Brandon Adcock dot comMy Thoughts, Mostly on Direct Response Marketing

I haven’t posted anything in awhile because I have been really busy and haven’t felt too inspired to share anything.  However, I was sharing this story with someone the other week and thought it might be something other people would find useful. The actual campaign is also no longer relevant so I feel ok to share it.

A year ago, almost to the week, I was just starting to run this display campaign for Stretch Mark cream.  As I used to do, the first thing I did was put up a Google content campaign related to stretch marks.  Pretty much right off the bat it was doing a few hundred sales a day, so I knew the campaign had a lot of potential.  A few days after the campaign launched I started digging into the stats only to see I was getting a lot of sales from articles talking about the news of Chris Brown beating Rhianna (I am really not kidding).

At first I laughed and thought it was odd, but then I thought there had to be a reason this was happening.  After looking through all the articles related to the incident, most we’re coming from Hip-hop sites that I was not actively targeting.  The majority of the people reading these sites were African Americans.  I had never thought previously about actively targeting black women for this campaign, but it seemed like it could work.

Taking the idea of targeting Black Women specifically because of my referral data, I created a quick content campaign that was full of placements geared toward black women.  I found a lot of sites that I didn’t know about (which is always great) and realized that many of them were a lot larger than I realized.  After the first day or so it stood out that Black Planet could be a huge source for this campaign.  Taking my Google content campaign data, I called Black Planet and signed an IO to target women ~25 and over (I don’t quite remember) and it did very well.

Point of the story is that if you pay attention to your traffic and really look for patterns, you can learn to infer demographic data about your sales patterns without forcing customers to give the data to you.  As you’re scaling campaigns, look for patterns and ways your can use those patterns to scale the campaign even further.

I posted this info several months ago in a thread on WickedFire, but I forgot to post it on my blog.  In case you missed it before, here are a few tips that have really helped me over the last year to grow and manage my business.  As affiliates, we often times only look at campaigns and offers, but there are many more aspects that we need to be involved in when we view our affiliate businesses as traditional businesses.

• Get a CPA, don’t be cheap. You get what you pay for and a good one will pay for it’s self very quickly.
• Stop using a debit card immediately. Get a good credit card, I use the Amex Plum that has 2% cash back. After a little history with them you can usually charge about 200-300k before they make you pay it down. This gives me a lot of float and protection you don’t get with a debit card. When you start doing bigger numbers, the cash back with this card can be more than enough to live off of each month.
• I have tried to stop using a regular checking account and move to brokerage account for all my banking. I use Schwab, but others are good too. I do all my banking straight out of my tax free municipal bonds sweep account. I earn interest on my savings not to mention since i am doing all my checking from this, I earn money off my weekly wires until it is time to pay off the credit card. Many credit cards end up having a float period of 35-60 days. That can be a lot of tax free interest money
• Stop paying wire fees at your bank. Schwab has no wires and most banks don’t either if you keep enough cash in the bank. Bank of America doesn’t charge wire fees on their preferred business checking with only requires a avg monthly balance of 25k. Wire fees can add up, stop paying for them.
• Negotiate your media buys. Almost any rate can be negotiated. I’ve gotten as much as 50% rates by prepaying or signing a larger IO. Say you’ll do 100k if they give you break. Get a 48hr out clause, if the traffic sucks, bail. If it doesn’t, you got a cheap rate.
• Ask Google for credits. I can usually get refunds of $500/m by submitting click fraud info too Google and they will almost always credit me. They do click adjustments, but it doesn’t always catch everything. Audit your traffic and email their quality people if you find lots hits from multiple ip’s or a small block of IPs
• Find short terms investment options. There are some short term bonds, cd’s, etc… that you can put cash in before you need to pay your credit card. Lets say you have a card that the billing cycle is 30 days and they give you 30 days to pay, that’s a 60 day float. You could invest some or most of your advertising costs into a short term CD before you need to pay off your credit card.
• Don’t try and be a baller, save your money. Bank hard now, save, and then live the rest of your life off the interest your savings earns. This means that you should try and live below your means.  It’s ok to reward yourself, just don’t do it all the time and don’t do it when you can’t afford to.

