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.

Google is now offering it’s new “Website Optimizer” in beta. At first glance this would seem to be a dream tool for affiliate marketers. It’s basically a tool that let’s you A/B test landing pages in a similar way that you can test multiple ads in Adwords. You can set up any number of landing pages with different elements, then get reports on which pages convert better. You can even make changes to your landing pages right from the tool. On the downside, Google gets to insert their tracking code into more of your pages and know even more of your business. I plan on setting up a few tests next week and report back with some results.

You can watch the demo here if you are interested.

There is a lot of buzz out there about Google’s new PPA (Pay-Per-Action) ads which are currently in beta. I will post my views of the service after I have had a few more weeks to see the real world results, but until then, here is a step by step guide of how to set up a PPA advertising campaign on Google. There are 14 steps and screenshots in total.

1. First step is to create your action and setup conversion tracking. By going into the conversion tracking section and choosing “Create New Action”.

(Click images to see full size)

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I have long suspected that Google may be using their analytics for more than we know. Ever since watching Matt Cutts pull up every domain a guy at Pubcon had ever registered, live in front of an audience, I have been worried. Call me paranoid, but I just have to wonder what information they are gathering and compiling into some huge database by all of us happily placing their tracking code on our sites.

Now this may or may not be a coincidence, but something very funny happened with a new site I had launched recently. This site was created to send leads to an affiliate offer. It’s more than just a landing page, but that’s the general idea of the site. I was running an Adwords campaign with some good results. All my bids were in the range I wanted, all keywords active. Then I installed Google Analytics tracking code on all the pages. Within 3 hours of doing that, ALL my bids for every keyword in the campaign went to $10 and switched to inactive. Now this seems like quite a coincidence like I said before. Is Google using analytics to determine landing page quality and relavancy?

You be the judge.

So I just noticed something interesting with this blog. I only started it less than 2 months ago, and I assumed although it was being indexed by the big 3 that nothing would really be in the SERPs yet. Well imagine my surprise when just today I was doing a Google search for “keyword assists” and found the #1 position was my blog for that keyword! I was just trying to get more info about the topic for my own curiosity and had no idea I would be up there. This is from a short blog post I did on the subject on December 6th. I guess the search engines really do to give weight to blog posts!

I’ve been getting some unexpected cool stuff in the mail recently. Right before Christmas I got a special delivery of a box marked with “perishable” and “fresh food” on the outside. When I opened it up, it was this awesome gift basket from Azoogle. It has all kinds of fruit, nuts, candy, cheeses, meats and everything. We have been eating well around the house lately from this thing. Thanks Azoogle!

Then just today I got a small box in the mail from Google. Inside was this nice little travel mug. I’m not sure if it coincides with just getting my premium Adwords account status, but it was a nice gesture from the big G.

One of the best ways to test the effectiveness of you landing pages is through Google Analytics Bounce Rate metric. This particular report can be found under content optimization, navigational analysis, entrance page bounce rates. With a bit of tweaking you can view a chart like this:

So what does this show? Well, like in golf, a lower number is better here. The lower the percentage, the more people are clicking through your landing page and taking the action you want them to. The higher the percentage, the more people are abandoning your landing page. In the example above, the landing page with the 46.3% rate is the most effective page, while the 76.5% page is pretty bad. This is a tremendously important way to gauge the effectiveness of your landing pages.

It’s also import because it gives you an even more detailed view than just conversion rate. For example if you have a 5% conversion rate, you still don’t know how many people are abandoning your landing page versus abandoning the affiliate offer page. By looking at bounce rate, you can tell not only the average rate that users click through your page, but also you now know how many users get all the way to the affiliate offer page then quit without buying. Pretty good stuff.