Google Slap? Where?

Lately I’ve noticed many affiliates and blogs of affiliates are talking about slaps they got from Google. For those of you that might be new to this business, “Google slap” is a term to describe a massive drop in you campaign performance and quality score and that is not being caused by something you changed.

Let me just tell you that I didn’t get slaps in any of my campaigns so it’s not like the first Google slap that occurred in 2004 (as I remember), when Google “unleashed” the quality score.

If you are wondering why Google slapped you – it’s probably because you did something wrong that is against Google’s guidelines. First of all go and read the AdWords guidelines and policies. If you don’t want to rad it all, just ask yourself if you did PPC that includes:

• Flogs – also known as fake blogs.
• Scams – Google got a lot of complaints about this recently, specially in the “make money online” niche, but also in the “free-trials” scams such as acai berry.
• iframes – Google hates it.
• Government records sites – for those of you promoting the government records/background check niche, I know of 1 clickbank vendor that got slapped.

Keep in mind that Google like quality content and if you are promoting scams, your campaign will die eventually.

If you insist on keeping your campaign, you can try to:

• Switch domains.
• Open a new account and upload the campaign there.
• Google cloaking – just google it.

The methods described above are not recommended at all. I suggest to start something new with a real, quality product.

photo by: Vermin inc's

Can we have “Too much information” in PPC?

Yes we can!

I usually like that I have a lot of data on my campaigns, ad groups, keywords, ads and placements. I usually don’t take any action until I’m 100% sure that this is the right action to take and that I have enough data to back it up.

After a short explanation about my PPC habits, let me start my story at the beginning:

Few weeks ago I had a meeting with 2 Googlers. In the meeting I complained about a problem that I have – I was trying to run banner ads in the content network and I wanted to run them with 4 different landing pages (2 old ones that I know that works and 2 new ones). The problem is that I have 2 kinds of banners (proven, winning banners) and of course 8 sizes for each banner. To cut story short – I wanted to run with 64 banners in 1 ad group but the limit is 50. I know 64 banners sounds like a lot, but my ad groups usually get many impressions and clicks a day so I shouldn’t have any problem testing all 4 landing pages at once.

Before I talked to the Googlers I tried to copy my ad groups and run with 2 exactly the same ad groups, just with different landing pages. The thing is, that although Google claims that it’s OK to have the same keywords in different ad groups as long as it’s a content campaign, always one ad group took 90% of the impressions while the other exact same ad group got only 10% of the impressions.

What the Googlers recommended was that I will copy the ad groups, but not to make 2 copies – to make 8 copies! Yes, 8 copies of the exact same ad group just test different size in each ad group. That way they won’t compete against each other on the same spots. As far as my test goes, this method makes sense, but they told me that this is what they recommend to everyone. They think it is best practice. I disagree.

They claim that you want to know how a certain banner, with a certain size, performed on a certain website. On a perfect world that you could actually have the time to test this sort of thing and actually be able to follow up on it – they’re right. But this is not the perfect world and there is such a thing too much information. Think about how hard it can be follow up on all this data and take actions by it. Eventually, in order to best optimize it, you will have to create ad groups with 1 banner in a certain size that will target only few specific web pages (not even websites). For me that’s too much information. I’d rather just know, for a certain ad group, what type of banner, with a certain USP and image, will overall bring me better results that other banner that I’m running. Having too much information can make me lose my head.

Do you agree? Or disagree?

photo by: koenvereeken 

What is this blog for me?

I was thinking of how should I treat this blog. Should I just make it PPC news and techniques? Or should I also share what I’m going through as an affiliate?

I know there are many affiliates who started a blog and talked about their journey to wealth. I think I would like to do is as well but I’m not sure how it will affect the non-affiliates readers that I wish to have.

I think I will try to combine the two. Anyway it’s not like I have many readers that can just stop reading my blog. I get 3-4 readers on every post for now and I don’t think they are loyal anyway

So from now on there is going to be a new category, “my journey to wealth”, where I’m going to describe how I’m going to increase my current revenues of $1000/month from affiliate marketing to $5000 a month. And by 2011 – $10,000 a month.

Wish me luck!

Google Ad Planner – Part 2

This is going to be a short post since most of the things I wanted to share with you on Google’s ad planner were mentioned last week in the previous post.

As you recall, Google’s ad planner is a tool Google has craeted for planning media buying. In this tool you can see user data s(uch as demographic ) which is based on Google’s estimations. Google than lets you filter all the websites based on themes, users and relevance to a certain topic. Go to my last post to learn more.

