Brandon Adcock dot comMy Thoughts, Mostly on Direct Response Marketing

Sorry for the lack of blog posts recently, but I haven’t had anything I felt inspired to write about, and I’ve been working/traveling a lot.  Anyway, I wanted to give a big thank you to Azoogle, particularly Maggie and Mitch.  Azoogle was the very first Affiliate network I joined and they have taken care of me since day 1.  They have gone above and beyond what most networks do for their affiliates.  They’ve flew me to NYC for my Birthday, flew to see me and took me to a Hurricanes NHL playoff game, they sent me to the Playboy Mansion, not mention countless gifts/dinners/parties.  Basically, you’re stupid if you’re not working with Azoogle.

Just recently I moved to a new condo and when I told my AM at Azoogle (hi Maggie), she decided to send me some house warming presents.  Azoogle was kind enough to send me an LG Blu-ray player and an Epson 6100 projector for my new “movie theater”.  I made a little video below:

If you’re not working with them you should, they’ve never once failed to meet my expectations.  Heck, when I was in France my AM called me at 1am her time, 7am my time, to update me on an offer for on a media buy I was launching.

This post may seem completely obvious but few people can successfully implement it.  As I progress in my marketing career one of the things I become most protective over and work on the most are my traffic sources.  Even if someone copies your landing page and sells the same products as you, without a traffic source they have no sales.  This is why I worry more about being protective and territorial over traffic sources than I do landing pages and offers.

After you find traffic sources that work for your campaign, your goal should be to minimize competition and maximize exposure.  You want to find ways to keep your competitive out and scale your campaign to get maximum volume.  Here are some trips/techniques to start dominating your traffic sources

• Make multiple accounts.  On some self serve ad networks you can make multiple accounts and run your ads simultaneously, forcing out competition
• Out bid your competition.  If your ROI is very high, start bidding a little higher to get more volume and force competitors out
• Prebuy the adspace.  If you are buying reserved inventory and it is working out, start locking it down by purchasing more and more of it for future days.  I already have ad space purchased for June 2010.
• Ask for exclusivity.  When you find a place that works, say you will pay more, more frequently, or prepay if they don’t allow anyone else to advertise what you’re advertising with them

I always contend it is better to dominate one/a few traffic sources than run a little bit on every source you can find.  Play around with some ad platforms, get good at them, choose the ones you like, and then figure out the tricks to dominate them.  There are so many places to purchase ads right now, it is a matter of find what works for you and scaling.

This post can be applied to lots of different jobs and lifestyles, but it is mainly aimed at affiliates and business owners.

When I left my corporate job last year (6 days away from being 1 year to the day, not that I’m counting ), I did it for 3 reasons:

1. To Make significantly more money
2. To be my own boss and not deal with a corporate hierarchy/BS
3. To work less and on my own schedule

At this point in my life I have accomplished all 3 goals, but that wasn’t always the case.  When I first started, it took awhile to learn to make more money and in order to do it I was working longer hours, and at the time I was ok with that.  But as I learned more and my business grew, I learned how to work smarter and not work longer.  January 2009, right after Affiliate Summit West, is when I started doing this, and my earnings have increased dramatically every month since.

My old schedule consisted of me getting up around 9am, working all day, eating dinner and then working until 2-3am, sometimes longer.  My days of doing that are gone, in terms of affiliate marketing.  My current schedule is usually to wake up around 10-10:30am, get to the office in time to go to lunch and I am out by 6, and I do 1-2hrs of work outside of this office, tops.

The reason my schedule has changed so much and my earnings have gone up is because I started focusing on the most important/high volume tasks and less on every task that will make me money.  For instance:

