Brandon Adcock dot comMy Thoughts, Mostly on Direct Response Marketing

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.

About 6 months ago I left my cushy corporate search marketing job at a fortune 50 retailer to do AM fulltime.  When I quite, I had no real campaigns setup, only ideas, confidence, and a blog that was making enough to pay the rent/eat.  Shortly after I quit my job, I was dropped from the affiliate program that was my main earner for the blog.  I was pretty much left stunned and confused.  I spent a few days being pissed off and worried, then i just decided to put up or shut up.  I knew that I was very good at search marketing and that all I needed to do was parlay that into different affiliate offers, people were making big money so I knew that I could too.

Flash forward 6 months later and I am incredibly glad I quit my job, by far the best decision I have ever made.  Not only the best decision financially, but personaly as well.  When I was at my job and wanted to test new traffic sources, I would have to write something up to justify it and then request approval.  Now, I just do it.  I used to have to be at the office at 8, now I sleep till 11.  I used to have 3 or 4 levels of management, now i’m my own boss.

Being completely in charge has tought me a lot.  Some of the biggest things are:

• My level of effort as an affiliate is almost directly proportional to my revenue.  The more I work, the more I make.  It’s a great feeling, whereas my pay at my old job was always the same, no matter how hard or long I worked.
• Test everything.  If you find a new traffic source, test it.  I am testing out networks I never heard of 6 months ago and many of them are great
• Diversify your offers.  Don’t put all your eggs into one basket, because if an offer or niche gets cut, you don’t want to be SOL (i.e. credit cards).
• I did my first media buy, but make sure you have an out clause.  You don’t want to get burned from shitty traffic and not be able to pull out.  Also, make sure there is a designated spend pattern, don’t let a network jack spending up in the final days just to complete the IO.  If you had asked me 6 months ago if I thought I would be doing 5 or 6 figure media buys, I would have laughed in your face.
• Never be the last one in or out of a niche.  I really learned this over the last 3 months with Acai.  Get in hot niche’s early before margins dry up and the market gets saturated, and get out before too much heat is on it or margins get ridiculously slim.
• Google Content network can be awesome when done right.  When I was at my corporate job we never used the content network, I always read and was told that it was terrible traffic.  Was that ever wrong.
• Be efficient with your traffic.  If 70% of your traffic leaves, do something with it.  Send them to another landing page, or directly to the offer when they try to exit.  Upsell your customers.  Many times there are offers that can compliment the one you’re running, why pay for traffic to get a user to complete 1 action, when you can get them to complete 2 or 3.  Also, don’t send non-cookie enabled users to cookie only tracking networks, their leads won’t count.  Being efficient with your traffic gives you a huge edge over the competition.
• Find individuals you can trust and bounce ideas off of.  I’ve been lucky to become friends with 5 or 6 other large affiliates and it has really helped me. In the sense of sharing ideas, getting someone else’s perspective, ethics check, coding help, but also to realize that everyone has good and bad days.
• But the biggest thing I learned is to believe in yourself.  If you honestly think you can do it, you can and will.  Everyone goes through periods of doubt, i’ve had great days where i felt like I won the lottery with a campaign, and i’ve had terrible days where I couldn’t believe I lost several $k on a campaign.  But at the end of the day, believe in yourself and your abilities.

Well, Affiliate Summit West 2009 is just a few days, and i’m slated to fly into Vegas Saturday night.  The conference was gracious enough to give me a press pass so I will attending some of the sessions and blogging about some of what I hear.

I am really looking forward to this event for networking, trying to pick up a few tips, meet some friends, and of course go to some parties.  I’d love to meet up with people, so if you’re going hit me up on twitter or something and we can get a drink.  I’ll definitely be making my rounds, i’ll be at the network parties for advaliant, azoogle, copeac, and CX, and the WickedFire meetup on Saturday night.  So if you’re going to be there, say hey.

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.

I haven’t posted much recently because I have been trying to keep my nose to grind.  Not to mention, there is so much acai drama going on, it could keep anyone busy.

