I’m sure everyone has read about the Google/Yahoo ad sharing deal. If not here’s the whole thing in a nutshell:

“The agreement will enable Yahoo! to run ads supplied by Google’s AdSense™ for Search and AdSense™ for Content services next to Yahoo!’s internally generated paid search and algorithmic search results. Yahoo may also run Google-supplied ads on non-search Yahoo web properties, as well as on current members of its partner network.”

My take:

To me this is just another example of Google getting stronger and Yahoo getting weaker. It’s pretty disappointing really because it there going to be fewer and fewer alternatives to Google.  I have always pulled for Yahoo to hold their own and provide a real alternative to Google.

All this deal really does is makes Google’s content network bigger, as paid search ads will now spill over to Yahoo results and sites. So to you and me that means, we better be good at running Google content campaigns. My only question is, will Google let you specifically site target Yahoo properties? We’ll have to see.

If you are a stock trader, you watch the market trends all day. If you are a pay per click marketer, you should be keeping up on keyword trends every day too. The keyword marketplace is always changing and new keywords are surging for different reasons. I have posted before how the savvy marketer can capitalize on surging keywords to make huge profits. Fortunately this data is readily available, and the best source is the Google Hot Trends feed. This is updated usually about 10 times a day so the info is very fresh. If I could keep only one feed in my reader this would be it. No other site has ever helped me make more money than this feed.

I guarantee this RSS feed will make you money!

Google Hot Keywords

Enjoy and good luck!

Ok, this title may be a little misleading. You aren’t really gaming the quality score by following these tips, you are just working with their system and giving Google what it wants. You may have heard some of these, or they may be new to you - but I can personally vouch for the fact that these methods work. Without further ado here are 4 techniques to acheive that high quality score:

1. The “player” approach. It’s hard to get a good CTR and quality score with low bids. So when you start a brand new campaign, come in with a high max CPC. Higher than you normally would run the campaign. It may cost you, but it should help your initial CTR and allow you to snag a good score. Then you can back the bids down slowly.

2. Adgroup structure. Put all your keywords into adgroups with common semantic meaning. Google will see this similarity and reward the group with a high QS. Don’t allow poorly related keywords to creep into your adgroups. Keep the number of keywords as low as possible in each adgroup.

3. Clearing bad results. Sometimes despite all your best efforts, you will experience the Google slap and your bids will shoot to $10. When this happens its time to clear these results away. Delete all keywords, ads, ad groups. Make a change to your landing page that the Google bot will see. Wait 20 minutes. Rebuild the campaign in the reverse order than you deleted. Hopefully, this will bring your bids back down.

4. Super relevant landing pages. This is probably the best way to affect QS. Make every landing page relevant to every keyword. Google loves to see the exact keyword used in the search on the landing page. There are several PHP based ways to capture the search and display it on the page. When Google sees super relevancy, they reward it with super quality score.

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!

As CPA affiliates, we often have to absorb the costs for wasted clicks of tons of traffic that we drive to advertisers sites. If fact the majority of traffic that we pay to send to an advertisers site doesn’t not convert for the specific action that we are contracted to be paid for. Of course, they are still getting the benefit of that traffic. It may convert for something else on their site, or after the cookie has expired. Even if the customer we sent doesn’t take an action, the advertiser still gets to build their brand and gain visitors. It’s kind of the forgotten element of the CPA model.

Well here’s an example of just how good it can be on the other side of the equation. We have had a PPA (Pay Per Action) campaign set up on Google for a while now, sending traffic to a customer site that we are managing in the Aviation market. (See our visual guide of setting up a PPA campaign) . This PPA campaign is mostly for testing purposes, and not our main driver of traffic at all. So anything we get from it is basically a bonus. As you can see from the screenshot below, it does not convert very well at all for the action that we have set up. However, the traffic does end up staying on the site and looking around, which is great.

For the 1,499 click of Google traffic, we have paid a whopping $9.00. That breaks out to a CPC of $ 0.0060 per click! Now do I feel guilty about all the Adsense advertisers on the content network sending me this traffic and for essentially free? Not at all! I am on that losing side of the equation most of the time, so it’s nice to be the one on the receiving side.

I’m sure all the savvy readers of this blog can think of some very “grayhat” ways to exploit this kind of thing. That’s not how we roll at CDF Networks, but rest assured we have thought of them too.

Checking my logs, I noticed I have been getting a ton of organic (free) traffic from Google lately. The big G really likes this blog and even seems to be giving authority weight to my PPC posts. I have seen posts rank within a few hours in Google’s index for terms I am not even trying to rank for. I dug into some of my stats and found we rank surprisingly well for a lot of keywords.

# 1 and #4 for ecpc ppc

# 1 for keyword assists

#2 for super affiliate blog

#4 for affiliate ppc

#6 for PPC network

#6 for pay per click network (Google adwords ranks #9, now that’s funny!)

I’m really trying to differentiate this blog from all the others by focusing on the PPC side of things in the affiliate game. So I’m glad I have Google on board with this mission. I was worried that I would lose all these ranking when this blog was transferred from our old domain about 2 months ago, but careful 301’ing and some good .htaccess tweaks seemed to have done the job.

Google is opening up it’s new mobile search pages for free advertising.  Yep you heard me right, free clicks!  The catch, your ads and landing page have to be adapted to work on mobile devices.  But if you like to pioneer new forms of advertising, you can’t beat testing it for free.  I think I am going to play around with this a bit and report back how it works.

Info on the program here

Nothing is permanent in affiliate marketing. People seem to be lulled into a false sense of security that campaigns will continue to run, offers will continue to pay out, conversions will continue to happen, and so on. But you can’t count on anything. It’s like the standard disclaimer on every investment and stock, past performance is not indicative of future results. Yet, people always seem shocked when a hot offer suddenly stops, or a well running campaign is shut down. Count myself in that group. Even though you know it can happen, it’s always surprising when it happens to you. A few weeks ago, my top performing, longest running campaign on Google Adwords was effectively shut down. This campaign had been running nonstop for over a year, yet the algo change Google made totally killed it. I tried every trick I know to get it back up and running, but to no avail. It’s kind of sad that Google makes no effort to retain a “good customer”, but search relevance rules over customer loyalty it seems. At any rate, it just goes to prove my point that at any time affiliate income could all go away. So be prepared.