Danger Brown » adwords

How to undelete an Adwords Ad to save it’s history

dangerbrown — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 04:31:58 +0000

I was just making a single character change to my best money making ad in my best campaign. I thought I was creating a new ad, but accidentally edited the old one.If you edit an ad at all, it deletes the ad and replaces it with the edited version. This new edited ad has lost all it’s account history which is part of the Adwords auction quality score and has an impact on how that ad will be served in the future. If it was a real winner, you may really notice the difference in CPC, ad position, or targeting if using conversion optimizer. Deleting an Adwords ad is irreversible if you are using the web interface.

If you have accidentally deleted a productive ad you may think all hope is lost and that you have to start over with an exact replica. Not so my young padawan. Open up Adwords Editor and:
1. Get Recent changes (top left button) basic is fine
2. Click on the folder for the campaign and subfolder for the adgroup in question. (on the left)
3. Click on the tab that says “text ads”
4. Sort by clicking ‘status’ at the top of that column (optional)
5. Find your deleted ad and click anywhere on the horizontal row. The text will have a line through it.
6. Look at the bottom section and make sure you have the right ad selected.
7. At the bottom right change the status dropdown from ‘deleted’ to ‘active’.
8. At the top click on ‘Post changes’

9. That’s it! You can check your web interface, and your ad will be there in all it’s glory with all of it’s important history intact. Feel free to buy me a beer next time you see me.

EDIT: Here is a screenshot.

Affiliate marketing 2nd month totals

dangerbrown — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 22:41:33 +0000

Here we go. I actually am running fewer campaigns than when I started this month. I have built 3 new landing pages and tried promoting them without success. One of my two profitable campaigns has gone downhill and I stopped promoting it a few days ago. That’s alright though I’ll keep at it. I’m still gonna hit that $10/K monthly goal.

May, 2009
Money spent:
Adwords $4516.16
Yahoo $209.75
Total money spent $4725.91

Money earned:
Hydra network                 $6066.00
Neverblue                               $77.00
MarketHealth                         $50.00
Adsense                                   $190.94
Moreniche                                $15.00
Gross money earned         $6398.94

Net money earned $1673.03

Some of that Adsense money is residual. But mostly I spent $81.03 to drive traffic to sites with a high CTR on Adsense ads. This is a remnant from before I started Affiliate marketing, so you could subtract those numbers if you cared to. I leave ‘em in because I’m feeding my family. To eliminate any confusion, I do not have Adsense on my affiliate landing pages. It is completely separate income. If you don’t count that income/expense the total is $1563.12 from affiliate marketing only.

These numbers come out to a 35.4% ROI. My profitable campaigns have done a little better than that, while my failures have lost money and hurt the overal ROI. I’d prefer to have my ROI at about 50%.

Further. Almost all my income is through Hydra right now. They put me on weekly payouts a few weeks ago, and that lets me quickly reinvest any money made through Hydra. Therefore most of my efforts are in that direction for cash flow reasons. If I get the money back in 10 days or so, I don’t care about ROI as much. With the weekly payouts, I could afford to spend $20K/mo easily. I just need more profitable campaigns to run. Hydra is not the only network that will do this, but I was able to get approved by grossing over $1K/weekly.

In June I may be distracted a bit from the affilate marketing. A friend of mine and I are working on a new startup. Top secret until the launch. I expect to be telling you all about it in 2-3 weeks. Wish us luck! Don’t worry though, the startup will not stop me from my $10K/month goal. Feel free to follow my micro-updates on @dangerbrown on Twitter.

If you are a doubter, here is a big screenshot of my Hydra earnings.

My 1st month

My 3rd month

Ultimate mini how-to guide to PPC affiliate marketing.

dangerbrown — Sat, 23 May 2009 17:12:19 +0000

It’s hard to believe, but this diatribe began as an e-mail reply to someone who asked me “What exactly do you do to make money on the internet?”

My response was this mini how-to step by step guide to affiliate marketing:

Because if I show you my exact websites and offers I am promoting today, and you could practically copy/paste my income while stealing market share/profit from me, I (and any other internet marketer) tend to be secretive about the exact thing I am doing.

