You may have seen these new ad formats show up in your account recently. They are not in full release yet, but many advertisers are now able to run them after the latest Adwords maintenance last Sunday. These template ads, or rich media ads are for the Google content network only. The are much more content heavy ads than a standard text or image ad that you could previously run on the content network. These type of rich media ads can also be run on third party networks, but now Adwords is fully in the game.

One of the main benefits of these ads is the interaction tracking. This lets you see statistics of things like user mouseovers of images, and clicks on various ad components like next, previous, poll results etc… Which really helps you optimize your ads based on the interaction data. The interactions that you can track vary based on the ad type.

There are 7 different types of template ads that you can build:

• Showcase Template Ad
• Slideshow Template Ad
• Quiz Template Ad
• Business Locator Template Ad
• Photo Gallery Template Ad
• Site Search Template Ad
• Coupon Template Ad

These ads are easy to create, just plug your info and images into the template.

I have testing some of these ads for 3 weeks with mixed results. The formats I have tried are the Showcase, Quiz, and Coupons templates. I am having trouble getting decent volume with the ads, which is not surprising due to the early stage of the rollout. Once the formats become more widely accepted and the publisher base expands a bit more with Adsense publishers, I see this being a very good opportunity for marketers. Conversion rates have been strong with the low volume.

I am curious to hear if other people are testing these with good results.  Anyone want to share there experiences?

Once you have a successful campaign running, you always want to increase the traffic. After you have done all normal methods such as optimization of everything and buying all the traffic you can on every network, then what? It might be time for a little self-competition. This is a fairly advanced technique that works great for expanding the reach of an offer.

Competing with yourself is a way of capturing a larger percentage of the paid traffic for a given search result by having more than one ad for a given search query.

You may have seen someone owning all the spots on Google for a given keyword. They have the exact same ad copy and even destination URL. But that is way too obvious, not very effective, and not self sustaining. The PPC network will catch on and shut you down. You can take a more subtle approach for better and long lasting results.

The approach

The approach is to have the competing ads and landing pages be completely different in every way to the main campaigns. Different ad copy, different domains, different landing pages etc. The only thing that stays the same is the keyword and offer. Someone looking at the search results and even clicking through to the landing pages should have no idea they are owned by the same person. The plus side to this, besides the extra market share you are grabbing, is that the competing campaign is essentially a split test of your main campaign. You can use it as a testbed for new ideas without upsetting the main stable campaign.

Different accounts

It’s debatable whether or not using multiple accounts is allowed with different PPC networks. It might work, and it might not. So if you want to be really sure you won’t be hassled you can follow these steps. You don’t want to sign up for another account with the exact same info as your main account. If you have a secondary credit card and alternate address, use that info.

Different Domains

You want completely different domains to send competing ads to. Ideally, they are totally different sounding than your main domain. Also I would use a different landing page and coding structure from the main campaign.

Different Webhosts

Google has ways of seeing all the domains you own under a given webhosting account. Don’t ask me how, but they do. So if you really want to keep everything separate and not draw attention to yourself, get a new hosting account for your new domain.

Different Campaigns

This is really where self competition comes through. You want to write ads completely different than your main account on your competing account. Play off the other ad. Go opposite of the ad text. Remember you are trying to catch a different customer than would click on your main ad, so get creative. If your main ad is playing to an emotional buying response, try a more analytical stat based selling technique on the competing ad. Capture the right brain and left brain people in the same search result.

If used correctly this technique can add a lot of revenue along with providing you more and more data about your niche. Have fun with it!

Disclaimer:  Many PPC networks (like big G) don’t like this technique, so use at your own risk.

It’s pretty well known that the 4 main categories of quality score elements that you can control are:

• Keywords
• Ad copy
• Account Structure
• Landing pages

Volumes of information have been written about each one of these topics. But many people are not aware that there are other factors to your quality score that you have little to no control over at all.

1. First of all, the niche you are in affects your quality score. By just entering the niches, certain factors are applied to your score at the account level.

2. Your business model affects your quality score. Adwords looks at the way you are driving leads to a landing page and assigns a business model rating to your account. If they think your business model is based on affiliate sales they probably have a rating that dings your whole account.

3. Lastly, your competitors afffect YOUR quality score. This is probably the most frustrating thing to learn, but yes the competitors around you affect the score in your account in a negative way. Is this fair? I don’t think so, but that’s how Adwords rolls.

source: Adwords employees

Many sources claim that up to 50% of searches are tagged with some sort of Geo term. With those kind of numbers, Geo terms are something you can’t ignore when building your campaigns. It’s possible to incorporate these location searches in many types of campaigns.

What exactly are they?

If someone adds any geographic location to their search term, that is a geo tag. For example:

Seattle car insurance

Florida trial lawyer

CA mortgage

The most common GEO tags for the US at least are city, state, and state abbreviations. Obviously you can append almost an search with the common geo tags. But just be sure it makes sense with the search. For example “Michigan ringtones” does not make sense. But “Michigan dating” does.

You can get very creative with GEO tagging, especially if you think outside the box. You can also get very granular in your keywords when you start going down to the city level or even suburb level in large cities. I always recommend putting your geo term keywords into their own campaign.