Just a few things that might help you save or make more with the money you have.  Anyone else have other tips that have helped them?

If you’ve been in the affiliate industry in the last year or more, you know about the Tracking202 team.  Whether you are using their tracking202 platform, the self-hosted prosper202 (like I am), or even their various world proxies, almost everyone in the affiliate game is using one of their services.

In the last couple of days they announced the newest addition to their line of services, the Revolution202 Affiliate Network.  While I generally think that the last thing the Affiliate Industry needs is a new network, they actually managed to create a new network that brings offers and services that other networks don’t have.  Stephen Truong, one of the co-founders was nice enough to chat with me yesterday on the phone about their new network and to approve my application.  After talking with him for a bit, these are a few major highlights and services that will be offered with Revolution202:

• They will not be brokering out their offers and taking brokered offers
• Will have both CPA and CPS offers available
• Free coupons to Google, Myspace, Facebook etc for their affiliates
• Instant qualification for Yahoo Gold
• Custom transparent back end that will allow affiliates to see their lead quality, charge backs, cancellations, etc. on the offers that they are running
• They will also be offering their paid services like tracking202 Pro and the future full release of Stats202 for free to their affiliates who push volume
• Not to mention a few extras I can’t talk about yet

Like I said, I’ve already signed up with Revolution202, and you should too.  There are definitely some big things coming their way.  Not to mention, if it wasn’t for their services like Prosper202, there is no way I would have been successful as I have been with my campaign.  I think most anyone who uses it could agree as well.

I read this somewhere a while a back, but I don’t remember where, so I’m just going to post my own rendition.  If you use Prosper202 or Tracking202 for your affiliate tracking software you’re well aware of the tracking string that is added to your URLS, it usually looks something like “?t202id=32254&t202kw=”.  While this part of the URL is really important since it will track everything, it is also ugly for users and can also giveaway info about your campaign to other affiliates.  There is a way to strip all this out and still have it track correctly.

What you have to do is setup a new redirect file, name it something like redirect.php or tracking.php and inside of this file put this html code:

<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<script src=”http://yourtrackingdomain/tracking202/static/landing.php?lpip=1303″ type=”text/javascript”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”> window.location=’http://www.clean-url-users-go-to.com’;</script>
</body>
</html>

After you’ve set this file up and uploaded, you take your orginal P202 tracking string, “?t202id=32254&t202kw=” and add it to the end of this newly created redirect file to look something like http://www.yourdomain.com/redirect.php?t202id=32254&t202kw=.  Now what you’ve done is send the user to this redirect file, which contains your Prosper202 landing page javascript to track the user (which will track against the URL parameters you added), counted the user in Prosper because the javascript was triggered, then your users will be sent to a clean URL.  On this clean URL you will still use your outbound Prosper PHP redirects as normal and it will still count your click throughs.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, Azoogle is having at big contest, the winners get a trip to the Playboy Mansion.  You can get more details here.  I honestly believe this is the best contest any affiliate network has offered to date.

Generally speaking, when a network has a contest, the prizes they give away are usually items I would have bought already I wanted it.  Therefore, I either already have or I am not interested in it, making me not motivated to participate in the contest.  Which is exactly what Azoogle is not doing.  The 25 winners get a free trip to LA and get to party at the playboy mansion.  Odds are, you would not ordinarily be able to do this and haven’t done it already

To make things better, their rules actually benefit newer affiliates and affiliates that are new to their network, more than it is large affiliates.  The winners are determined based on incremental revneue for February, March, and April, over the 3 previous months.  So if you never sent them a lead in the previous 3 months, you chances are better than say, Jonathan Volk, who sends them 6 figures each month.

If you’re a new affiliate, now is the time to step your game up, you can win this contest.  The great thing about Affiliate Marketing, is that any affiliate can really blow up and become a super affiliate overnight.  If you haven’t signed up with Azoogle you’re missing out.  You can sign up here, and ask for Maggie as your AM because she is awesome!