But to be fairly specific, I am currently promoting Health and Beauty offers(products) available on the Hydra, Neverblue, and MarketHealth networks. These same exact or very similar offers are available at nearly any affiliate network. I use Google Adwords to get people to go to websites I own. Those websites are biased of course. The best product in the world is the one which pays me the most money. I have struggled a bit with the ethics of that, but have 4 children at home, a wife, a mortgage, and retired parents. Taking care of my family takes priority over feeling guilty because people will buy overpriced junk on the internet simply because I suggest it.

I use Google adwords to drive traffic. YSM (Yahoo Search Marketing) and MSN Adcenter combined will only provide 10% of the traffic you can get from Google. If you have a profitable campaign, you can expand it into other venues as part of an expansion strategy. But we will ignore them for the rest of this conversation.

Using adwords seems deceptively easy, but requires real skill to be successful. When promoting a CPA (cost per action) offer where 10,000 other affiliates are promoting the same thing, you are competing for the exact same keywords trying to sell the exact same product. You are also competing with people who have been doing it for 10 years and are happy to make 20% profit on high volume. You don’t have their skill, and you need more ROI (return on investment measured as a percentage) than they do.

You may not know yet how to make landing pages (mini websites) yet, but don’t take shortcuts. Google gives a quality score to your landing page in relation to the ads and keywords you use to promote it. If your keyword, ad, and landing page aren’t perfectly aligned in relevancy, and in compliance with Google’s best practices and terms of service you will have to pay more for the same click. If you are very far out of whack on this, you’ll be paying more than can be profitable when competing against the pros.

You can start with direct linking, but Google will only show one ad for a given URL per query. This means that all the other lazy affiliate wanna-bes in the world are competing for that one ad spot. Google will display the highest paying/highest CTR (click through rate) ad according to a formula. It’s tough to compete for that spot, so you are forced to go with long tail keywords (lower traffic uncommon searches) or play the bidding war game. Better to stick with the long tails, or only use direct linking to test an offer prior to building out a landing page. Keep in mind I’m talking about higher CPA offers (over $10.00). If you have a zip/email submit with no credit card required, I’d direct link, and build a separate campaign using content network only. If you want to direct link, you may also be well advised to try to find less popular offers which will have less competition.

In response to the question “What exactly do I do?”:

1. I talk to my AM, affiliate manager. I ask her/him to give me current stats for the best converting/highest EPC (earning per click) offers using PPC search to drive traffic.

2. I search Google for obvious keywords having to do with that offer. I look at the sponsored links only. I look at the types of landing pages that other affiliates are using. I pay more attention to the websites in the best ad positions, at least on the first page. Some websites will be irrelevant (Ebay, or whatever) ignore those. If it’s an affiliate, you will usually see his tracking links/redirects when you click through to his offer page. Look at the exact offers other affiliates have named as their #1 product. Look at the landing pages they are using. If they can afford the first page spots, they are making money. If you see similarities in their landing pages (you will) it is because those common elements are what is working today.

3. I build a mini website (landing page) which has similarities to the other successful affiliates operating in the space I want to be. This site has privacy policy, contact us, and terms and conditions/disclaimer pages. These extra pages are required to keep a decent quality score which will allow cheaper clicks for my traffic. It also has original text which may be similar to, but is different from my competition. Google will penalize you for duplicate content if you copy/paste.

4. My outbound affiliate links are redirected through Prosper202/Tracking202 running on my hosting account. This allows me to see more information than Google will share about the traffic I’m buying. Also, it allows cloaking if I want so my AM doesn’t know exactly how I’m making money. Your AM is your friend, but is also your competition’s friend. They can see exactly where all of your traffic comes from and you might not want that. Conversion tracking pixels are created in Google and e-mailed to my AM to place them on the offer’s site for me.