Here is a list of the states, state abbreviations, and top 50 US cites by population for your campaigns.

Well, I just finished going through the stats from the big Mother’s day holiday weekend and it was a good one. I saw great earnings on several holiday related offers like flowers, gifts, etc. These were fueled by some solid 5 figure daily MSN spends that always lead to super high conversions. It’s always been tough to get good traffic volume with MSN so I was very pleased.

Holidays are always great to boost earnings and go after some low hanging fruit. You have the 2 major factors that help ensure success as an online marketer.

1. Increased traffic surge. Having a know date on the calender provides guaranteed traffic and allows you to plan ahead.

2. Motivated buyers. They have a deadline to provide the sense of urgency to the purchase, which leads to great conversion rates.

So what’s my holiday strategy? Well, I probably put 80% of my time into normal, non-seasonal or non-holiday related offers. These are your bread and butter offers that have solid year round traffic. They may have certain trends that you need to keep up on, but for the most part traffic is pretty even.

The remaining 20% I like to focus on holiday/opportunity offers. The earnings on these days are too strong to ignore, so I definitely recommend chasing holidays. The next holiday coming up is Father’s day, which is a lot less of a shopping holiday than Mother’s day. But there are still some offers to capitalize on the built in demand.

As promised here is a technique I have been using with great success for a long time in some PPC campaigns. When using this method I routinely see click through rates on my ads of 25-45%. This leads to tons of cheap clicks and great quality scores. Also, the boost from these highly clicked adgroups can help raise the overall quality score of your whole account.  The secret is, targeting Spanish speakers.

There are an estimated 45 million Spanish speakers in the US. If you aren’t specifically writing ads for this massive audience, you are really ignoring a highly converting group. The thing is, not many people are writing paid ads in Spanish. So when someone types in a search in Spanish and your ad comes up matching their search, CTR goes through the roof. The market is still wide open in some niches. This can be implemented on the adgroup level of a current campaign, or a whole new campaign to capture the market.

You don’t have to speak Spanish to write your ads and landing pages, just use any of the online translators to convert your current ad copy. Then convert your existing keywords to Spanish.  So there you have it, a simple technique that works ridiculously well.  Enjoy and I hope it makes you a lot of money.

I was looking at the stats yesterday for the last year of a successful campaign I have been running. I ran an average yearly eCPC and compared it to the affiliate network average. I was surprised to see my average was 83.9% higher. So how am I doing so much better than others running the same offer? Here are some reasons its going so well, and some tips that can help you outperform the crowd as well.

1. I have optimized the campaign to the highest degree. Once I saw the campaign had promise, I tore it down and rebuilt it from the ground up with awesome structure. Then I kept checking reports all the time and honed everything down intto a conversion machine. This is nothing but hard work and time investment.

2. I know the niche inside and out.  I researched everything there is to know about the industry to a level that a wall street analyst would.  I checked out consumer demographics, the major players in the industry, what moves the market for the products and services, etc.  Then I applied all that knowledge back into step #1.

3. I researched the trends.  I know what days of the week convert, what months are hot, and when things are slow.  This information is can be utilized to forecast spending trends and optimize the campaign even more.

4. Success breeds success.  Good campaigns take on a momentum of their own.  The more money you make, the higher your payouts, the better terms you get, which lead to more money.  It’s like a feedback loop that keeps building and building.

I think it all boils down to knowing your niche better than your competitor and just outworking everyone else.  If you are willing to do that, you can easily outperform the averages by a large margin too.

Domain choice is a hugely important step in any new PPC to affiliate campaign. I touched on this subject briefly almost a year ago in this post about display urls, but I wanted to expand on that. Your choice of domain names to host your landing pages will have a big impact on conversion rates. So here are some quick strategies I usually follow concerning domains to be used for PPC.

1. Always buy a new domain for every offer. Don’t try to use the strategy of buying a general domain and then splitting it off for every offer you test. This will lead to lower conversion rates and may kill what could be a promising niche before you even get started.

2. Don’t buy a overly hyphenated domain that looks spammy. A domain like buy-my-products-now.com does not instill confidence in the consumer. Short, dot com names have always worked best for me. Never buy dot orgs.

3. I have had some success buying names that sound similar to the offer. This way when the searcher clicks from the landing page to the offer page, they are often unaware anything has changed, especially if you are keeping the same look/feel of the offer page. This leads to high conversions.

4. Most often, buying a domain with the keyword in the title works best. When someone sees the keyword they searched for also in your display URL, it reinforces the relevance of your ad. That follows through all the way to the conversion.

5. Once an offer shows promise, I buy multiple domains. Domains should be split tested for conversion rates just like ad copy. It’s amazing how keeping everything the same, except the domain name can affect conversion rates. I have seen a 7.2% increase in conversions by picking a better name. How many names should you buy? I would keep testing until you are satisfied you have the best domain possible. I have tested10-15 domain names on my most long running offer now.

Keep in mind, these strategies are for PPC to offer campaigns and are different that strategies for building a long term site. I am not factoring in brand building or SEO like you would if you were building an a site for organic results.