the PPC Book|Pay Per Click Blog | Long Tail Thoughts in a Short Tail World

Most of you probably didn’t know, but the Dalai Lama recently became a client of mine. It’s not that big of a deal to me, but my colleagues think it’s incredible. I can’t tell you what he’s promoting, but let me just say, it’s definitely trancendental. Hypnotic almost, life changing.

When he first called I didn’t believe it was him. I was actually on a golf trip with some friends. I landed in Hong Kong and I make my way over to Tibet, and I get on as a looper (to pay for my Adwords bill) at a course over in the Himalayas. A looper, you know, a caddy, a looper, a jock. So, I tell them I’m a pro jock, and who do you think they give me? The Dalai Lama, himself. Twelfth son of the Lama. The flowing robes, the grace, bald… striking. So, I’m on the first tee with him. I give him the driver. He hauls off and whacks one - big hitter, the Lama - long, into a ten-thousand foot crevasse, right at the base of this glacier. Do you know what the Lama says? Gunga galunga… gunga, gunga-galunga.

So we finish the eighteenth and he’s gonna stiff me. And I say,

“Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know.”

And he says, “Oh, uh, there won’t be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.” So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.

He goes on to tell me that gunga galunga is a really competitive term online, and he needs help. I tell him about my PPC skills and he says, “In addition to total conciousness, you can manage my lead gen campaign for the monestary”. Which is cool.

Which Brings Me to the Point of My Story!

I’m holding a golf challenge, Saturday, September 30, in Chicago. The course is to be determined. You see, I fancy myself pretty sharp with the stick, and if you or anyone who is employed at your company can beat me, straight up, tournament rules, play it as it lies, in a contest of 18 holes, I will manage your PPC campaign for 1 month free. This includes my normal analysis, campaign build, and management services. Here’s the kicker, you don’t even have to beat me. Just for showing up and paying your way and mine (or 1/3 of mine if we have a foursome), then you will recieve 1 hour of my consulting time (worth $250), PPC, SEO, or internet marketing in general. Whatever you need.

Consider this, if I wasn’t worth it, would the Lama have hired me? I don’t think so.

Here’s the details of the… 1st Annual Lamas for PPC Challenge

Location: Chicago, Il
Course: TBD (probably Cantigny)
Date: September 30th
Availability: 3 spots are currently open
Rules: USGA Tournament. No handicaps, play it as it lies.
If you would like to enter this challenge, you should visit the contact page and send me a message indicating you are game.

In case any of you work for the Lama and don’t want me talking about this deal to those who haven’t completed the 8 fold path, please check here.

Salesforce is now becoming an agency of sorts for Adwords.

This is interesting to me because a client, once upon a time, was integrating their tracking with Salesforce. As I’m always pushing my clients to implement end to end tracking solutions, which are defined differently by every business, I’ve come across Salesforce/PPC tracking a few times.

In this particular case, the client had users register for a whitepaper, once the registration hit the database, the user info was passed into their database and to Salesforce. Now, to date, there wasn’t really an efficient way flag that user as an Adwords prospect. Once that lead hit the Salesforce system they entered one of those epic software sales cycles that lasted 12-16 months. Good luck managing the campaign for ROI based on only landing page conversions. That doesn’t tell me if the keywords I used pulled in a valuable prospect or not, it just told me that someone, anyone, wanted the whitepaper. Not good enough for an ROI freakazoid like me;)

Tracking all the way though the Salesforce CRM lifecycle was a pain. I used a tag in the URL that showed up in some obscure Salesforce field jumbled with other url data. This resulted in a manual parsing of referring information, which required intervention on the clients part, wasting their valuable resources. What would have been ideal would be to have Salesforce look for a variable that I defined, like, ADWORDS>KEYWORD, then, we could sort in Salesforce by PPC lead, keywords, and other useful methods.

So, my question is, will this new Salesforce development come with better integration for PPC/Adwords campaigns with regards to tracking? I would think so, but hey, I’ve been wrong before.

Technically this is a post about affiliate-based arbitrage, not pure arbitrage. In my opinion, here is the difference:

Pure arbitrage (using ppc): The technique in which a publisher buys mass amounts of traffic from various PPC platforms. The traffic is directed to a site that then serves the user a page that contains outbound links that are monetized on a CPC basis. The publisher tracks both the cost of the inbound traffic versus the income from the outbound traffic, and attempts to monetize the ’spread’ as much as possible. For example, if I bid $.09 for the keyword ’sears washer dryer model RX21223′, someone clicks on my ad, lands on my page, and sees a link for ‘Buy Sears Washer Dryer - Free Delivery’, which is a link I got through a feed at Yahoo, and that click pays $.25, I just netted $.16. If I can do that on a mass scale, I am running a nice little business.

This technique is different than using PPC to do affiliate arbitrage.

Affiliate arbitrage (using ppc): The technique in which a publisher buys very targeted PPC traffic focused around a theme or product. The traffic can be sent directly to an affiliate landing page or to a publisher hosted page that contains one, or several, affiliate offers.