The other day I published my Facebook cloaking script. Well, I actually use two, since I use each for a different reason. Here is the second one I use, they both cloak the same people, but you can use them in different ways, or on different files. For example, if I was using a jump file, then I would use the script I posted before, but this one below you can just paste into the head of the landing page or if it is Wordpress into the header file or index.php file.

<?
$referrer = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
if (preg_match(”/intern.facebook.com/”,$referrer)) {
header(’Location: http://www.urlforfacebooktosee.com/’);
} elseif (preg_match(”/dev.facebook.com/”,$referrer)) {
header(’Location: http://www.urlforfacebooktosee.com/’);
};
?>

The title of this article says it all. Most everyone knows the order of market share for search engines, even people who are not in the industry. We all know that in terms of search volume Google is 1, Yahoo is 2, and Microsoft is 3. According to my Microsoft rep, their market share is about 13.6%. I believe she said they use comScore data and that comScore rates them slightly lower than others.

This is what I was shown as accurate historical market share for Microsoft. I will say that from what I have heard from Microsoft, they are in online advertising for the long haul. They have many new things coming out and I am really intrigued by several of them. They should continue to see a rise in market share from current changes, but they have yet to integrate the cornerstone of their company, software. I mean Jesus (not literally), the possibilities are endless if they can integrate it properly.

If Live search can be correctly and cleanly integrated into Office, hell just Word alone, it would be a huge boost for them. Can you image the ability to select a portion of text in your word document, right click, and hit search. It would then interface directly into Live’s search results and provide results for the text you selected. That is just one option for implementation, even just a search box in the toolbar area would be a huge improvement for them. I wonder why something like this wasn’t included in the release of office 2007?

Now obviously, I have not taken into account legal ramifications of bundling search in with Microsoft’s products. I am not a legal expert, or really even that knowledgeable about monopoly laws, but I am sure Microsoft could find a way around them. It seems to me that the next large battlefield for search juggernauts will be search integration.

I read this article last month and thought it was on point as it discusses 10 marketing and sales tips from strippers. Funny concept too. Its a shame they don’t teach stuff like this in school. Well these tips, and stripping too I guess. Actually, that is part of a new prostitution major at a school in New Zealand. Enjoy!

This article is going to tell you how my company dropped their CPC for branded terms by 50%. Who wouldn’t want to do that? Keep reading.

Before I go on any further, let me clarify for anyone who might be slightly confused when I refer to branded terms, I am referring to search terms with some version of a company’s brand name in it. As a little background, I recently came on board at a Fortune 50 retailer to do SEM work for them. They have been having some internal discussion about whether or not they should be advertising on branded terms because upper management thinks it is cannibalizing organic results. Thats another article I will be posting, the findings from our experiment of Organic cannibalization from Paid Search. Anyway, we see a very high CTR, conversion rate, and ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) for our branded terms, but our CPCs were in the high teens and it was costing a lot.

When thinking about the Paid Ad keywords, it can be thought of just like typical supply and demand. The more players bidding on a keyword the higher the CPCs will be. Because of this, branded terms tend to cost less than others. Have you ever thought you might be driving up your own ad cost? That is exactly what we found with my company. Our brand is very large and so is our paid advertising budget. We spend millions a year on paid search. There was a theory that since we were such a large player for purchasing our branded terms that we might be bidding up our own prices, so to speak. A test was done and our max CPC was reduced to what our average CPC cost was. After this was done, we saw a drop of several cents in CPC price. Then, after we lowered it to the average CPC, it was lowered roughly another 20%. All the while, watching to make sure none of our terms went inactive for search, thus indicating we had gone to low. After lowering it the second time, we had successfully cut our CPC by nearly 50% and were seeing single digit CPC.

To pull it all back together in case my train of thought was off, we realized that our brand power was quite large and that we could lower our branded CPC by simply lowering our bids. I thought the findings were pretty darn interesting. Not to mention the lower CPC allowed us to realize a higher ROAS.

Anyone else seen this before? Also as a disclaimer, I am not taking credit for these results, I actually started a few days after the theory was put in to effect. I just thought I would share our findings.