5. I build an adwords campaign starting with Google keywords. Then I write 10-15 ads for my website. I may steal ad copy from my competitors and paste it directly into about half of my ads. You can steal everything but the display url and destination url. Google will not penalize you for this in the vast majority of cases. There are rare cases where every ad on page 1 is identical and Google will crack down in that case. The rest of the ads, I’ll try to make as different as possible from each other. Some Upper Case, and some lower case. I try to think like a person who just searched for my #1 keyword. Are they lonely, fat, afraid of being ripped off? Are they old, young, male, female? If my target is a female, I’ll ask my wife to tell me what’s wrong with my ads. She’ll usually tell me to use an exclamation point! (Google only allows 1 exclamation point per ad)

Use completely different sales pitches in your ads. Generally, though line one is an attention getter, line 3 is a call to action (‘buy now’, or ‘find out more’ or ‘Get your free trial today!’). Use dynamic keyword insertion in some of your ads on every line including the display url. This is a test. If you can’t use dynamic keyword insertion because it doesn’t make sense, then your adgroup is too diverse. Put the ones that don’t make sense in a separate ad group(s) so that within each group, every keyword would make sense if you used dynamic keyword insertion in any of your ads. Ads should be set to ‘optimize’ to show better performing ads more often. Use negative keywords to prevent your ad from displaying when it won’t make money.

6. I start with a search only campaign, and will build a content campaign if the search campaign makes money. You can copy/paste it all with adwords editor, but need to write some new ads with better attention getters for content network. It’s a different thing to convert a searcher than it is to convert a surfer.

7. My adwords campaign will be set to exclude mobile (it defaults to include mobile) if my offer requires a credit card purchase. I also set it to display ads evenly over time until I know which times of day are profitable. Once conversion data by time of day is collected, I use accelerated delivery and advanced ad scheduling, or ad scheduling with conversion optimizer.

8. I monitor keyword quality scores and CTR’s immediately and every 1-2 hours on day 1. Less and less frequently as time passes. New campaigns need to be babied. Poor quality keywords should be deleted. Keywords with a CTR below 1% should be paused. Your ads and keywords are building account history at the same time, but with 10 ads, your keywords’ CTR’s are being dragged down by your underperforming ads at first. Once your best CTR ad is revealed, you may be able to turn some marginal CTR keywords back on. If they are below .5% CTR, I usually consider them dead and delete them. 1% is a ballpark defining point of success with a keyword, ad, adgroup, or campaign. It varies with the niche, but if you have lower than 1% CTR Google will be raising your minimum bids, giving your poorer positions and the impressions will stop coming. The campaign will die. If your CTR is above 1% your campaign will probably live and you can continue to optimize bids, scheduling, ads forever.

9. I observe whether or not Google search partners are profitable and turn it off if not.

10. With a maturing campaign, Google will be displaying 1 of your ads more than the rest based on CTR. You will want to choose the most profitable combination of highest CTR and highest converting. I often will try to combine features of my better CTR ads with my better converting ads. Eventually, you wind up with 1 ‘best’ ad. Then take that and do systematic split testing. Always have 2 ads running. Your ‘best’ ad and 1 which has only 1 small change from your best ad. At this point all crappy ads are paused. Leave them there if there is room so you can remember what didn’t work. Write a new ad where you change from caps to all lowercase, or just change one line to lowercase, or ad a question mark, or change one word to a synonim. Do this forever and review it after you have 100 click or enough data to seem definitive on the ‘new’ ad this week.

11. Read the e-mails from your affiliate manager. Sometimes offers are pulled, and you have to replace your offer with something similar. Sometimes they change policies on what traffic is allowed.

12. If you see an unexpected drop in conversions, look at the offer page to make sure it’s still there or they haven’t changed their prices or policies in a way that’s turning away customers. You may need to move on to another offer and be ready to do it fast. If you are on vacation, it’s OK to log in every day or two just to make sure that you are still making money. Pause any campaign that dove in the toilet until you get home and want to fix it. Lots of people are happy about their SEO skills, and if you’re good ad SEO, you can pay your mortgage. But if your good at paid advertising, you can pay off your mortgage.

Your comments are welcome!

I intend to make my blog more and more of a resource for affiliates and give free value with the goal that some will sign up for good hosting (about a $50-$125 commission) or one of my referral links. Many of you will get something (knowledge) for free, but that’s OK. There is always risk present where there is profit. The risk I take is empowering you to be my competition if you are not one of my referrals.

Affiliate marketing 1st month totals

dangerbrown — Fri, 01 May 2009 22:37:50 +0000

Report at the end of month 1 of affiliate marketing:

OK, here is where I stand. Unemployed and gotta feed my wife and 4 kids. Lost all income about 35 days ago, took a little while to get organized. Started my first campaign about 2 weeks ago.