In my particular case, I was trying to figure out how to track conversions back to keywords on an affiliate I was promoting through Commission Junction. It’s a little hard to figure out due to poor documentation on CJ, but I’ll help you get right to the goods.

Basically, CJ uses SID’s, or site ID’s I believe they call them. Normally, people apply these to a site, so you can tell which site is converting for a particular advertiser they are promoting. In this case, we are going to use SID’s to track a PPC campaign at the keyword level.

Let’s say our campaign is for payday loans, and we’ll use 2 keywords as a starting example. My keywords are:

pay check advance
“pay advance”

Notice the second one is phrase match. CJ will give you a long url under “keyword links” that look something like this:

http://www.dpbolvw.net/click-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx

Obviously, the x’s are placeholders. Your affiliate id will be in there. Now, as is, you can’t tell which keyword generates a sale or conversion. Adwords conversion tracking won’t tell you either. We need to use SID’s to track the sales. You can build out a nice Excel formula to do this on a mass scale if you have a lot of keywords, but I’ll show you how to do it first with just a couple.

Take your base url:

http://www.dpbolsd.net/click-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx

add a question mark

http://www.dpbolsd.net/click-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx?

add sid=

http://www.dpbolvsd.net/click-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx?sid=

then add the keyword, replacing any spaces with +

http://www.dpbolsd.net/click-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx?sid=pay+check+advance

for phrase match keywords, you can do this:

http://www.dpbolsd.net/click-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx?sid=pay+advance+phrase

That’s it. Just plug those urls into the keyword creative and you’re in business. Now, in your CJ account reporting, you will be able to see which keywords converted by looking at the report details. Viola. You’re a millionaire!

Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.

Several sites are popping up recently that are making good use of the AOL data that was recently sprung on the search marketing community. I have to admit I massively underestimated what this really means. I had no idea that the search queries were tied to a user ID! OMG. What an absolute FUBAR by AOL.

 Here are some of the interesting tidbits:

Want to see the referring search keywords for any site?

http://www.askthebrain.com/aol/

Want to see the CTR by position in the AOL serps?

http://www.earnersforum.com/showthread.php?t=3953

 Want to see what that user ID: 20688257 apparently really wants to find a teen hooker?

http://www.aolsearchdatabase.com/

Good lord we’re in for a doosy. Have fun! And don’t forget to send me any URL’s I’ve left out.

Shoemoney points out the new emails from our lovely friends at adcenter.

“You have 24 hours from receiving this mail to remove your ads. After 24 hours, your account will be suspended.”

Good lord.

Now Shoemoney, who’s quite the traveler these days, can’t get to his account in time to ‘improve’ the ads. I would venture to guess he’s not the only one, considering

It’s the middle of summer, it’s august, people travel in august! Hello, McFly?

Redmond, let’s use some common sense here. First and foremost you approved these ads. Secondly, if you decided you made a mistake, why not disable or pause said offending ads. Don’t disable the FREAKING account. What a ham-handed way to handle this problem.

I am sincerely pulling for Adcenter, because Google needs competition, the marketplace needs competition, to be truly healthy, and believe me they’re not getting it from Yahoo, formerly Overture, as in, formerly useful. This new stunt from the folks at Adcenter is really not going to help their case.

Now I may just getting a bit salty because it’s Monday, but hey, I wonder if no one had told me about this, and then my Adcenter account was disabled, would I have even noticed? I mean, more people walk on the moon than see my Adcenter ads, but that’s another can of worms.

Earth to AdCenter, come in.

One of my clients is an online soccer retailer. They have a fantastic campaign to begin with, but when you add in a once in 4 years event, as the World Cup is, you get absolute top end performance. The client actually had me cap the campaign in the middle of July because the 4 guys who worked at their main store couldn’t ship any more orders during the course of the day.

Of course, being a soccer retailer, there is an ad group devoted to player names. Suprisingly, it’s the smallest portion of their campaign in terms of clicks/sales, but it’s interesting to me nonetheless because of the whole sports celebrity thing. I’m not a huge Zinedine Zidane fan, but I am a former soccer player, and he’s one of the best, so I can appreciate watching him play. Now, if you don’t know the story, you’ve obviously been under a rock so stop reading here…
Even though this is a low percentage of the overall campaign in terms of spend, I thought this was an interesting example of things an analyst has to pay attention to while managing a campaign. In particular, an analyst always has to be on the lookout for a star athlete head butting an opponent in the middle of the sport’s final game, and the effect it may have on keyword pricing and conversion.

To illustrate, here are the numbers from Zidane’s keywords broken down into July Overall, July 1-9, and July 10-31. The final game and infamous headbutt occured on the 9th.

July 1-9….

July 10-31…post headbutt…. Notice 3 things:

1. The cost per conversion before and after the incident.

2. The drastic drop in conversion rate.

3. Also notice the average postion rise, as I’m assuming many people stopped competing on his name because they anticipated the drop in conversion.

Anyhow, I just thought this was somewhat amusing. I suppose that’s about what you can expect to happen with your jersey sales when you make a completely foolish decision like that. Anyone out there have any similar examples?