Brandon Adcock dot comMy Thoughts, Mostly on Direct Response Marketing

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.

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.

2 days ago, I logged into my Google MCC and noticed that an old Adwords account of mine, which I had not used in months, suddenly had clicks/charges showing. I thought it was funny so I went into the account to see what had accrued charges, figuring that somehow an old campaign came unpaused. What I found was not the case. Someone had hacked my password (I checked, I had no malware/keyloggers on my computer, nor had I been phished) and created a campaign, disguised to look like my others, for cheap airline tickets. I couldn’t believe it.

To make matters worse, it was a really good campaign. The ad groups were tightly themed around certain airline ticket modifiers, and they had multiple ads using DKI. I was actually rather impressed by the layout/structure of the campaign. Luckily I caught the campaign within a few hours of it going live because the hackers had set a daily budget of 4k.

After researching Adswords accounts being hacked, it apparently seems like a common problem. Not to mention that these campaigns always seem to be airline tickets or ringtones (go figure). I submitted a ticket to Google, they were very response and will void the charges to my account.

Moral of the story is, check your adwords accounts often (even old ones), watch out for malware and adwords phishing sites, and change your password semi-regularly. The damage wasn’t bad, but it could have been much worse.

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.