Money spent:
Adwords $2329.82
Yahoo $58.35
Total money spent $2388.17

Money earned:
Hydra Network $2948.00
Neverblue $224.00
Adsense $79.70
Gross money earned $3251.70

Net earnings$863.53

I feel pretty good about this. I started a big campaign about 16 days ago, and another one about 8 days ago. I know I’ve made improvements to these campaigns, and expect their profitability to increase over the next 30 days. I have another campaign I’ll be starting in about 5-6 days. Things are looking pretty good.

I’ve pretty much already hit my initial goal to survive without getting a job. If I don’t do anything, these two campaigns provide enough for us to scrape by. We can scrape by on $1700/mo but need about $2500/mo to feel comfortable.

One more moderately successful campaign will do the trick and I think I’m on to it. Wish me luck.

Mid range goal is to make $10K/mo profit by end of August. I’m pretty confident I can do it. Follow my micro-updates @dangerbrown on Twitter.

See what happened during my 2nd month.

My dark little secret and a new plan.

dangerbrown — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 19:02:11 +0000

I haven’t been blogging much lately, but have no fear. I have been working on new campaigns and twittering about it regularly.

My secret:
OK, here is my dark little secret. From August 2008 to March 2009 I have been making a living with Adsense arbitrage. I was driving traffic with adwords to loans and insurance related sites with adsense on them. I was able to double my money to the tune of about $1800/mo average.

It was doomed:
My sites were within terms of service, had original articles, privacy policy, contact us, terms of service, exit links, etc., but were doomed. What I was doing was legal, and the way I did it was within Google’s terms of service. Although Google can’t make it against TOS without shooting themselves in the foot, they don’t really want people doing straight Adsense arbitrage. In the forums, nowadays, you’ll read that most people think Google arbitrage is impossible. It used to be super-easy. Unfortunately I wasn’t around for that. I started after most people had been put out of business forever.For the last few years, they have been making it more and more difficult to pull off. I’m actually pretty proud to have made an arbitrage living for 8 months.

Google Slap:
I knew they would slap my domains. A “slap” is a penalty received on a domain (landing page) which causes all your adwords keywords to show up as ‘poor quality’ and your minimum bids to be $5 to $10. Google doesn’t notify you when this happens. More about slaps later. I hoped it would be months or years down the road. But about March 10th, they slapped my lesser quality domain. Two weeks later they slapped my domain with better targetted adgroups. I was left with zero income, but I had one more Adsense direct deposit ($4418.60) due on April 26 or so. Oddly, March was a good month with $2500 profit.

Terror:
So here I am, unemployed with no income. All I have is a very strong set of adwords skills. And a reserve of about $4000 before I’ll have to get a job. I came up with a plan. I’d held off on CPA marketing, because I didn’t want to change anything in my Adwords account for fear of upsetting my working system. Didn’t want to add conversion tracking, or analytics. Didn’t want to draw the attention of an account review. It was all fear based. But I have a wife and 4 kids to take care of. You heard me right. 4 KIDS!!!! I gotta pay the bills. Homelessness is not an option.

The plan:
I know that I could probably take my arbitrage to the next level. I have some good ideas about what kind of landing page would work today. But it would be temporary. Google will raise the bar again, and it will eventually be impossible. I need a longer term solution. So I decided to do what I could with Adwords driven PPC/CPA affiliate marketing. The plan is to try to achieve a living before I have to get a job. Plan B is that if I have to get a job for a while, it will only be a stop-gap measure until my affiliate efforts produce a living. I should mention that I haven’t had a job for 5 years. I used to be a 911 dispatcher.

The sub-plan:
If I have money in my budget to spend, I’ll be working on new campaigns. Which is why you haven’t seen much action here yet. But if my budget is maxed out, I’ll be working on promoting my blog with the ultimate plan of having many affiliates sign up through my referral links. The network (not you) pays me 2-5% of what you make. I only profit from your efforts if you succeed. This can build a lifetime residual income. I will be making a newsletter only sent to people signed up underneath me. In this newsletter, I’ll share information about my marketing techniques that I won’t share with anyone. For instance, I’ll share exactly what offers I”m promoting. I’ll also work one on one with you for free. I will tell you things that no affiliate marketer would share with his competition. I will teach you to fish.

