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.

There are a ton of keyword tools out there both free and paid.  But, some of the best and most innovative tools these days are coming from MSN. Yes, I said MSN not Google. Their Adcenter Labs site is really putting out some cool gadgets lately that I am using a lot.

Here’s some examples:

Demographics predictor You type in a keyword, and it shows you the predicted demographics of who might be searching for this term. That is really important information for targeting you campaigns and ads, as well as good data to use for Google content network targeting;)

Keyword Mutation Detection This is a great misspelling and typo tool.

Keyword Group Detection This tool finds groups of keywords related to your original keyword. Great data.

Ad Text Writer Type in a URL and this tool will write text ads based on the content of the site. Doesn’t always work great, but fun to play around with.

Entity Association Graph This one is really cool. Type in a keyword and the tool show other entries that co-occur within the same user session. You can adjust your hop levels and edge strength with sliders. This kind of info is gold for search marketers.

These are just a few of the many tools MSN has. If you really want to dive into your niche and learn everything about it, these free tools are a great place to start.  Remember, to dominate your niche, you have to know everything there is to know about it.  Research is the key.

OK, most bloggers don’t post about offers they are actively promoting, but it’s Friday and I’m in a good mood. There are only 4 days left until the deadline for tax filing in the US. There is a huge surge going on now, and will only get bigger in the next few days. It’s not too late to throw a campaign together to get in on this action. I’d suggest the tax offers on Neverblue and CX digital. Trust me, these are hot right now.

As you can see in this Google trends report, there is always 2 traffic surges in tax season.

The first is when people get their W-2s and file right away. The next and biggest surge is last minute files, right before the deadline. These people are in a hurry, desperate, and want to convert your offer!

Everyone is always looking for a secret to doing well with Adwords. The endless campaign options and quality score considerations can be a mystery to newbies and veterans alike. But Adwords success can be summed up in one sentence.

Here’s the big secret: give Google what they want.

That is a radical concept to some people who are always trying to find some trick or glitch to keep their ads running. But do you want your business depending on tricks? Sure its a pain to follow all of their rules and guidelines. Sure they have driven me crazy over the years with Google slaps. But if you want the traffic, what choice do you really have? You can either play ball on their field, or go home.

Here are just a few common sense examples of giving Google what they want.

• You know Google doesn’t like “thin affiliates” anymore, so don’t waste time building these campaigns.
• You know Google likes heavier content sites on Adwords, so give them content.
• You know Google doesn’t like inaccurate display URLs, so use simple clear links to a direct page.
• You know Google likes tight relevant adgroups, so don’t put a million keywords into one adgroup.
• You know Google likes good CTR rates, so split test multiple ads to find good CTR.
• You know Google isn’t going to give out .03 clicks anymore, so bids high enough to get impressions.
• You know Google likes quick loading landing pages, so optimize your images.
• You know Google likes the keyword to appear in the ad and your landing pages, so put them there.

Google even tells you upfront what they want!

So is Google evil? Perhaps. Do they withhold some information about quailty score? Absolutely. But all that is irrelevant. If you want to continue to run ads successfully over the long term, and ultimately make money, surrender your pride and give them what they want. It’s in your own best interest.

In this video I answer questions about:

• Direct linking on content network
• Adgrouping on content network
• PPC for leads or product sales
• Datafeed tips
• Initial testing techniques
• My most profitable offer types
• Keyword tracking
• Match types

You often hear that direct type in traffic and parked domain traffic converts better than search. But if you don’t own a thousand domains, how can you get exposure to this traffic? Well, many people are surprised to find out this source: the Google content network. Google quietly slipped this one through a while ago. If you are running on the content network, check your placement performance reports, you probably are already getting traffic from parked domains.

If you run a placement report by URL, it shows up as “parked domains”.

There is an excellent explanation of how to run these reports if you haven’t run one.

You can also turn off parked domain traffic using Google’s “site and category excludion tool”, under the “page types” tab. But, why would you want to turn it off? I have found this traffic does convert like crazy!

Dayparting is the practice of scheduling changes to your campaigns at specific times of the day to follow known trends. The goal of these intra day changes is to maximize profits when you know conversions are the strongest and minimize spending when conversion is the weakest. If you want to use this advanced technique, there are basically 2 steps.

Data Gathering phase:

You have to know your trends in order to make good decisions about your bid scheduling. Let’s use Azoogle as an example. In Azoogle you can check your stats by the hour, and export those reports. In your statistics, simply choose “By Day Report” then click the “BH” selection to show results by hour.

I would export these reports for at least a week (2 weeks is better). Once you have the data for a time frame you can go back and see by day and hour, which times had the best and worst conversion rates. With this information, you might come to a conclusion like from 2pm-4pm conversion rates are 25% higher than the rest of the day. Or from 1am-5am conversion rates are 38% lower than the rest of the day.

Scheduling phase:

Now we can implement changes in our PPC accounts to reflect the performance data we gathered. Using Adwords as an example, here’s how its done. First you have to enable the feature, by selecting your campaign then click the “edit settings” button. In the campaign settings screen under “advanced options” check the box in “ad scheduling”. Now click the “edit times and bids” link.

Adwords will let you make changes down to the 15 minute interval. In simple mode you can only pause and run ads during certain time frames. This might be helpful if you have really horrible conversion rates at a certain time and don’t even want to run the ads. But we need to click the “advanced mode” to really optimize the campaign. You can get as granular as specific days of the week and weekends, but for this example let’s assume all days of the week are equal. So choose “bulk edit” and all days.

Based on the example above, here is what we scheduled. We have increased our bids by 40% during the high converting times, dropped our bids by 50% during the low conversion period, and kept them at the default bid which is 100% for the rest of the day.

After we save the changes, you can see the scheduled bids throughout the day by the height of the green bar during the time period. The higher bar is the increase bids, the shorter bar is the low bids.

That’s all there is to it. Dayparting can be a really powerful tool to increase profits and especially to decrease wasted spends throughout the day. Give it a try!