• I’ve pretty much stopped doing SEO for affiliate sites. It takes up too much time that I could be spending on media buying or not working at all.  When in reality, the money you can make from SEO is peanuts compared to high volume media buying.  I don’t mean to piss of SEO people or say SEO isn’t a valuable/important task, because it is, I just choose no longer to focus on it given my current business model.
• I stopped running every offer.  I used to run 4-6 verticals at a time, now I focus on 1-2 and make them large.  Once I started doing this (I was a 1 man operation) I was able to scale my verticals much bigger than when I was trying to focus on tons of campaigns.  I contend it is better to be one of the top players in a niche instead of being a small to mid-size player in several. But to each their own.
• I started focusing on traffic sources that required less oversight/daily optimizations and could yield much higher sales volumes.  I decided that I would stop spending countless hours optimizing keywords in PPC campaigns or blocking sites in content campaigns, and I would focus on spending money with large ad networks where less attention was needed.  Yes I know I am leaving some money on the table, but I am ok with that.  I don’t have to earn every available dollar.
• I realized that you don’t win an award for working longer hours than the next guy.  No one gives a shit about your tweets that let the world know you’re working an all nighter, no one cares.  So why work long hours if you don’t have to?  Learn how to beat your competition through being smarter instead of working around the clock.
• I stopped doing so much competitive intelligence.  I used to make it my job of knowing who was running what offer, where they were running it, etc.  When I started focusing on my stuff more, I started to better.

These are just a few things that I started doing that have helped me to work less and earn more, allowing me to live the lifestyle that I ultimately wanted.  What are some things you do?

A couple days ago I did a podcast interview with Andrew Wee for his blog.  It is fairly long, like 45 minutes, but it goes over how I got my start, what I did before AM, how I work on campaigns, platforms I use, compliance, etc.  Hopefully someone will find it useful.

You can listen to the interview here.

I had a friend tell me not to post this because it was “too useful”, but I figured I would post it anyway.  Everyone needs a useful tip every now and then right?

One thing that most affiliates don’t do is manage the country redirects to offers on their side.  They rely on the network to redirect the traffic or they create seperate pages for different countries.  While this is an ok solution, it isn’t the best.  Often times people will be traveling abroad and want to buy, but are sent to the wrong offer because if their IP address.  Or sometimes affiliates aren’t monetizing international traffic at all.

Here is what I do to monetize international traffic:

I downloaded an geoip script from here off GeoPlugin.com.  I unzipped the script into a folder called “geo”.  This file will basically capture the users IP address and cross reference it to a database to determine what country they are then.

After this is done, I setup my redirects for the affiliate offers.  So your redirects would now look like:

<?php
// ccr.php - country code redirect
require_once(’/geo/geoplugin.class.php’);
$geoplugin = new geoPlugin();
$geoplugin->locate();
$country_code = $geoplugin->countryCode;

switch($country_code) {
case ‘US’:
header(’Location: http://www.yourdomain.com/usoffer.php’);
exit;
case ‘CA’:
header(’Location: http://www.yourdomain.com/caoffer.php’);
exit;
case ‘GB’:
header(’Location: http://www.yourdomain.com/gboffer.php’);
exit;
case ‘IE’:
header(’Location: http://www.yourdomain.com/irelandoffer.php’);
exit;
case ‘AU’:
header(’Location: http://www.yourdomain.com/australiaoffer.php’);
exit;
case ‘NZ’:
header(’Location: http://www.yourdomain.com/newzealandoffer.php’);
exit;
default: // exceptions
header(’Location: http://www.yourdomain.com/allelseoffer.php’);
exit;
}

?>

Basically what this redirect does is check the users IP, determines their country, then sends them to the appropriate redirect based on where you specified people from their country to go to.  By doing this, I can control which offer people from which country go to.  So if a top converting offer only takes US traffic, then I send the US people to that offer, then find the best CA offer and send CA traffic to it, and so on.  As you can see in the script, I identify specific countries which I receive the most traffic from, then I use a final “catch all” redirect which I send users to if an offer accepts “any country”.

By using a method like this, you will prevent more broken links when a user can’t access an offer, you have more control over where users go, you will effectively monetize more users, and make more money.  Hope this helps.

It’s been awhile since I posted something useful, so I thought I would post how I run/optimize my Google Content campaigns.  Personally, I love Google Content, I would run it almost always over Search, if I had to choose.  I haven’t been running it recently, just because I have been focusing on media buys.  However, Google Content is a great source for traffic, usually cheap, when you can get it.

There are 2 kinds of Google Content campaigns, keywords and placements.  This post will focus soley on keyword campaigns.

