazy about any of these, if I had to pick one of these 3 landing pages to test first, it would be this page.

Hopefully these landing page reviews give you some ideas of how to critically look at your own pages.  As always, test test test.