Last week, out of the blue, I was assigned a Facebook account rep (what up dude, if you’re reading, sorry about the cloaking post - swear I don’t do it).  At first I was really skeptical of what he could offer me, aside from being able to call him when I need big limit increases, which he did.  After talking with him on the phone today I learned SO MUCH about Facebook and he was an awesome guy.  It was actually pretty amazing everything he told me.  I am not going to share it all, I got to keep some to myself but here are some of the big highlights I learned from him:

• Contrary to popular belief, Facebook does not use interns to approve ads.  They have full time employees (yes I am sure it must suck) who approve ads and also double as customer service.
• When you see intern.facebook.com show up in logs during reviews, it stands for internal not as in an intern
• Facebook does pace your campaigns during the day and it paces on campaign limit.  So he suggested that I raise my campaign limits real high to like 20k/day so that it would show more ad impressions, instead of pacing it to a lower limit.
• If you want a big boy daily spend limit, they like for you to have a debit card associated to the account.  I was informed there are quite often large charges that get bounced, so if you attach a debit card as a back up, it can help to get large limit bumps.  I added one and they were quick to bump me pretty high.
• Using keywords can really help, even for broad demo’s.  He really stressed that I should try using keywords more than I do, said a lot of people don’t use them and they can make a big difference.
• Another suggestion was to really break out ads by city/state and call out that city/state in ads.  I’m probably not going to do it because I am lazy, but he said a lot of people see CTR boosts when doing this.

If anyone needs/wants a rep and spends decent coin on facebook, he said I could pass his info to a few people.  Just leave a comment here with your real email and I will get in touch with you.

I just recently picked up a dedicated from The Planet, they were having a “blowout sale”.  I got what I think was the best deal I could find.  The server is a dual Xeon 2.8, 2gigs ram, dual 73gb scsi’s, 100 uplink for $139/month.  From what I hear, this is a $200+/month server normally.  So far I have been very happy at The Planet, I just need to learn more about administrating a server.  I know very little about this stuff.  My friends at 3tailer recently got a server at The Planet too and they like it a lot.  Here is there review of The Planet (their server and service).

I think the sale is over, but you should go check, might find a good deal or two.

Surprisingly, this is going to be my first conference related to internet marketing, and i’m paying for it.  I can’t believe I never got to go to one when I was in-house, but that shows you how tight big companies are with their money.

I am going to be headed to Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas, January 11-13th.  I am thinking I will go down a day early and leave the day after, but I am not sure yet.  I do actually have a full pass for this event, so I will be blogging about most of the sessions, particular Nickycakes’ session which I hear is on how to absorb mypace losses with a shamwow.

Anyone else going?  If you are let me know, we should meet up.  I am sure I will be tweeting info while I am there.  You can follow me on twitter if you want.  I am really looking forward to some of the network parties, I hear it is the place to be.  Copeac, don’t let me down!

Yesterday afternoon I received an email from the Director of Myspace’s new self-serve ad platform, asking if I would be interested in providing feedback on their beta platform. Needless to say, I jumped at the chance considering I’m spending thousands of dollars there, and there are definite changes that can be made to improve it.

We chatted for awhile today and he was a very nice guy. It seems Myspace is genuinely looking for feedback to make their product better, especially in regards to how it compares to Facebook. We spoke for about 45 minutes and these are the major points I gave to him:

• Add an ad scheduling function - would make a key differentiator from Facebook
• Increase session login time - I’m sick of it making me re-login (he said it was set at 15min)
• Examine how they count clicks - they need to not count repeated clicks by a user within seconds of the previous - Myspace currently reports 10-20% more clicks than my analytics report
• CPC’s need to be tied to CTR and not static.  I gave him examples of how Facebook and Google reward high CTRs with lower CPCs.
• Reporting needs to be closer to real time.  There is a too much of a delay in reporting
• Add toggle feature on reporting to show in EST & CST instead of just pacific
• Add ability to delete ads (he said they were already on it)
• Allow ads to be filtered, sorted, and put into groups
• Ability to receive impressions faster - sometimes the initial impression volume Myspace throws at an ad is very small
• Remove 10k ad max spend, more annoying than anything
• Add an option for no end date on an ad
• After unpausing an ad, impressions need to come sooner.  Facebook is within minutes.
• Allow for adding multiple credit cards so they don’t ban your account when it is denied once
• Open up ad platform to advertise in Canada, UK, and Australia (he said they were looking at it)