Today I wanted to discuss with you how you can use this tool to plan your content campaigns.

I started using this tool when I was trying to plan a branding campaign for one of our clients. The client wanted to start a banner ads campaign is sites related to online marketing, new and business. There is no better way of planning such a thing than the Ad Planner. It was so easy. All I had to do is filter by websites in Google’s content network and choose certain catagories and certain demographics.

If you are not dealing with a branding campaign, you can still  use this tool to search for relevant sites for your client based on certain type of user. I am 100% positive that you will find sites that you are currently not targeting, not even with the automatic placements, probably due to low bids or the lack of enough relevant keywords. The Ad Planner can help you to better understand how are you doing in terms of reach, meaning that if you are targeting all that you can, and can help you expand your curent content campaigns.

Google Ad Planner – part 1

Not enough has been said and written about the Google Ad Planner and I intend to change that.

I recently needed to use this tool for a certain client and I was pretty amazed. The last time I tried using it, it was when the tool was in closed beta, and let me tell you, since than the guys at Google did a hell of a work improving it.

For you guys not familiar with the tool, it is a tool designed for online media buying plans. This is gathering its information for all kinds of Google properties and partners including Google analytics.

The tool gives you the option to research a certain site and find traffic data such as unique visitors, reach, page views and total visits. Other cool insights you can get are gender, education, users’ age, and household income. As you can see, the data is shown in the same way as it is shown on Quancast.

Another way of using this tool is a research of websites that are commonly visited by a certain audience. You can set your target audience by many available setting options such as:

• Geographic (country, state and city).
• Language (choose from 20 languages)
• Demographic settings (gender, education, users’ age, etc..)
• Site visited – this option is amazing! You can actually search for sites that your own users are also surfing on. Also, it’s a great way to get the most targeted websites using this tool.
• Keywords searched – you can get websites that are visited by users who searched for a certain keyword. Let’s say I want to target PPC marketers, I can enter the keyword “AdWords tips” and get relevant sites that users who searched for “AdWords tips” actually visiting on a regular basis.

The last cool thing you will find in the audience settings is a “load audience” button that by a drop of a menu lets you choose pre-defined audiences like baseball fans or moms.

More filters that you can use are:

• Ranking method – The tool gives you no more than 250 websites in every research. The ranking method filter lets you choose what sites are more important for you to get, high traffic ones (Audience reach) or more targeted ones (Composition index). You also have the option of combining the two.
• Ad Items – very important if you are doing a research for a campaign in the content network. This filter gives you the option to get only sites in Google’s content network.
• Category – another very important filter that lets you get more relevant sites.
• Ad specs – gives you the option to get only sites with certain ads format or sizes (example: flash ads in 160×600).
• Domain suffix – I don’t think you want to use this option, but it lets you choose between (dot)com’s , (dot)org’s, etc..

This post is longer than I thought so I guess I would divide it into 2 parts. The next part of the post will hopefully be in the next few day and it will be about few examples of how you can really use this tool to your benefit as a PPC marketer.

If you have questions about this tool, post it and I will try to answer in my next post.

AdWords Bid Simulator

A month ago Google published a post on their blog about a new feature that they plan to integrate into AdWords: the bid simulator.

It was first released into close beta, and now many more advertisers are finding this option on their campaigns.

The bid simulator is can tell you, how much traffic you could have gotten in the last 7 days  if you were using different bids.

Note that this tool cannot predict the future, and it can only give you estimations about “what could have happened” last 7 days.

If you’re smart enough, you will be able to find more ways of using this powerful tool. For example:

As you see in the image, if  my bid would be 42.86$, I would have  gotten 858 clicks for $13,600. Short math can get us to a “real” CPC of $15.85 . Based on that, I can assume that my competitor, either got a quality score much higher than mine and I got to learn from him how to write ads, or he is paying ~ 15$ a click to be in first place. A short glimpse at his landing page and ad copy got me to a conclusion that QS is not the factor here (just an assumption, but based on experience), so that leaves us with the second option. This way you can actually find out what is your competitor’s bid. (update: just realized that this system works only for exact match keywords).

I know that what I described here is quite a big assumption since you can’t really know your competitors QS, and you can’t use it all the time, but if you’re experienced enough I’m sure you’ll be able to get the most out of it.

What do you think? Do you think of more ways you can use this tool? please share.