As an affiliate marketer, it's an insane game of catch-up when you have to go back and forth between your sales stats and your spend stats. When you want to do reporting, if you aren't using any kind of keyword tracking software, it's a bitch to generate your own. Well, these are just a couple most of the many gripes that inspired this post. This is basically a wish list I'm creating in hopes that someone out there will answer my prayers and make something resembling this dream system.

Free

It's a long shot, but hey, it's the perfect price. I believe that any software worth having should, at the very least, have a free package amongst its paid packages that doesn't limit you too much to use on a small-time basis but limits you just enough so that you eventually do have to upgrade if you become a more intense user. Oh and also, I don't mean a timed trial. When I say free, I mean free for the long-haul baby. Any perfect keyword tracking software would have to start out FREE.

Live Statistics

And I mean LIVE baby, like right now! This goes several ways, from spend sources to revenue stats to visitor stats. When I want to know what my spend stats are for a particular PPC source, like Adwords, I have to log in and run a report to get my most up-to-date spend stats for the day. When I want to see how much I've earned, I have to log in to my statistics application that I developed myself and when I want to see live visitor data--well--I can't ... yet. Having live statistics from all my sites would, in turn, allow me to have a central location for all my information and that's a beautiful thing. Any keyword tracking software worth its salt would need live statistics polled, say, every ten minutes or so. That way all my graphs would be up to date.

Graphs, Charts & Reports (Oh My)

What good are stats if I can't see them graphically? What if I'm a visual learner? I need graphs, baby! Pretty ones, too. If you're going to build that perfect keyword tracking system, it had better have graphs ("wow" looking ones). Then, what if, at the beginning of a new year, I need to print out all my data for tax purposes? I need exportable reports. Yeah, I'm talking about CSV, Excel and the like.

Easy-To-Implement Code For Landing Pages And Such

My biggest peeve with every keyword tracking system I've used so far, mainly affiliate radar, has been its implementation. Although it's not impossible to figure out, it lacks that ease of use that would take it to a godly status. Face it, most affiliate marketers aren't developers or even HTML jockeys to say the least, so the best bet would be to make something really easy to implement -- something like Google Adsense code. And the site would have to SHOW us how to place the code, preferably with videos!

Video Tutorials

How awesome are video tutorials? They make learning fun and easy. Hell, I love to make them in my spare time and post them up on Youtube (check them out here), so it can't be that difficult to make tutorials on the keyword tracking website and all the bullet point features. Also, it makes the site look less enormous and daunting if you see someone else actually using the site the way it's intended to be used.

Security

The last thing I need as an affiliate marketer is to worry about people stealing my keywords, looking at my landing pages and basically stealing my business model for the campaigns I run. Additionally, I don't want to have to worry about the people who run my site looking through my financial data or about the site being hacked and random people gaining access to my data. This means strong security measures have to be in place for data storage and the site owners would need some kind of absolute accountability to its public. How that would happen, I do not know.

One more note on security. At the landing page level, keywords would have to be encrypted as well so that random affiliates and affiliate managers will keep their grubby fingers away.

Customer Service

This kind of goes without saying, but I felt I should include it anyway. Customer service is always a must to at least provide some kind of sense of "I care"-edness to the service, even if they don't. It gives the customer the sense that they are actually helping to turn the gears of action to get them what they want, even if the customer service rep is merely a middle man between the person and a FAQ list and eventually, a trouble ticket form. Sometimes you just need a live person.

Web 2.0 Hotness

Is it too much to ask for the site to be strikingly handsome? That's right, if I'm going to be married to this site for the long haul, I want it to be pretty for as long as possible--just like my wife (thanks Sarah). That means, it has to not only look great but also carry web 2.0 functionality with it. Just enough, but don't get carried the *!#% away (Yahoo! Search Marketing, you know who I'm talking about). AJAX is a feature not the main show, baby. Just keep it fresh.

Auto Stop Losses

This is a feature I've been scheming up in my head since I started. I figure, since this dream keyword tracking software can already tap into the back-ends of my PPC sites (like Adwords, YSM and Adcenter), it should be able to turn my campaigns on and off based on my current profit standing. As affiliate marketers, we all have those days where a campaign that is normally doing great decides to put on its ugly face and turn on us. Not to mention when we were first starting out and didn't really know what the hell we were doing and lost $5,000 within the first month (sorry Sarah).

Just imagine-- if you could put in a "stop loss" amount of, for example, $50.00 and the system would constantly monitor your stats and automagically shut the proper campaign(s) down as soon as it noticed you were $50.00 into the negative. How cool would that be?