The Good News:

Good news 1.
I made campaign 1 in the health and beauty category which is doing pretty well. It is only about 10 days old and I’ve spent $1488.83 and received $2246 in conversions through Hydra. So I’ve made $757.17 in profit on campaign 1. My ROI (return on investment) will improve over time as account history is built up which provides information that can be acted upon.
Good news 2.
Due to taxes we paid in the first quarter of 2008 and having 4 kids, we got a tax return of $4378. Much better than expected. I always wait until April 15 to file to reduce chances of an audit. (Even though I don’t cheat on my taxes, an audit would be a big hassle.) We got our refund deposit on April 24, and now I’m spending it on Adwords.
Good news 3.
I built another campaign in the health and beauty category yesterday. I worked 18 hours almost solid. Just ask my wife. I built a new website and Adwords campaign to promote it. Turned it on at 1:30am. As of this moment, when I’d be happy to break even, I’ve spent $25.56 and it has $108 in conversions.

Why work 18 hours in one day?:
I pushed so hard yesterday because I knew if I got this running that any income made the last 3 days of this month would come back to me on about the 20th of May. So I can reinvest it again. If I spend money today, I get to spend it again in 3 weeks.

I’m not getting a job:
With my tax return I have about $5K to invest. I have two promising campaigns. Hydra owes me $2482 due in 3 weeks. It looks like I’m going to make it. I haven’t had a job for 5 years. Swore I wouldn’t get one again. And I think I’m going to be able to keep that promise to myself and my wife. She likes having me home. We are very much in love and nearly inseperable.

Basic adwords strategy

dangerbrown — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 16:54:03 +0000

With a new campaign, everything should be highly targeted. Small, tight keyword groups are the way to go. Your keyword should be found in your ad text, url, and webpage. Google has quality scores for keywords and relevency is important.

Writing ads:
If you don’t know what to write for an ad, do a Google search for your keyword. Look at the ads that come up. These are the ads which most likely have the highest CTR (click through rate) which is critical for adwords success. It may be frowned upon by some, but you can usually “borrow” the ad text from some of these successful ads. If there are trademarks you may have to avoid them. Use combinations and variations of the ideas you see on these top results. Make multiple ads for every ad group and make sure you have selected “Optimize: Show better-performing ads more often” for ad serving under “campaign settings”.

Bidding:
Now is the tough part. If you are in a competitive niche, and want your adgroup to be successful, you will probably have to run it at a loss for a little while. A time-honored strategy is to overpay for a little while and get your ads running in a good position, then to slowly lower your bid. Often your ad will be able to maintain it’s postition at the lower price.

Split testing:
During this process, your multiple ads should be selectively served by Google automatically. They will start serving your best ad more than all the rest. Once your best ad(s) have risen to the top, you may opt to pause most of the under-performing ads. (We’re looking at CTR here) Take your best ad and make some small change to it. For instance change your url from word caps to lowercase like this www.DangerBrown.com www.dangerbrown.com or the other way around. If you have narrowed it down to one ad, and want to speed up your split testing, you may choose to change “Optimize: Show better-performing ads more often” for ad serving under “campaign settings” to “Rotate: Show ads more evenly”. This will display your split tested ads 50/50. When it has become obvious which is the better performing ad, pause the weaker one, and make another small change to the best ad. It is adviseable to always be split testing your ad. Always be improving it.

Keywords:
Especially in a new adgroup, watch your keyword quality. Google rates keywords on a scale of 1 to 10 for quality. Your keywords quality scores and CTRs are averaged into your adgroup, campaign, and account quality scores. If you have any poor quality keywords they should be paused or deleted. Keyword CTR should be 1% or greater or it may start to count against you. Sort by impressions and if you have a keyword getting 1000′s of impressions with a CTR that is really low (below .5%) pause or delete it. Usually, these are poorly targetted words less likely to convert into sales anyway. If you have a great quality keyword with a high CTR or conversion rate, plug that keyword into the keyword tool to find more similar keywords to expand on that success.

Conversion tracking:
Utilize conversion tracking if appropriate to your marketing purpose. It may be possible that your best CTR keywords and ads are not the best converting. Use the same methods above to optimize for conversions instead of CTR. Usually a balance between the two is wise as lower CTR results in a lower price paid per click and hence a higher profitablity.