Mad PPC
PPC, PHP, and other Affiliate Marketing tips. It’s OK to be MAD!

Stumble it!

Pretty fucking stoked to stumble in drunk, in the wee hours of this morning, to see that I have been approved for a Full Pass + Press Credentials for Affiliate Summit West in VEGAS!! I am so stoked!

This has completely changed my schedule, this year for Affiliate Summit East (ASE) in Boston I flew in early the first day and flew out the last day cuz my hotel was expensive as shit [piss on you Westin on the Waterfront].  Nothing really goes on the last day anyways, that is when all you have is an Exhibit Hall pass.  You spend a few hours of day 2 roaming the hall unless you have someone specific to talk to.

However now I’ll probably try and take in a few of the more interesting seminars, I think nickycakes will be doing some panel so I’d defiantly go check it out.  Vegas is suppose to kick ass for party’s so you definitely have to be there fully all three days just for that.

Oh yeah if your a WF member, looks like Jon has passes [just Exhibit Hall & meet market].  So go grab them from him.  Note:  If you just registering at the forum for the passes you probably not get one, chance are they’d go to the guys whom actually hang around there.

Why should you go to Affiliate Summit?  You mean besides learning way to make mad dough?  To party your ass off and learn.  Really it’s a very cool experience especialy when you get hooked up with some fellow IM’s.  It’s worth every penny you throw down.  Do yourself a favor and stay at the RIO also.

Stumble it!

Got a PM from Lickity_Split over at WF:

rage, sup bro…

I’m rockin your script to hide referral data [refering to this post] that I got off your site last week, I just got setup on ads 4 dough and wanted to know if you could kick down what param I need to put in that script to pass the subids to a4d. I tried using o= but then I read here that a4d only shows the subids for conversions..so there is really no way for me to test it for sure. Shit kinda confuses me. Any help would kick ass. Thanks homie!

Well homie I got your back, and the simple answer is, Prosper202!  Create an affiliate campaign like you normally would, “Affiliate URL” is where ever you want the click to land, whether that be an lp or directly to the offer.  If you want, create an ad for tracking.  If you doing multiple ads for the same offer, I would recommend it.

Next generate a tracking link for the offer and ad.  Drop that link minus the http:// into the “Offer Link” field on the cloaker back end.  Then just drop your subid value right behind the “&SubID=” in the redirect url.  It’ll show up on the Prosper202 back-end, and when you get conversions you’ll see the Prosper202 SubID on the Ads4Dough back-end and you just plug those into Prosper202 to see what converted.

You should be using Prosper202 for tracking anyways, so it’s not that much of a change, and if you are then this isn’t anything really revolutionary.

For you noobs, your welcome.

Stumble it!

Can’t say I’m overly surprised that they would generically respond to the questions asked:

Hello Brad,

Thank you for contacting us regarding our quality-based pricing system. We attempted to reach you at but were only able to leave a message.

Currently, the best way for our advertisers to monitor traffic from our various partner sites is through our Tracking URLs feature. We are constantly monitoring the traffic quality from our partner sites and adjusting the cost per click accordingly. However, there is not a way to view the exact quality rating or cost per click for individual sites. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may be causing you.

We are continually evaluating the features and tools we provide for our advertisers and it’s important for us to know which features our advertisers most desire. We have passed your feedback along to our developers.

If we can help answer any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We can be reached at 1-866-924-6676, Monday-Friday 6:00am-6:00pm, PST and Saturdays 7:00am-4:00pm, PST.

Sincerely,

Joseph Decker
Customer Solutions
Yahoo! Search Marketing

So they say you can use the Tracking URL feature to monitor the traffic from the sources, but I see nothing about identifying that source of traffic.  They also keep saying they adjust the cost of click per traffic source which with no proof, because they can’t show you, pretty much means it’s a bunch of bull shit.  Gimmick I say, Gimmick!

I’d go on more, but damn am I hung over.  O-U-T.

Stumble it!

As my quest of figuring out why Yahoo! sucks so badly, I take all the major issues to them trying to get some answers.  This is the letter:

Hello,

A while back I had talked to support and they mentioned something interesting to me.  They mentioned something called Quality-Based Pricing and that :

“This feature helps mitigate the effect of traffic that may not perform as well as others. Quality-based pricing is a method for adjusting your cost-per-click, based on our assessment of the quality of traffic that you receive from a source within our partner distribution network.”

So I’m wondering if there is a way to tell how much I’m being charged per click from these various websites?  I have never seen anything in the interface about it.  Is there a Quality-Based Pricing tab I’m missing?  Furthermore it was also mentioned:

“We assess the quality of the source of our partner’s traffic when you are charged for a click from that source. Depending on the quality of the traffic from the partner source where the click came from, the cost per click may be discounted by a certain percentage.”