Of course, you wouldn't want to set some small number as your "stop loss" as there are times when campaigns that are breaking even temporarily dip into the negatives and then shoot into profit; however, you wouldn't want to set it to a number that is too high either as it can take search engines a while to stop showing ads even after you've turned them off. Overall, I think you get the point.

Auto Suggestions

With the right statistical data, this hypothetical system could make suggestions about whether or not to look for new keywords for the campaign, remove non-converting keywords, ditch the campaign, adjust spending on the campaign, try different ads on the campaign, etc. Not only would this be an insanely awesome tool for n00bs, it would help seasoned affiliates maximize their profits and learn new tricks here and there to apply to new campaigns.

Centralized Advertising System (CAS?)

Going back to the idea of a central location for live data, why stop there? While we're at it, we might as well allow affiliates to stop using the clunky interfaces of Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft Adcenter and start using the ONE interface for the keyword tracking software. For what, you ask? Well, for creating/managing ads and keywords of course! How many times have you been inside your YSM Panel and thought "Dear god, what monkey built this thing?" You aren't alone.

Once and for all, there should be an intuitive system for adding keywords and distributing them across ad groups in such a way that maximizes efficiency. Also, as affiliate marketers, we use individual ads across multiple ad groups. Why not use one ad and apply it to multiple ad groups instead of creating the same ad over and over and over?

This would be the mother of all features but if done right, would revolutionize this business.

Email Collection (Aweber Style)

While it's in the business of hanging out on our landing pages, the software might as well have an option for collecting e-mails in an Aweber-like fashion. That is, it would pop up with a box or hang out somewhere on the landing page and ask people to sign up on the mailing list. Then it would have follow up messages and the ability to broadcast without being spammy. Don't get me wrong, I love Aweber but if some software could centralize all my affiliate tools, I'd be there in a heart beat.

Click Tracking (CrazyEgg Style)

Although CrazyEgg does an incredible job, live click tracking is just a cool feature to have. Google Analytics is also a great tool for this kind of thing, I know but wouldn't it be cool (once again) to be able to manage all of your affiliate-related tools in one place? On top of that, the software could suggest strategic placement based on clicking hotspots to maximize revenue. Just a thought.

Conclusion

I know there are POS's (pieces of software) out there that already do some of the things I mentioned but I have yet to find one that does all of them or even most of them. Someone out there has to be willing to build such a monster and when they do -- game over. I will be MAD RICH. Until then, I am just making a decent living.

But I can dream.

Popularity: 39% [?]

Lately, I've been monitoring my campaigns rather closely. In fact, I've been doing updates on 30-minute intervals to check my spend/revenue (profit) throughout the day over a period of about a week. It's difficult to be robotic about it, but it's necessary if I want to maximize my profit.

What I've noticed is that (of course) some common hours of the day are much more profitable than others. In fact, I noticed something that I thought I noticed when I first got started with affiliate marketing- if I stop the campaign at a particular part of the day, I make more money overall.

Yup, that's right. Instead of letting my campaigns just run, I've learned to pause them at a particular point (when profit is highest). My partner practiced this for a long time when we were heavy into ring tones and kept telling me to do it, as he said it would increase my profits. Turns out, I should have listened back then as it makes more sense to me now that I'm dealing with more money.

So now that I'm essentially scheduling my campaign on and off periods, it makes perfect sense that I use tools available to me to do the scheduling for me. My poor partner had to do it manually, but that was when we were mainly using YSM for our affiliate adventures. Now that we're using Adwords, we've got the most beautiful tool in the world- Google Adwords Ad Scheduling (picture on the right).

If you'll take a second to look at the screen cap from a campaign I was testing it on, you can literally stop and start your campaign for every day based on specific times. It's simple yet elegant and so far, it's saved me a bundle.

What's more, you can set how MUCH of your budget you want to spend at a particular interval based on a percentage. Of course, when I have my campaigns on, I like them running at 100% but if you wanted to, you could completely maximize your revenue if you did enough testing.

I highly recommend this if you want to make the most of your affiliate marketing adventures. Hopefully Yahoo! will jump on the bandwagon soon and implement this feature, but until then, Google is your friend when it comes to scheduling.

Hope that helps,

Scott

Popularity: 16% [?]

This post ties in with my "Understanding the Adwords Formula" post and provides a little more perspective on what Google wants from you -- money.

