The following are our top six tips for selecting key words for Google AdWords:
| SYNTAX for Developing Additional Keywords | ||
|---|---|---|
| KEYWORD EXAMPLE | SYNTAX VARIATION | NEW KEYWORD |
| Surfing | Related words/forms | surfer, surf |
| Surfer | Plurals | surfers |
| Surf | State as question | how to surf |
| Surfing | Niche jargon | stoked, wipeout |
| Surfboard | Misspellings | surfbord |
| Surfer | Affective Adj. | pro surfer |
| Surfing | Descriptive Adj. | contest surfing |
| Surfing | Regional Adj. | ESA surfing |
| Surfers | Numbers-letters | 1969 surfers |
| Tow-in | hyphen vs no hyphen | tow in |
| Surfboard | One vs Two word | surf board |
| Fin System | Abbrev/Acronyms | FCS |
PRIMEDIA Inc., a leading targeted media company, announced today that it has reached a search and contextual advertising agreement with Google Inc. that includes a four-year distribution and revenue sharing agreement for PRIMEDIA's About.com as well as the sale of its Sprinks unit to Google. Sprinks is the pay-per-click advertising network that serves About.com and numerous third-party distribution partners. Financial terms were not disclosed.
NexTag now offers two types of accounts:
1. Full Service
2. Self Service
Initially, we signed up for the self service because we were not sure how it would perform. Also, it has some advantages: minimum bids for many products (tech/electronics) are about half of what they are with full-service. We also wanted to have control over what products were listed and where they appeared. The self-service method accommodates this.
Now, the drawbacks: Self-service is designed for retailers who are listing a smaller number of products and not doing as much in traffic. With self service, there are two ways to fund an account -- you can wait until you hit $50 and it charges you automatically, or you can add money to the account and pre-purchase the traffic. Unfortunately, the system produces errors if it does not have a balance that lasts more than two days. Recently we where spending over $50 a day and it did not want to make more than one charge in 24 hours.
They suggested we change to full service or add money manually. With full service we will have to pay slightly more per click, but we can have them set the campaign to auto-withdraw more than fifty dollars so the campaign does not run into the same problems. Unfortunately, the system they use for this is a feed so your products cannot remain up with the old system. We will need to rebuild a feed with all the products or have them crawl the entire site. Or we could stay with the old system and deposit a larger sum of money by hand, possibly once or twice a week to prevent it from going down.
BIO
Dr. Flint McGlaughlin
The Marketing Experiments Journal is published by Digital Trust Incorporated (DTI). Dr. Flint McGlaughlin is the Director of DTI.
Dr. McGlaughlin is a pioneer in strategy and communications. His primary research is focused on discovering the most effective means to market intellectual assets across the Internet.
Dr. McGlaughlin has advised more than 1500 companies including, AT&T, The Federal Reserve, Pitney Bowes, and Merrill Lynch. He has conducted over 2000 hours of keynote speaking. He has directed the development of more than 20,000 web pages.
Dr. McGlaughlin currently serves as the Co-Executive Producer of the new FOX Family series: "Courage" - hosted by actor Danny Glover. He also serves as a senior advisor or board member to twelve growing companies, and four charitable foundations.
His writing and television production activities have, thus far, won two Tellys, an Edwin Murrough, and an Emmy.
Dr. McGlaughlin is quick to acknowledge that the research at MEC is largely dependent on the intense, focused efforts of the Lab's Leadership Team.
Nick Chunias
Nick Chunias is the co-founder of MuscleMaster.com, Inc. The company sells more than 2,000 health related products, including nutritional supplements, weight loss products, anti-aging products, vitamins, minerals, and fitness accessories representing 120 major brands. They have grown at a rate of 75-100% percent per year.
Jalali Hartman
Jalali Hartman is the Co-Founder of Infopia.com. Infopia is an online marketplace reaching more than 200 million buyers with product listings valued at $2 billion. Infopia partners with consumer-goods retailers and manufacturers to deliver integrated software and services that minimize the costs and maximize the potential revenue of selling via multiple online product marketing channels.