How, and what criteria, is used to determine a partner traffic quality and worth?  Is there a rating we can see for the partner site?  Also noted was:

“Also keep in mind that the quality of traffic coming from a particular site can improve over time. If you block a domain and never unblock it to check its quality, you may be losing out on valuable traffic.”

Don’t you think it would be more valuable to alert marketers that a traffic source has gotten better?  We - after all - blocked it for many reasons including:  poor quality of traffic, no knowledge of Quality-Based Pricing, and the inability to track said traffic.  Which brings us to one of the more pressing issues with using Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM):

“Unfortunately, there is not a way to opt out of receiving traffic from all of our partners, however you can block specific domains which have resulted in poor traffic for you. We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause.

The best way to determine where your traffic is being referred from is to monitor your web logs. For more information on how to read your web server logs, please see the following link:”

Which brings us to one of my major questions, why should I have to look at my logs to see where traffic is coming from?  Do you understand that if I could actually track my CTR, impressions, and conversion rates from a traffic source - I might gee - use it.  That in turn makes you more money.  Furthermore all these crappy, spammy “partner” sites pile on top of your stats and make them look a lot worse then what they should be, causing your CTR to drop and costing the advertiser more CPC.

Now most Internet Marketers (IM) and Affiliate Marketers (AM) are pretty displeased with the traffic you provide, however most of them haven’t dug as deep as I have to try and find the answer.  You could have a great thing, but the IM community would like to wonder why these problems exist, and why you don’t want our money.

I’ll let you know when they respond.

Stumble it!

If there is one major PPC question I see the most it’s:  When is there enough data [or clicks] to tell whether this ad or campaign are tanking?  Or, when is there enough data [clicks] to start chopping keywords?

These are very important questions, that I feel should should be learned the hard way, but hell I have a blog.

The very simple answer your likely to get is:  There is no magic magic number.  And to a certain degree that is very true, but leaving someone hanging on just that doesn’t help.  In fact somewhere there should be a general number, however that number is based on other factors.

Factor #1: Payout: Payout will be your number one factor in telling when you have spent enough.  Obviously when your payout is a $1.50 zip submit, you will be able to determine conversion rates much quicker than if your payout is a $40 diet lead.  Well, that is unless your a big dog whom spends many thousands a day.

Factor #2: Avg CPC: Really goes hand in hand with Payout.  Say for that $1.50 zip submit your paying an average of $0.30 per click.  That means to be profitable you need to be converting better than 1:4.

Note: 1:4 being, 1 to 4, NOT 1 in 4.  Huge difference.  1 IN 4 would say that you need to convert once IN every 4 tries.  1 TO 4 would say that you will convert once TO four failure times - so your total amount of tries is 5.  It’s a poker thing…

Anyways, while at the same time with the $40 diet lead, you may be paying an average of $1.50.  You need to convert better than 1:26 and 2/3.

This way the zip submit would have more than 5 times as many clicks than the diet offer.  So the diet offer should be collecting 5 times as much data before making a decision.

Factor #3: Tracking: How many factors are you tracking?  FB you track just the ads, Other PPC platforms your tracking keywords, some people are tracking down to the time of the day they get a conversion, etc..

I guess a general rule of thumb would be: The less your tracking, the less time you need to wait, because your not looking at as many possibilities and how those possibilities convert.

Factor #4: Budget: Have a solid budget in mind for just testing.  For some people that could be $50 or less and for other it could be a couple $1000.  This depends on the campaign and your budget.  As an example, say for the zip submit we want to get at least 100 clicks of data to analyze, so you budget out $30 (.30 x 100) for the test, and agree to not stop the test until you hit that mark.

And / Or

Factor #5: Time: No matter what the budget there is no substitute for pure amount of time, to see how you offer plays out over say a week.  The broader the data, the better you can make an overall determination on the campaign.  It’s true some days your campaign will do better than others, you must try and remove the statistical anomalies from the data the best you can.

And / Or

Factor #6: Rate: The best way I can convey the concept of rate, as I call it, is it’s part time, budget, and tracking.

Especially if your bidding broad on your keywords, you know that some of your keywords get many more impressions and clicks while others, not so much.  So the longer tail keywords need more time to mature than your better performing keywords.  This mostly deals with when you have to cut keywords or set negatives.  It can be worth your wild to give some of your better long tails some time to see how they do.

So at the end of it all I’m normally winging it.  For bigger payouts it can take a while to get a good amount of data.  I have to encourage you to take time, and spread the testing out across several days to get a good idea, but there is no one perfect way to do it in all situations.  Do what feels right, think about some of these factors, and if you fuck up - learn from it.

No go forth and make monies.

Stumble it!

Want to wish everyone a drunken filled Halloween.

I don’t have a costume yet, but working on it kinda.

If I have pictures I’ll post them.

I hate writing stupid posts like this.

You need to watch the videos in this thread.

Peace.

Stumble it!