Lately, I've had a good deal of success with several of my campaigns. I won't discuss how much quite yet, but we'll just say my new record kick's the old record's ass.

Moving forward- I've had a chance to dance a bit more with Google AdWords over the last few weeks.  And when I say dance, I don't mean the nice kind. When I started a campaign recently, I saw great success in the first twenty-four-or-so hours. My wife and I couldn't be happier and we were both in disbelief. Our disbelief proved correct when Google proceeded to slap us down with the fury of Zeus. Our minimum bids went from being under $1.00 (profitable) right up to $10.00 (not profitable). I'll admit, I hadn't been more pissed off in quite some time and yet I'd never felt so helpless.

After that point, I had a good friend of mine do a test using his account to see whether he could achieve similar success. He didn't want to spend quite as much, but lo and behold, he saw a similar success but without fail, was slapped down by the mighty hand of Google.

What we've learned in the ensuing weeks could prove more valuable than any advice we've ever read in blogs or e-books and so far, that has been true:

Google just wants more money.

Yes, it's that simple. After increasing the bids on both our accounts for a period of about three to four days, Google started displaying our ads again (even though it said otherwise in our accounts). Sure, we lost money but were able to slowly adjust the knob back down to break-even and finally, to profit. I'll warn you - we lost thousands - but it will be returned to us within a few days and with what we've learned, we can now apply it to our other campaigns and Google-slapped keywords to return them to the SERPS and now you can, too.

So if you're feeling helpless because big brother Google has taken away your keywords, worry no more! If you've got a little money to burn, Google seems to accept bribes. Apparently, they just want to know you're serious.

And that's all there is to it.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Lately, I've been obsessed with the Google Adwords Quality Score or Adwords QS system. Especially when considering very short tail keywords as discussed in my last post, it's important to educate yourself on what Google actually considers as quality when it comes to not just your landing page but also your very ad text and keywords.

In my search for the answer to such puzzling questions, I've come across a few sites that help put the QS into perspective. Back in August of last year, GrayWolf put it best when he titled a post "New Google Adwords Formula = Just Pay Us More." And from what I've been reading, more or less he's right.

From Google's perspective (I hate thinking this way more than anyone because it utterly debilitates me and makes me feel helpless), they want to do three key things:

1. Maintain their position as internet god
2. Provide an easy and useful experience to users
3. Profit, profit, profit

This makes complete sense. Who doesn't want to profit? I know I do. The problem is that they are telling us "as long as your ad generates enough clicks and/or pays us enough, we'll keep it running and in good positions." Yes, some people might pay less as a reward for really good CTR (Click-through ratio) and still end up in a similar ad position, but it doesn't cushion the fact that someone in the ad right above or below them is simply just paying more to be there. For those of us who can't afford such a luxury, it's completely daunting. Especially when you take into consideration the fact that you could be removed from first or second page results due to this fact or even Google Slapped.

So the next logical step, of course, would be to pony up and pay the piper, right? Instead of cursing at Google for being so unfair, I like to look at this as an opportunity to take advantage of a beautiful system.

As an unnamed Google Expert put it back in May of 2007 in an exclusive interview:

Start overbidding! I am serious! You hit the nail on the head when you shared your shocking results that new Google AdWords advertisers are screwed. They have no history, no good quality score, so they have to bid high to get into the door and stand a fighting chance. You have to start out aggressive and then scale back. Otherwise your campaigns will never get off the ground.

By overbidding, of course, the expert meant bidding significantly more than your minimum bid in order to get over the 24-hour window where Google decides whether you are worthy of maintaining your good standing with a particular keyword. You do this in hopes for a high CTR (counterintuitive, I know) so you can start slowly decreasing your bid down to something manageable and hopefully, profitable.

So this is where we're at as the new marketing generation. It's come down to a price war between advertisers. The great Google has spoken and that's pretty much all there is to it. Don't worry about high-quality ads anymore. Focus more intently on keyword-stuffing your landing pages and overbidding just to slowly adjust your bids back to profit.

On a more personal note, if there's one thing I hate most about Google, it's their customer service. Am I alone when I say I feel helpless when I talk to them? It's not because they scare me. It's just that they're so robotic, as if they're the human form of a help wizard. They have no real authority, either. Essentially, they tell me to view the tips on improving my quality score. Honestly, if the solution to my issues were just that simple, don't you think I'd be calling them with something more important? I thought so. Oh, and if there were one more thing I'd say I hate most, it's that they act as if they have no regard for people who spend $5 to $10k every day. Yahoo, on the other hand, has assigned someone specifically to me and they call ME if anything goes wrong.