Campaign Structure

As an example, I will use “Golf Clubs” as the product I am promoting.  I start by creating a content campaign, with search turned off, and choose 1 country.  I like to make countries their own campaigns for tracking purposes.  I make an initial ad group with 50-75 keywords around a loosely related topic like “golf clubs”.  Then I write 2-3 text ads and upload 2 image ad variations in the standard ad sizes.  If you are using tracking/propser 202 make sure to use the {keyword} variable at the end of your URLs.  After this ad group is done, I’d make another ad group for Putters and repeat the ad types.

Bidding

I normally bid very high initially.  This way I am getting impressions, clicks, and developing a history.  After a few days your CPCs will start to fall and you can continue to make optimizations.

Focus on CTR

Your ad CTR is pretty much the biggest factor on what your CPC’s will be.  You need to work on getting your ad CTR as high as possible.  This means writing good, original text ads and making quality image ads.  If you copy everyone’s text/image ads, your CTR will be low or eventually fall off.  You also need to block low CTR sites, which we will get into in a minute.

Landing Page Tweaks

In terms of landing page optimizations for Google Content, you need to have original text or you will get slapped quickly, I try not to use Wordpress for Google Content as I find I usually get slapped faster, but this isn’t always the case for everyone.  In the footer you should have links for the Sitemap, About, Terms, Privacy, and articles pages.  I usually build back links to the site as well before I launch the campaign.  I find if I treat the site like I am going to “SEO it”, it performs much better in Google Content.

Eliminate Underperforming Keywords and Sites

This is the biggest thing for making a campaign successful.  I usually try to let a campaign run for 3-5 days before I start making tweaks.  After about 5 days I start to elimate keywords that aren’t doing well, as well as blocking sites that are performing poorly.  If you use tracking/prosper202 and out the {keyword} variable in your destination URL, then you should be able to track performance of your content keywords.  If you have a keyword that is flat out tanking, eliminate it.  Then run a placement report so it shows by domain, then sort by CTR and elimate all the domains with low CTR.  You are effectively raising your CTR by doing this which will lower your CPC’s and raise your quality score.  I usually eliminate anything under .1% unless it is converting very well.  Also, if you have placements that are not converting well, eliminate them too at this time.

I almost always start my campaigns by blocking sites like gmail.com, myspace.com, and ezinearticles.com.  They tend to really bring you down.  Once you start eliminating sites, you will see a nice drop in CPCs.  I usually end up with several hundred blocked domains in a campaign after a few weeks.

All in all, that is pretty much what I do for content campaigns.  I find the content network to be pretty easy to run/optimize if I am not getting slapped around.

This may sound simple and it is, but it seems to me that learning how and when to take risks is the biggest separator between unsuccessful and successful people.  Very few people are successful in life that don’t take risks.  Me personally, I am naturally risk averse when it comes to money/business.  I don’t always play it safe, but I am rarely the one that goes for the home run.  I have found this to be good and bad.

After going to Ad Tech in San Francisco, I realized that the biggest difference between myself and the affiliates that are larger than me, is not that they know more or have access to information I don’t have, it is that at some point they took some big risks.  Now I am not an advocate of taking risks that don’t make sense, but there are times when they do make sense.  Whether it is doing a very large media buy, doing a homepage takeover, starting your own product, or taking heavy losses on a PPC campaign to break into a market, there are times when you have to take risks.  Assuming your risks make sense, the rewards can be huge.

In regards to affiliate marketing, you can’t just immediately take risks when you start.  You need to learn the ropes, save a little cash, get a feel for what works, then you can take some risks.  There comes a point in time when in order to reach the next level, to be the best, you have to start signing insertion orders for $1M, $2M, or more.  Right now in affiliate marketing, unless you’re doing mid to high six figures a day, you’re really not one of the biggest players.  The way these guys do it is by taking risks and spending a BUTTLOAD of money each day on ads.

So if you want to be average or middle of the road then it’s fine to play it safe, but if you want to be the best or in the top tier, you eventually have to start going for the home runs and hope they work out.

I am going to preface this post by saying 2 things.  I’ve had good success doing small and mid 6 figure buys, but I’m not the best at media buying.  Secondly, when I say media buys, I mean purchasing ad space through a network or large site, on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) or dCPM (dynamic cpm) basis.  I do not consider Facebook, Adsonar, Adsdaq, Pulse360, etc. to be media buying for this post.

