The PPC Toolbar

You probably all heard of toolbars that are made especially for SEO’s and SEO purposes, right?

So now there’s is a toolbar that is made just for PPC’ers, and it was created by yours truely.

The Toolbar includes:

• Quick access to RSS feeds of all the great PPC blogs out there.
• Quick access to my twitter – I’m working on an option to follow more people through it.
• Quick access to many tools that will help you with your keywords lists.
• Quick access to many text ads tools that  you are sure to use.
• Competitors research tools.
• Landing pages (LP’s) optimization tools.
• URL shortener
• Quick links to your favorite social media sites.
• One click website translation
• Quick access to your emails. You can also add an email notifier.
• Open a Microsoft office document right from the toolbar.
• Coming soon – Affiliates tools and quick links

If you think there is something missing in the toolbar that will make it even better then how it is now, please let me know!

You can download the PPC toolbar here: http://PPCisme.OurToolbar.com/

Will Google get rid of the middle man? (that’s us)

Recently I’ve been hearing a lot of affiliates claiming that Google has banned many of us since they don’t need us anymore. They claim Google is heading to a direction of being an affiliate themselves, meaning that they will move into the CPA pricing method.

The CPA pricing method is not like using the conversion optimizer Google AdWords is offering when you just set you max CPA and the algorithm will adjust your bid accordingly, rather it’s actually charge the advertisers just when a conversion occurs. These affiliates claim that over the years we have all helped Google gather all the keywords and ads that gets a user to convert and now they don’t need us anymore. That’s the perfect solution for all products and sites owners. Google will become as profitable to the advertisers as the affiliates used to be and both Google and the advertisers won’t need the affiliates anymore (this applies just for adwords of course).

A few months ago I read an article about “paid search without keywords“. This article tells the same story as the affiliates I mentioned above but it is more relevant to agencies. The article is raising the possibility that Google will create a paid search without keywords since it already have enough information about what ads and keywords works best and can soon offer the advertisers to just register to AdWords, select their relevant niche, provide information on products, product descriptions, pricing, etc. . Now if you combine that with a CPA pricing method, the advertisers won’t need professional PPC managers  and won’t need the agencies.

I persoanlly think that we’re far away from that situation and PPC advertising in the major search engines will just get more and more complicated as more and more features will become available.

As for the affiliates theory, I also think this is not the case (yet). Affiliate marketing is still alive in Google, just the “instant 1 page landing pages” are dead. Direct linking is live and kicking although every “guru” would tell you otherwise if you asked them just 6 months ago.

What do you think? Will Google eventually get rid of the middle man?

My ads are on googleusercontent.com

I recently noticed that my client’s ads in the content network are showing in this site: googleusercontent.com .

If you copy this domain to your browser address bar you are redirecting to google.com . I contacted Google to find what is this site and why it’s redirecting me to google.com.

This is the answer I got from them:

Please know that ‘googleusercontent.com’ represents a page that is participating in the Open Social network. Therefore, your ad appeared on a page participating in the Open Social network. This is different from Google Search or Search Network.

Just thought I should let you know since there are probably more of you who have seen your ads on this site.

Why I got banned from AdWords – Google’s side of the story

Lately I almost can’t find the time to post here and there is a lot of updates.

This post, as the title says, is about Google’s side of my banning story.

Yes, I finally got an honest answer from an AdWords rep’ about why exactly my account was terminated.  This is the email I got from AdWords about a week ago:

hello Erez,

Thank you for your email. I understand that you are concerned about the
recent suspension of your AdWords account due to repeated submissions of
ads for low quality landing pages. Specifically, you are concerned that,
due to a previous incorrect evaluation of one of the sites you advertiser
by our system, this suspension is also incorrect.

I’ve researched why your account was disabled, and found that this action
was taken for the following reasons:

o The URLs cited for a very poor-quality landing page experience are:
smiley-center.com, and gov-resources.com
o The account was disabled because of the following: smiley-center.com -
Data collection site that uses quizzes in order to collect private
information; gov-resources.com – Bridge site that the primary purpose of
which is to drive traffic to another site with a different domain

As you know, we are committed to making the AdWords experience safe and
effective for our users and our advertisers. We disabled your AdWords
account after a review of your landing page quality evaluations because we
believe that this kind of poor-quality site creates a seriously negative
or possibly harmful user experience.

The decision to disable your AdWords account was not taken lightly, and we
appreciate your cooperation in this matter.

 OK, so at leasy  there is a reasonable explanation for my AdWords ban, gov-resources.com, as some of you are fermiliar with if you worked with clickbank, is really just a fraud. The other site mentioned in the email is a poor try to send traffic to smileycentral.com . I don’t really get why they claimed it to be a data collecting site but I do agree it’s a poor quality landing page.

The thing is that I didn’t promote these websites from more than a year or 2 when I was a “baby affiliate”. And back then, many affiliates promoted these poor clickbank sites like I did. After all, this is how all the “gurus” told us we should start as an affiliate.

I did asked AdWords for their mercy and understanding, but as you figured out, there’s no one to answer my emails any more.

Few things we can all learn from my case:

• Never listen to gurus claiming they know the “secret” and especially ones in the affiliate marketing scene.
• Before you promote offers as an affiliate, check closely if these offers are valid and do not violate any guideline.
• Create GOOD QUALITY CONTENT.

Before I sign off I want to leave you with a small tip that might “help” you if you got banned from adwords:

Try to open a new adwords account. I say no more.

Google Browser Size Tool

When going over my Google Reader today, I found that Google has released a great tool called Browser Size.

As you all know, in your landing pages there are some elements you just don’t want the users to miss and therefore you design your landing page in a way that those elements will be above the fold.

Also, as you all know, Internet users use different types of screen resolution, different sizes of monitors, and also a big part of the Internet users use a toolbar. All the factors I mentioned are making the users’ first look at your website a bit different for each. That way, not everyone will get the same “fold” line as you.

This is why you should try to use Browser Size by Google. It let’s you see what is the % of users that can’t see the main elements (like the “click here” button) in you landing page.

What I found using this tool is that 30% of Internet users can’t even see my RSS button if they don’t scroll (and I have a big RSS button). Lucky for me, most, if not all of my readers are using a “normal” screen size and resolution. But what if your site is about selling health insurance that is mostly visited by “old guys” (no offense )

PS

Can you recommend a free screenshot software that won’t write “unregistered version” all over my image?

I got banned from AdWords – AGAIN!

OK, now this is ridiculous. I got banned again from AdWords. And why? who the hell knows?!.

As you probably remember, last time I got banned, I asked AdWords to re-review my account, and it the day after I got an email saying that I am no longer banned and that it was a computer error.

Now, a month later, I got banned again! This is crazy and annoying. I didn’t promote anything that Google doesn’t like, and in fact, in the previous time I got banned and then un-banned, AdWords help guys told me that everything I’m promoting is OK. So what the hell happened now??

By the way, my friend, of which I told you about last time, who also got banned and un-banned, also got banned again. Something is really F***ED UP with Google’s banning algorithm. Why we don’t here anything from the blog-sphere? Why no one at Google is taking the blame and admit to everyone “I’m sorry, but the machine and algorithm I created really suck”? But no! everyone should dance according to Google and no one can make the all mighty “G” to admit he’s wrong.

Google has too much power and it’s starting to get too late for us to see it.

Fortunately I already have some nice campaigns running on Facebook. You should try it too. Google is no longer relevant for me as an affiliate. Too bad..

Now go and make some money!!!

Erez.