Now that is what I call customer service. But in the end, Google is king and we all know it. That shouldn't stop you from dominating your niche, so go out there and kill!

Popularity: 26% [?]

Generally, stuffing as many keywords as possible into each ad group and campaign is thought to be the best practice. This is the exact reason we have such pervasive terms as 'keyword trimming' and the like. Essentially, you start with, say, 50,000 keywords and you run them for about a week. After a week, you start trimming (hopefully using one of the methods described here) and you end up with fewer non-converting keywords using up your money. You repeat this cycle until (hopefully) you are only spending the majority of your money on keywords that convert directly into sales.

This might work for some, but for those of us who want to DOMINATE a specific market, it just doesn't work. We're talking thousands per day here, not hundreds. So what's an affiliate marketer to do? Well, instead of using a machine gun, use a sniper rifle.

That is to say, instead of using tons of keywords that might garner a few weak hits, try using a few high-traffic keywords. My first thought when reading the previous sentence is "but that's going to cost a ton." But then I answer myself by saying "experience has taught me otherwise."

I've tried high-traffic keywords in the past and we'll just say, I've been dragged through the mud. So a warning to all those who dare to tread on dangerous ground, you CAN get burned and get slapped with thousands of dollars that you have to figure out how to pay back. Now that I've scared you, let me give you the good news. If you find high traffic keywords in areas that aren't as highly competitive as, for example, "make money online", "web host reviews" or "christmas gifts", you just might find a few winning keywords.

So my advice here is to stay away from the already crazy-saturated markets and find those with tons of daily searches but less competition. Note: there will ALWAYS be competition no matter what you try. At some point, someone else will have your idea and it's usually before you. That's no reason to step out of the race though. There are literally millions of dollars to be made.

So your next step is finding those keywords that are high traffic and for some of them, you just might be surprised. To find our prize winning keywords, we head over to Google Trends (of course) and start doing searches that revolve around our target niche. For instance, let's assume we want to sell Teddy Bears, we'd want to find out what searches there are on keywords like Teddy, Teddy Bear and perhaps, Stuffed Bear. So we'd do our search like so: Teddy vs. Teddy Bear vs. Stuffed Bear. What you'll notice right away about the search is that 'Teddy' dominates over all, while 'Stuffed Bear' is definitely something we can toss to the wayside.

What we'll want to focus on is keywords that are more like 'Teddy' and less like 'Stuffed Bear.' Now the keyword 'Teddy Bear' is right in the middle, so you'll just have to see how it converts.

The next step is tweaking. I like to think of it as turning the adjustment knobs to get everything running just right. You'll have to come up with multiple ads for each keyword. What I do to guarantee that I focus on specific keywords is literally make ONE keyword per ad group. That way, I know each ad is tailored to that keyword and quality score will be less likely to flounder. Trust me, you want to keep your quality score up and that means reading Google's quality score guidelines in detail. Make sure you don't screw this part up. "Why's that?" you might ask.

Well, imagine having a campaign that does $5,000.00 one day and gets Google-slapped, as it were, and suddenly your beautiful $0.25/click bid goes up to a $10.00 minimum bid. How do you get yourself out of that pickle? It's a terribly discouraging feeling that I've had on multiple occasions and I wouldn't wish it on any of you. The truth is, all you can do is do your best to make sure your landing page meets all of the quality score guidelines and that your ads get as many clicks as possible (high CTR = good). You have to do all this, of course, while making sure you're in profit. It's a tightrope walk, no doubt about it.

But the pay-off is great. You'll have multiple-hundred and thousand-dollar days going for you every day, as long as Google likes you and your offer stays in tact. Make no mistake -- there is no auto-pilot about it. If you want to make this kind of money, you have to constantly monitor your campaigns or you will be killed. It's a cut-throat industry, so stay on top of it and you should be fine.

On a lighter note, you'll be working hard but hopefully, in much nicer clothes, a nicer car and a nicer house. That's the dream, isn't it? Good luck to you.

Popularity: 17% [?]

In both my own experience and the experience of others, I have not found one successful example of Ask.com working for affiliate marketers. In fact, having spent over $500.00 with these guys, I am sad to report that I have made a big fat zero back on my investment.

Just doing a small search yields some very interesting finds, such as this or this. I'm not normally the one to yell about the sky falling, but damn -- it's not just me saying this.