After having spent a lot of money doing media buys, i’ve learned a few things:

• Rates are almost always negotiable.  Either sign a larger IO or offer to prepay and you will almost always get a lower rate.  Lower CPM pricing can make or break a media buy
• Just cause you see someone’s ad in a media buy doesn’t mean it is profitable.  I make this mistake often.  There are lots of variables as to whether you can make it profitable such as their CPM cost, their payout, but also they could also be running negative.
• Know you’re target market before you do a media buy.  You should know your target demographics before you contact the network/site.  Don’t rely on your rep to tell you what ages to target, often they just want to make the sale.
• Test the offer on Facebook first.  I have found running an offer on Facebook first gives me a great idea if the landing page is good and what ages to target.  Better to learn this info on Facebook than during a 6 figure buy.
• Make sure you know when you’re out clause is.  Ask upfront before you sign the IO, you never want to get stuck in a bad buy you can’t get out of.
• I’ve never had success with Right Media.  I have found on multiple buys that the traffic quality on Right Media is bad.  I would just stay away from it.  Yahoo properties and their Comscore 250 are a different story, but smaller right media sites tend to be bad.
• Don’t expect every buy to have ridiculous ROI or be wildly successful.  My first buy tanked.  My second buy tanked (lost like 25k), my 3rd buy rocked (like 400% roi), but every other one has usually been modest 10-25% roi.  When doing big media buys, you usually have smaller margins and make up for them with volume (there are exceptions to this obviously).
• Do not sign an IO if you don’t feel comfortable with it.  Trust your instincts, typically you will know more about your offer/landing page than your ad sales rep.  If you don’t like the targeting, make them change it.  If you really think the CPM price is too high, don’t sign it.  Bottom line is don’t let someone badger you into signing an IO if you don’t want to.  It will rarely ever work out in your benefit.

That’s just a couple of tips for media buying that i’ve learned from successes and failures.  Also, don’t think you have to do media buys to be big.  I know really big affiliates who never do media buys, but I also know guys who almost only do media buys.  There are tons of traffic sources out there, some will work for you, some won’t.

It will inevitably happen at some point, your tracking server will go down.  It could be anything from you accidentally shutting it off, blocking traffic, data center loses power, who knows.  But the good thing is that there is a very simply trick that will save you a lot of down time.  When you setup the prosper202/tracking 202 redirects, they will look something like:

<?php

// ——————————————————————-
//
// Tracking202 PHP Redirection, created on Sun Feb, 2009
//
// This PHP code is to be used for the following landing page.
// http://youraffiliatedomain.com
//
// ——————————————————————-

if (isset($_COOKIE['tracking202outbound'])) {
$tracking202outbound = $_COOKIE['tracking202outbound'];
} else {
$tracking202outbound = ‘http://www.yourtrackingdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/lp.php?lpip=232′;
}

header(’location: ‘.$tracking202outbound);

?>

That is the standard redirect prosper will spit out to you.  It basically translates to, if the user has cookies enabled, call the tracking domain and subid from the cookie.  If they don’t have cookies enabled, here is the direct link to the tracking domain redirect.

Here is the real simple fix, instead of using your tracking domain link in the “$tracking202outbound = ” field, but in your direct affiliate link at the network of the offer.  If your tracking domain is down, PHP won’t execute the redirect from the cookie, so it will redirect to whats in the “$tracking202outbound = ” field.  You might as well put your affiliate link there anyway, because if the user doesn’t have cookies enabled, their subID won’t be tracked.

Hope this made sense, because it has saved me a lot of headache.  I edit all of my redirects to do this.

It has been awhile since I posted, so I thought I would post something useful.  I may not do the biggest volume on an offer, but one thing I try to pride myself on is being extremely efficient with the traffic I am getting.   There are several small tweaks and tricks I have used, some I will share, some I won’t, that help to effectively monetize my traffic better than others.  Here are a few of them.

Non-Cookied Users

Splitting out traffic for non-cookie enabled users.  I have received a couple questions from people asking me to elaborate on this so I will.  Many networks use a platform called directrack (Copeac, MarketLeverage, etc..), this platform uses cookies to track sales. If a user does not have cookies enabled, their sales will not be counted.  A competitor to Directack, a platform called Hitpath, does not use cookies to track.  Currently Eads uses this, and Ads4Dough and started the transition over to this network.  What I do is use a php script to check to see if a user has cookies enabled, then I send the traffic to my primary network of choice for that offer, if the user does not have cookies I sent the user to the offer at Eads or Ads4Dough.  I normally see about 10-15% of my leads come through as non cookied users.

