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

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

Last week there were some mergers and buyouts in the second tier PPC network space. Adknowledge was formed in 2003 and has received some pretty good capital funding from Technology Crossover Ventures. They have been buying up all kinds of various networks and platforms lately. Last week the purchased the media division (PPC) of Miva for the bargain price of $11.4 million, which included Miva and Findwhat. They also purchased the Chicago based SearchFeed PPC network. I have done considerable spends with both Miva and Searchfeed in the past.  Hopefully these consolidations will make a very strong second tier PPC network, and expand their reach.

I’ve always been a fan of trying every traffic source out there.  I have had some great success, as well as total failures on second tier networks.  You definitely have to test and track your traffic as always, but there is some good converting traffic to be found.   Another positive point is that every second tier network I have tested will give you free clicks and credits to try their networks.

Here are some current free click deals:

$50 Miva coupon - This is still good after the buyout.  Miva Adcenter accounts will continue to work as normal, so I would grab this credit while you still can.

$50 ASK.com credit  -  Ask has always been a solid performer for certain niches.

7 Search 20% Credit -  Still probably the cheapest traffic out there.  Test as always, but for the right offers this traffic will convert.

It used to be somewhat hard to find good data for building and optimizing campaigns. Now days, there are so many tools out there it’s almost overwhelming. Some of the best tools are from search engines themselves.

I’ve talked about Adcenter Adlabs before, and their tools keep getting better and better. The Audience Intelligence tool group has an amazing Demographic Predictor. Enter a keyword string and it will tell you very accurately the demographic percentages of the people searching that term. Hint: Doing demographic targeting on Facebook and Myspace campaigns? Start your research with this tool, then build your ads with the data.

The Detecting Online Commercial Intention tool really blows me away. Adlabs describes the tool: “Web page searches display two levels of commercial intent: informational and transactional. This tool can detect customer intent to acquire information or to purchase products based on their search queries or recently visited URLs.” To an internet marketer determining customer intent means money. The tool can actually produce a statistical probability of the query have a commercial intention. In other words - a conversion.

Another great tool is Adwords Insights For Search. This tool is like Google Trends on steroids. The data is scaled and normalized so you can compare keywords against each other easily. The seasonal and geographic information is really important when planning new niches. Hint: Location targeting on social ad networks? Search keywords by country to find the top states and city data for that niche.

There are many ways to slice and dice keyword trends based on location, time, or other factors. Say you want to search the trends for the keyword ‘verizon ringtones’ from 2005-2009, for the USA, in Southern California. No problem, it’s that granular.

If you aren’t using these tools, you are really missing out on a goldmine of data that can take any campaign to the next level. Best of all, they are 100% free.

We are very focused on PPC at CDFnetworks for ourselves and clients. But I have dabbled in social network content advertising on Facebook and Myspace. There are a ton of opinions out there about social network advertising. Opinions are great, but I wanted to gather hard data on what converts better. I decided to run a case study to see what kind of conversion rates I would get on the Adwords content network versus Facebook.

The campaigns:

It’s very hard to do an exact test of PPC and social network advertising because they are very different animals. I want to single out conversion rate, so I tried to keep as many other variables as possible the same. I ran the Adwords test only on the content network, so both tests were contextual. I used the same ad text on Adwords and Facebook. I also sent both traffic sources to the identical landing pages on the same domain with tracking installed to gather the results. Both campaigns were set up with demographic targeting. Obviously Facebook allowed the use of a photo, which I could not duplicate on Adwords.

Sorry, I can’t show the ads or give away the niche because this is a niche I am still actively promoting.

The total stats for the Adwords content network:

The total stats for the Facebook network:

I was able to get similar spend amounts for the test. However, I received over double the amount of clicks on Adwords due to the lower CPC, and much higher CTR. I had good quality score which allowed me to lower my bids throughout the test. I had to run a pretty high bid price on Facebook to keep the ad running for the duration of the test. But both amounts of clicks are statistically valid for the purposes of the case study.

Conversion results:

The results were surprisingly close:

Adwords:

Total conversions: 1,250

Total overall conversion rate: 4.8%

Facebook:

Total conversions: 449

Total overall conversion rate: 3.9%

I had expected a blowout in conversion rate by Adwords, but they were not that far off. Although 4.8 is a 23.1% increase from 3.9 which is significant. Of course given the lower CPC, the Adwords campaign in this case was much more profitable. If I would have been able to lower the bid prices on the Facebook campaign to a similar amount the profitability would have been closer. The Facebook campaign also produced a huge number of impressions that I could capitalize on with a better CTR.

Bottom line:

Both traffic sources converted, which is the most important thing. But for the money spent, Adwords PPC was clearly a much better result in this case.

I thought I would start a new series of posts to tackle common PPC to affiliate marketing problems. The first one is: not enough traffic to the offer. Many times you set up a great site or landing page, spend hours building a PPC campaign, implement a full tracking system, then launch everything only to find traffic trickling in. What went wrong, and what can you do to build up the traffic?

1. Bid prices. Assuming you have a decent keyword set, if you aren’t getting any traffic your bid prices may be too low. This is by far one of the most common problems I see with campaigns. Its very tempting to try to ease into a niche going after cheap clicks, but its also an biggest way to shoot yourself in the foot. You have to bid enough to get the clicks, no matter what that price may be. If the top ads are bidding $1.75 and you start with $ .85, your campaign might be doomed to never get any impressions. Set your bid aggressively - you have to pay to play.

2. Add Keywords. If you have maxed out the traffic on your current keywords, common sense says its time to add more keywords. There are million keyword tools out there, so finding new keywords is never a problem. Just be sure they are relevant keywords to your adgroups. Adding non-relevant keywords could end up hurting your quality score and actually reducing traffic levels.

3. Increase CTR. Split testing ads is still one of the best ways to increase traffic on current adgroups. You should always be testing new ads no matter how much of a winner you already have. Even small increases in CTR can yield a lot more traffic. If you have an adgroup getting 10,000 impressions a day and were able to increase CTR from 3.5% to just 5.5%, that would be a 57.1% increase in total clicks.

4. Increase Quality. The quality score on your account will affect the amount of traffic you get. Unfortunately this topic alone is so big that full books are written about it. The main things to look at are ad CTRs, keyword relevance, and landing page factors. Different networks weigh the factors differently. A good resource is always Adwords help.

5. Other traffic sources. Once you have everything optimized and running nicely it might be time to add new networks. Adwords, Yahoo, and MSN are all great. Try adding the content networks with all 3 networks (in separate campaigns). There is always second tier PPC networks, some of which do actually work. Social networks like Facebook and Myspace are another option. Media buys at large ad agencies can add lots of traffic volume as well.

Next up: no profit.