All anger aside, it seems the problem is the way in which they send traffic to their sites. Even their 'search' network is mainly content-network-based. And in general, it's known that content networks (ads on websites) deliver a lower quality click than those generated on a search engine. This is due to the fact that there are tons of websites out there that attempt to trick users into clicking on their ads for obvious reasons, while search engines don't allow such tom-foolery.

Perhaps when Ask.com alters their PPC (Pay Per Click) engine to include only traffic from its search engine, we'll have a winner but until then, suck eggs Ask!

Now of course I'm not out to bash a company if they aren't sucking, but to the best of my knowledge, Ask.com is hoovering BUT if you've had a different experience, please let me know.

Popularity: 19% [?]

To build on three previous posts Why Use Tracking Code, How To Put Tracking Code On Your Landing Page and How To Cloak Your Affiliate Links, the intention of this post is to inform you on how to track the keyword someone used to get to your site from a PPC (Pay Per Click) Ad, no matter which page they come in from.

The problem that people have that made this post necessary is losing the keyword when someone comes in either from a different page or visits the page, leaves and then comes back. Without knowing which keyword got the person there in the first place, marketers like you and me are lost on how to properly spend our money and on which keywords are terrible at converting. We definitely need that information, so we must make sure to do our best to track it.

Now going into this post, I have to assume three things: you can follow instructions, you are using one of the major search engines for your CPC ads and you are using PHP for your web pages. With that out of the way, let's proceed..

In the header of your PHP files, you'll want to include the following code-

keyword_tracking_php.txt

Once you've placed your keyword tracking code in your header(s), you'll need code in place to pass the captured keyword to your hop-link. If you aren't familiar with hop links and passing information using them, please read How To Put Tracking Code On Your Landing Page.

Additionally, if you'd like to learn about cloaking your hop links, please read How To Cloak Your Affiliate Links.

Now to extend the post on cloaking, you can modify your jump.php file with the following code-

jump_php2.txt

It's really as simple as that. The first page captures the keywords and feeds them into the jump.php for Azoogle (or whichever network you're using) to track. What's more is that you can track additional information just by doing the same thing with other information you pass (such as the name of the ad group, specific ad, etc.) in other cookies. Then, you can just append that to the actual jump link's 'sub' tracking variable using a pipe (|) to separate the different variables, respectively.

So there you have it, proper keyword/ad tracking with cloaked links.

Popularity: 62% [?]

So you know how I wrote that post about how AdCenter is Sucking Harder Than a Dyson vacuum cleaner? Well, it seems that my friend Jonathan Volk disagrees and since I have made it my job to keep you guys informed (hopefully without too much bias), I felt it necessary to inform you of what he thinks. So take a moment to read about why Microsoft Adcenter might not suck as hard as I thought.

Essentially, the Volk touches on how he's kept campaigns in profit with Microsoft AdCenter while he's tried to figure them out on AdWords and the like:

You’ll see my posts on Adcenter on Digitalpoint have always been in favor that Adcenter’s conversions were always par or better. In fact I used Adcenter to keep some campaigns going in the profit while I tried to figure out how to make the adwords campaign profitable.

Overall, I generally use the same keywords from my other campaigns and just transfer them over to adcenter. It seems to work well enough.

None the less, my experience has been different and I still haven't experienced any real turnaround from AdCenter. In my opinion, they still suck eggs.

Popularity: 20% [?]

You might enjoy using Microsoft AdCenter and at one point, I was as well. If you'd used Microsoft's AdCenter about two months ago, you would've been somewhat content with their turnaround time on approving ads and keywords.

Well fast forward to now where it takes about 12-24 hours to get your keywords and junk approved, I must say I am thoroughly disappointed.

It's not that I'm surprised about this being a Microsoft product, but more-so that the third runner in the PPC Search Engine battle would be so careless about Read More »

Popularity: 30% [?]

This must be one of the most frequent questions I get asked. The short answer is no. You don't technically need a landing page to be successful with affiliate marketing. Overall, you basically just need a referral link to send traffic to in order for your sales to get tracked properly. If you had a mailing list of 10,000 people that you just sent different referral links to each day, you would never need a landing page.

So when do you need landing pages? When you're dealing with search engines, landing pages become a necessity. Not only for PPC (Pay Per Click) traffic, but for organic traffic as well. Trust me, your referral (jump) links are extremely difficult to get indexed on Google. Sure, you might be able to get a referral link to work for a while on AdWords or YSM for PPC, but eventually they'll filter your ads out and you'll notice all your traffic has gone.

When you have a website you can send traffic to, even if Read More »

Popularity: 21% [?]