I threw a lot at him but that was the bulk of it.  He seemed extremely interested in the ad scheduling feature and I even layed out for him how it could look and work.  I really wouldn’t be surprised to see them add this.  It seems that the ability to delete ads is extremely immeninate and should be available soon.  He also discussed with me that they will probably be offering account managers (i.e. available by phone) to the larger spenders.  All in all, I am extremely glad I had the call with him.    They have a good platform so far, but there are a lot of things they could add to make it better.

I think they were asking feedback from their big spenders, so if you get the chance I would do so.  One word of caution though, they do pull up your account, look through it, and talk about it with you.  So if you’re truly running ads you don’t want them to see, then don’t participate in the feedback.

If your site or offer goes down while your paying for traffic, it is never a good thing. Just this weekend crushllc.com, which runs popular Acai offers, went down Friday night. In a situation like this, you need to be able to direct your traffic to another offer. Here is what I am doing to monitor my servers and offers.

I use Montastic for my server monitoring service as it is free and good. When you sign up, make sure to input the domains of your affiliate sites/pages, the domain of your propser account (if you use it, which you should), and then the domain of the offers you’re running.

For notifications, I listed 2 of email addresses (in case 1 was down), and I have it setup to send me a txt message if any of these servers go down. I use AT&T as my wireless provider and they issue each cellphone an email to sms address, for example your#@txt.att.net. What this will do is email that email address, which in turn sent to me as a text message. I am almost certain that every major carrier has this option, just look it up on their website.

When you’re spending thousands daily for advertisements, having a site monitoring service is vital, as Neil can attest.

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.

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/’);
};
?>

As per my previous post, I said I would post the Facebook cloaking script I use to send the editors(interns) to a different page than I send users. You don’t just use this for risque dating offers, it also works really well for Zip/Email submits. Facebook doesn’t allow you to advertise for those offers, as it requires users to input personal information, so you have to cloak to run them. Same goes for dieting offers, as Facebook has really cracked down on those as well.

I originally got this script from Nickycakes, then I modified it to include the second referral source once editors started to come from intern.facebook.com. This script won’t work every time, as often times editors will input the URL directly to test it, they have caught onto our cloaking, but try submitting it a few times and it will go through. Also, be choosy about what you cloak to, they know you aren’t really advertising for cnn.com or google.com.

<?php
$cloaked_url = "http://www.entercloakedurlhere.com"; // devs go here
$normal_url = "http://www.enteruserurlhere.com"; // everyone else goes here

if(strpos($tracking_ref,”intern.facebook”) || strpos($tracking_ref,”dev.facebook”)){
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: ” . $cloaked_url );
} else {
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: ” . $normal_url );
}
?>

Like I said, this script works for me, I might have to change it some as they become more savvy, but it is good for now (and simple).

If you haven’t heard already, which you should have Myspace launched an in-house advertising network.  The first several days on the network were like a free for all.  I had ads approved that I know were NSFW, but net damn high CTR’s for dating offers.  They have started to crack down in the last several days on the content in the ad, and at least for me, really hard on landing pages.  As many have learned on Facebook, cloaking your landing page from an editor (aka Intern), and sending them to a reputable or less risque site has become standard practice.

Myspace editors do not leave a referring source, like Facebook editors, when they view your landing page, but they do all seem to use the same IP address.  So instead of cloaking based on referral source like I do on Facebook (which I will post my script later), I cloak based on IP address.  This is the code and IP address I have been using to cloak my pages from Myspace editors.  Just paste this at the top of your landing page. It is very simple, but gets the job done, enjoy.

<?php
$visitor = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
if (preg_match(”/216.205.224.64/”,$visitor)) {
header(’Location: http://www.url-you-want-editor-to-see.com’);
};
?>

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

I took this picture on my iphone while driving from Charleston, SC to Charlotte, NC. This might be the ugliest, most impractical car I have ever seen.