Exit Pops

Exit pops are starting to become increasingly popular.  Basically, if your bounce rate is 60%, then you are not monetizing 60% of your traffic.  What many people have started to do is use javascript to pop up a window when a user tries to close the window or go back, that directs them to another page, which is usually straight to the offer.  Most people report seeing a lift of 10-20% when doing this.  I use it on some pages but not all.  One thing to remember is that many PPC platforms do not like this and can penalize pages.  I typically will not run this on a page that im running paid search.

Landing Page Margins & Font Sizes

When tweaking a landing page, one of the most important metrics is the CTR from the landing page to the offer.  You want to get it as high as possible, while still properly selling the user on the product/service.  One of the biggest ways to increase CTR is to bring the affiliate link/button above the fold for the user, usually the higher the better.  One thing I noticed when I started running blog style pages, especially with wordpress, is that many themes put most of the links below the fold for users.  Most wordpress themes lose a lot of valuable real estate to excessive margins, padding, line spacing, and font size.  When I was running blog style Acai landing pages last year, one of the biggest things that helped me was to edit my wordpress theme.  I decreased line spacing between unordered lists and header tags.  I reduced paddings and font sizes, just a little bit.  It effectively made my headers a little smaller, the pages a little wider, and most importantly, it brought my pictures and links above the fold.  I saw huge CTR jumps after implementing these changes.

Chase just announced this morning that they will be “pausing indefinitely” their credit card affiliate program.  This is pretty big news considering it is coming on the heels of American Express announcing the cancellation of its business card affiliate program.

This is pretty interesting because it is leaving affiliates with less cards to promote, not to mention wondering what company will pull their products next.  Capital One? Citi?  If another major issuer leaves the market, credit card affiliates could take a huge hit, even more so than they have been seeing over the last 3 months.

As universal search becomes increasingly integrated with the different offerings of each search engine, top ranking real estate spots will only become more difficult to achieve. It was just a few years ago, that websites only competed with other websites for top rankings, that’s not the case anymore. Now that pictures, videos, news, and soon to be products (not to mention 1 spot guaranteed to Wikipedia) are included, companies and sites must make use of every type of medium they can to achieve rankings.

Eventually Google Product Search (formerly known as Froogle) will be a fully integrated part of the search results. Currently product search is accessible in ways pointed out by the screenshot below.

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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.

Here is my attempt at a recap on making the #1 article across all sections on Digg, on August 17th. I wish I had been able to do this sooner, but I have been terribly busy at work, not to mention in Michigan watching my Mountaineers beat the Wolverines. I’ll talk more about that in another post.

This is the picture that made #1:

Quick Facts on my Digg Post here. These numbers are total numbers to date starting from the day it was submitted to Digg, August 16th.

92,470 Pageviews and 81,224 Unique Views (just for the How to get Fired from Dairy Queen Picture)

2:23 Average Time on Page (I am surprised it was this high)

Ever wonder what a #1 article on Digg looks like in terms of analytics? Here is what my Google Analytics looks like:

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A colleague of mine passed me this study in an email today, I am surprised that I have not seen it before. Nonetheless, it is a very interesting find that anyone in the Search industry should read.

Cornell University did a study of 397 search queries to determine eye tracking patterns for Google results. They used undergraduates students to perform searches in areas related to movies, travel, music, politics, local, and trivia. The picture below is a representation of the results they found.

While this study only covers organic/natural results, not paid, and does not include anything past the first page, I don’t think it would be an outlandish assumption to say that these trends also hold true for those two areas as well. It is obvious from this heatmap image, how important rankings are and specifically being “above the fold”. I would be very interested to see Cornell repeat this study after a few years and see if there is a pattern change of how users look at search results. Maybe users would become accustomed to seeing “spammy” results at the top of the page for certain queries and start to naturally shift focus to lower results. Or, the results could be similar. Anyway, its food for thought.

Link to original study