URLS
1. http://www.marketingexperiments.com/members/retailers/default.cfm
2. http://www.musclemaster.com
3. http://www.infopia.com
4. http://www.marketingexperiments.com/affiliate_offering.cfm
5. http://www.marketingexperiments.com/research_call.cfm
Reference Notes
Tim Ferriss offered 10 key points:
1. People work for their highest-margin/commission products.
2. You have to provide support to affiliates. Allow them to integrate the affiliate program into their business. Consider using articles or other content, and then include "For the complete report, click here." This link would be an affiliate link that would take affiliates to your site.
3. Email works. With the right opt-in list companies, you will have very few spam complaints and can recruit some effective affiliates.
4. An affiliate program is a lot harder to set up than you think it is. Don't underestimate the amount of time it will take to do properly. It will take at least as long as setting up a thorough search engine optimization campaign. Utilizing graphic designers, coders, and people who understand the affiliate software can also get expensive very quickly.
5. Differentiate your offer from others. Offer big payouts. Provide your affiliates with your conversion percentage to encourage them to promote your products.
6. Pay attention to how you qualify your affiliates. Stop developing new solutions for each new affiliate. It is a much better situation to have 100 affiliates each making $1000 per month than 1000 affiliates each making $100 per month. You will save time and money from a management standpoint if you focus on the affiliates who are the most effective. Also, working with fewer people allows you to correct and modify as you go along.
7. Approach site owners who have related services and products and offer them high commissions to promote your program.
8. An affiliate program is not something you can just slap on top of your existing offer. Make sure there are no conflicts with current resellers of your products. Be careful not to undercut them with your affiliate program.
9. If you don't have the time and personnel to recruit affiliates, don't bother starting one. Don't expect anyone outside of company to recruit affiliates for you.
10. You must have a very good idea of what your outcome should be before you launch your program. Identify the ideal affiliate program and work from there.
Nick Chunias contributed an additional 6 key points:
11. You must create a win-win program that allows your affiliates to benefit over the long term.
12. You must educate your affiliates about your program and how to maximize it. Education is essential. We keep our partners educated on the industry, on new products we might be rolling out, and we even train them on some of the new products we add to our offering.
13. You must constantly communicate with your affiliates. You should be there for your partners as an advisor.
14. You have to be creative and think outside the box and experiment.
15. You must listen to your affiliates and learn from them as well.
16. You should automate as much as possible in all aspects of the operation. Make the process run seamlessly.
Jalali Hartman from Infopia.com offered five primary obstacles to avoid when launching a new affiliate program:
17. PROBLEM: The partner has the wrong type of customers.
SOLUTION: Make sure your partnerships are with companies that have complementary products or services. The rule of quality vs. quantity applies here.
18. PROBLEM: There is no real incentive for the partner to fulfill their side of the agreement.
SOLUTION: When negotiating a co-marketing partnership it is standard practice for each party to commit to certain marketing activities. Since the goal of any business is to make money, marketing someone else's business can become a low priority. Partners should be well compensated, paid on time, and have enough financial incentive to make sure you succeed.
19. PROBLEM: The partner has control over marketing activities around promoting your business.
SOLUTION: Effective marketing of any product or service requires consistent, persistent marketing efforts. Be sure you have complete control over your content, including logos, pricing and messaging.
20. PROBLEM: There is a flaw in your business process or model that limits revenue growth.
SOLUTION: Prior to starting an affiliate marketing campaign, be sure to have a mechanism and business model in place that attracts customers, gives them something valuable enough that they will pay for it, scales, and keeps the customers coming back for more. Be sure your business model is sound and that YOU know how to market and sell it BEFORE advertising it through partners.
21. PROBLEM: You compete with your partner.
SOLUTION: Be sure that your products and services do not overlap with your partner's. Look for partners who complement your business offering. For example if you sell baby clothes, find someone who sells books on pregnancy. If you sell payment processing services, find a partner that will increase your customers' transaction volume AND give you new customers.
Summary
So what have we learned from all of this research? What you concentrate on grows. That is true in many endeavors, but it is especially true in affiliate marketing.
1. Don't think affiliates; think partners.
2. Focus. Focus. Focus. Forget the scattergun approach. Discover the profile of an effective affiliate, search for that profile, and concentrate your resources on helping them.