There is always feeling like a gap when developing and improving lading pages.  I mean you really only have so much data to work with, and you can quickly run into a road block.

I’m sure you have those sweet click maps that show how often a place on your page is clicked, all those beautiful hues.  That is all well in good but you really have no idea how someone interacts with your page.

Introducing Click Tale.  It actually records every movement a user makes on your page, everything entered into forms and more.  I could go on all day on why you need to use it, but it speaks for itself really.

Head over the the Click Tale site and try it out.  You get 100 basic recordings every week for free.  It’s not a ton but it’ll show you the basic features.  There are also business class features that allow you to do/analyze even more.  If your seriouse about PPC you know that this is priceless.

Stumble it!

…And by hard way I mean taking it up the ass - HARD.

Set up a new PPC campaign last night, for something new and exciting.  It uses a more complex redirecting system so I can use the same domain yet handle redirecting traffic from different countries to their respective LP’s.  Tried everything out so on and so forth.

It worked the last I knew.  So I head out for some heavy drinking, because that’s how I roll.  I think I checked in on my stats when I got home several hours later, not that it would have done any good because I would have had no idea what was going on.

As me and my buddies call it I was: sch-wasted, or in the “bag”, or “bagged” up.  Bag refers to a local bar that we frequent, and it’s name is something you get in a bag when your working in a restaurant.  That seems kind of vague as well as it should be, however we frequently say “Hey we are going to the bag, you coming?”.  Or “Hey I’m at the bag, where are you?  Uh huh, well get your ass down here.”  Anyways….

So yeah got pretty bagged up, and had no idea anything was wrong.  So when I check my stats this morning I thought it was really weird I had no clicks through for the campaign.  So I pull up my account to find out I had already spent $107.60 already and going strong!

Let me tell you, you never seen someone re-code a script so fucking fast.  As it turns out, it looks like I accidentally overwrote it with another script I was working on at the same time - lame.

Remember kids, you can never test too much, or too frequently.  Also maybe don’t get all bagged up when you just started a new campaign, k?

Now, go make monies.

Stumble it!

The inevitable truth - Yahoo! will do what it can to take your money, and if your not smart it will be parted from you promptly.

Whys that?  Because all the other sites are basically useless and cost you much more than without them.

All these other articles where building up to the actuality of why your taking it up the ass so hard, and it’s not hard to see.

There is a direct correlation between Impressions -> CTR -> CPC.  Now normally you’d think well, “(Clicks / Impressions) * 100  = CTR” and that basic principle still holds true.  However with Yahoo! Impressions hold their own significance - the fact that you can’t tell where they are coming from.

And because you have no idea where the Impressions are coming from it makes your CTR useless.  This all comes full circle as it:

1. Drives down your CTR super low.
2. Drives down your Quality Index Score, which is derived by CTR as far as we know.
3. Doesn’t allow you to get into a better place by bidding less.
4. In turn raises your CPC to keep it artificially inflated - and hence costing you a lot more money.

This should be called the “Yahoo Effect”.  Also the next time someone tells you that Yahoo!s traffic sucks, you can tell them why they are a “Yahoo”.

Fixing it is the most painful part - The least Yahoo! could do is allow us to fix this quickly and easily, but as mentioned before there is no “opt-out”.  Instead you have to grind through it.  It’s not only painful in the fact that it takes a little bit to do but it’s also burning a hole in your pocket, the “Yahoo Tax” if you will.

Follow these steps:

1. Set up proper tracking to capture referrers.  I’d suggest at least Prosper202.  You should be tracking all your ad data anyways.
2. Set up and run your campaigns,  wait for the clicks to start rolling in.
3. Check out all the referer’s that are not from a Yahoo! domain.  That being said you can’t block any Yahoo! related domains, like Yahoo! Answers.
4. I would suggest adding almost all the sites to the block list in your account*:  Administration -> Account General Information -> Blocked Domains -> Submit Domains.
5. Repeat 2 through 3 at least once a day until you stop seeing clicks coming from other domains.
6. Enjoy your better CTR and CPC.
7. Profit!

*You might find a diamond or two in the rough, but you can’t tell how many impressions you are getting from those sites, so they possibly make your data statistically useless.

What Yahoo! Should Do - Yahoo! struggles financially and they are at fault.  I’m sure anyone whom has worked a good amount with Yahoo! already knows this information, and has taken the steps twords eliminating the rogue sites.  Yet Yahoo! could make more money by - *gosh* - actually enticing us to advertise on those sites.

Those whom don’t know any better are still going to get gamed by Yahoo!, but we should have the ability to get access to this magical “quality based pricing” they told me about.  Does little good when it’s wrapped up with the rest of your clicks.  Or secondly, open up bidding on those sites and let the market decide how much they are worth, because they are worth a lot less than what your charging.

We should also have the right to see what our actuall CTR for anyone of those sites are so we can adjust accordingly.

This will probably never happen, but a guy can dream right?