5 Bucks a Day

There has been some expensive software made available recently, I may not be evaluating it correctly since I haven’t been hyped into joining the memberships that license it, but basically what they claim to do is allow you to supposedly learn what campaigns should be successful by analyzing ads currently being displayed.

The assumption is that if an advertiser has been running a particular pay per click ad for so many days, weeks, or months, it’s successful and profitable.

And if that ad is profitable for that advertiser, you should be able to jump into that market, copy or improve on the ad, and be profitable yourself.

In theory, that could be correct, or not. At least it’s an educated guess based on analysis, that has driven the direct mail market for many years.

There’s a difference in direct mail, though, if you see an ad in USA Today in the sports section, the ad is much more visible and the costs are much more predictable than if the ad was only being run on Google and viewed if someone typed in a selection of a couple dozen specific keyword phrases.

In other words, it’s easy to copy the ad from USA Today and run it in a publication with similar demographics, it’s not quite so easy to figure out what keywords the AdWords advertiser is targeting, or what his bid price is, or what he’s paying to be profitable because of the differences quality score makes.

Of course assumptions are not always correct. The advertiser could be stupid. The advertiser could have deep pockets and is making money not on this ad, but on backend sales. The ad could be profitable for some keywords and not others, and you’re analyzing the keywords that aren’t profitable. Or any number of other scenarios.

One of our members at 5 Bucks a Day, Matt Levenhagen, has written an insightful blog post on the subject here, which you should read:
http://blog.campaignblasts.com/competitive-analysis-tools-is-this-the-end-of-adwords-as-we-know-it.htm

One of the software tools which I almost subscribed to when it came out supposedly has a feature that I found particularly offensive. Again, I’m not on the inside, so I’m not sure this is true, but it’s what I understood from reading the sales page and emails. Supposedly if you found a successful ad in your tracking, you could also find other ads that the same affiliate was running in other markets. It seems that the servers built up a history of all the profitable markets that other members found, and would share them.

So if you found that affiliate X was running a profitable campaign (supposedly) on green widgets, and another member found the same affiliate X was running profitable campaigns for lawn chairs and jogging shoes, the system would tell you that. Forget the fact that the other member was paying several hundred dollars a month to find profitable campaigns, his efforts would be shared with you, and yours with him.

Will these aggressive software tools mean there is no longer a level playing field in affiliate marketing? Time will tell.

Three things. First, read Matt’s blog post, it’s good info. Second, make a comment on this post if I’ve given any incorrect information, if you’re a member of any of these sites that do the competitive analysis. And third: Don’t worry if you aren’t a member. There’s plenty of markets out there for everyone.

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When setting up AdWords campaigns, how many keywords do you target?

If you’ve been doing it for a while, you already know that you should have very targetted adgroups, with your keywords matching your ads and also matching your landing page.

So, in other words, if you have a widget campaign, you should have red widgets in one adgroup, blue widgets in another, and green widgets in yet another, and so on.

In the beginning I used to do things like dynamic keyword insertion, which asked Google to substitute the real keyword for the dynamic token, but I don’t do that much anymore. In using DKI you can’t for example, use misspelled keywords because Google doesn’t allow misspellings in the ads, and if you have a dynamic keyword insertion token, and the keyword is misspelled, the ad text or title is misspelled. That will get your ad disabled very quickly.

So how much is too much? I’ve read books where the author advises using hundreds, even thousands of long tail keyword phrases (3 or more words in the phrase). I’m not a fan of that either.

The reason is that Google has some unpublished limitations on the size of an account.

For sure, you can only have 25 campaigns. Some have been told you can only have 100 adgroups per campaign, but I’ve had campaigns with more than that, so that’s a flexible number. I’ve also been told no more than 2000 keywords per adgroup, but really, you should never approach that.

The big concern is, and again this is just what I’ve been told, there’s a limit of 50,000 keywords per account.

If you’re targeting several hundred keywords per adgroup, it won’t take long to fill up an account, will it?

I prefer to target usually a couple dozen keywords per adgroup. I prefer to have 2 word phrases, sometimes 3, and then variations for the plurals. Also variations for the keywords smooshed together (like greenwidgets, no spaces in between). Also sometimes variations with .com at the end, so greenwidgets.com and greenwidget.com.

Then I’ll add negative matches so that I won’t get killed by a lot of long tail phrases that I don’t want to pay for, like -picture, -free, -screen saver, that kind of thing.

Once I see profits coming out of the main keywords, then I might start adding more keywords to the mix, and deleting the ones that are getting a lot of impressions and few clicks, or no impressions, of lots of clicks and no sales.

Success with AdWords isn’t a one-step, set it and forget it process.

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Several months ago, I made up my mind that I would start branching out to promote other merchants. Previously I mainly promoted eBay and Clickbank merchants. I decided to check out amazon.com because of the huge amount of products they sell on their site.

However, I quickly became discouraged. It was difficult to pick from the seemingly millions of products, and even more difficult to construct the links necessary to send people to.

Now that’s all changed. There’s a new product called “Amazon Hunter” which makes it easy to promote an unlimited number of products using Google AdWords.

Using traditional tools in the past, it would take me at least 15 to 20 minutes to find and set up a campaign for a single product. Now, with Amazon Hunter, I could probably do 100 in that time if I tried.

Amazon Hunter is a desktop utility that allows you to pull down amazon products by category, by price range, and by keyword. Then you can sort the results down by specifying that you only want to promote those products that no other affiliate is promoting yet.

And then, you can take that data, and quickly copy it and paste it into Google’s AdWords Editor, and you’re ready to go.

This is an unbelievably useful software tool, you can find out more about it at the AmazonHunter web site.

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