3. Five relationships that work are better than fifty that don't.
4. Serving affiliate requires more than sending a link. Give them multiple ways to maximize your opportunity. At MEC, we have developed five types of promotions to empower our affiliates: http://www.marketingexperiments.com/affiliate_offering.cfm
5. Communicate with your affiliates often. Help to educate them.
6. A poor affiliate program is worse than no affiliate program. A weak affiliate program diminishes your reputation in the marketplace.
7. Sometimes your most demanding affiliates are your best affiliates. Balance potential against aggravation.
8. You don't want an Army. You want a Special Forces Unit.
9. If you can't make money with your offering, don't expect them to... Don't promise more than you can deliver.
10. In a space where value propositions define market dominance, ask yourself how 1000 people selling the same product can differentiate their offering.
From WebmasterWorld.com
Googleguy, a representative of Google (actual identity unknown) on WebmasterWorld.com had the following to say about Dynamic URLs and Spiders:
...Often as a user surfs or shops on a site, the site owner wants to track what pages they've seen, or stuff like what products are in their shopping cart. A session-id lets a site owner give each user a unique identifier. That identifier can reference customer data like the shopping cart contents stored in a database, for example.
Some people would mention that you could use a cookie to do the same thing and keep the urls much cleaner. That's true, but not every user has cookies enabled. Using session-id's is one way to try to guarantee that you know that state of a user, even if they don't allow cookies, for example.
So what's the problem with a session id, and why doesn't Googlebot crawl them? Well, we don't just have one machine for crawling. Instead, there are lots of bot machines fetching pages in parallel. For a really large site, it's easily possible to have many different machines at Google fetch a page from that site. The problem is that the web server would serve up a different session-id to each machine! That means that you'd get the exact same page multiple times--only the url would be different. It's things like that which keep some search engines from crawling dynamic pages, and especially pages with session-ids.
Google can do some smart stuff looking for duplicates, and sometimes inferring about the url parameters, but in general it's best to play it safe and avoid session-ids whenever you can. Hope it makes sense!
Recommended course of action (by another user): Turn off session IDs for UserAgent googlebot and other identifiable robots.
Google AdWords has recently added the functionality of being able to track sales and conversions of your marketing campaigns. While we have not yet had a chance to thoroughly test it, initial indications have shown that this may be a welcome alternative to using Hypertracker to track all of our PPC campaigns.
We will report on the effectiveness of the enhanced Google AdWords tracking in a future entry.
Many of us have recently had a problem with annoying pop-up ads coming from out of nowhere on our work computers. This was not detected with virus protection or scumware detectors, so we knew the pop-ups had to be coming from elsewhere.
We found it to be an exploit that used Microsoft Messenger.
If you're having the same problem, here is how to fix it:
Open 'run'
Type in 'services.msc'
Scroll down to 'Messenger' and double-click
Click "Stop" and set startup type to 'Disabled'
Click ok, and all done.
Google recently launched its content-based ad network, which it calls AdSense. Unlike AdWords, which shows your ads for specific search results, AdSense uses content channels to determine where your ads are shown.
The performance of AdSense is generally much lower than that of AdWords, but it is also much less expensive. So you can still get some worthwhile results and a positive ROI.
Initially, we have found that information-based products, services, and websites do much better than regular products on AdSense. This is (probably) due to the audiences of these ads looking for information on the desired subject rather than specifically searching for products as they might do through Google or one of its affiliates.
We will be presenting data on Google AdSense and how it stands up to AdWords and other marketing options in a future report.
For more information on AdSense, see: https://www.google.com/adsense/
We recently held a paid web conference for our subscribers. We thought we had thoroughly prepared the order process and the conference system:
- We ran six tests prior to releasing notification.
- We tested conference system for 12 months.
- We ran 3 internal conferences.
However, the day we launched the conference and notified out 100,000+ subscribers, we experienced downtime with our credit card processor, iBill. We lost what was potentially thousands of dollars in revenue. However, by implementing some safety measures, we were able to minimize the damage:
- We implemented a 3-step order process that allowed us to collect the email address and phone number of potential orders BEFORE they were sent to iBill.
- In some cases, we were able to call these customers who had problems and take their order with a back-up system.
- We sent all of the failed orders another email that offered them an additional incentive to come back and complete their order (once the system was functioning correctly again).