Money-Code » PPC

Thinking out loud about EPN Quality Click Pricing (QCP)

admin — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 03:05:04 +0000

So, I’ve been paying close attention to analytics and most importantly, my QCP preview in EPN reporting. Just like what it was stating for the end of August, my earnings will be looking really good under this model and I was trying to figure out why.

I really think the major benefit in my case is that I use limited PPC via YSM to promote my good earning niche sites. I never been too heavy in SEO, and relied on PPC to drive traffic to these sites. Finding the right balance of advertising cost with profits earned is tricky, but I think that is why my EPC is good on these sites. I’m driving ‘buyers’ to come to the site, and eventually ‘buy’ on eBay vs. driving a bunch of readers. I wrote a post about this in January 2008 “Readers vs. Buyers“.

Now, with this improvement with EPC, I think I’ll do some tests in October or November by ramping up my PPC campaigns to drive more quality traffic to eBay.

While I’m still waiting for the dust to settle, I’ve been working hard (hence the lack of recent posts) on creating Amazon store fronts, CJ based store fronts, hub support blogs to my various sites. I’ve been working on creating a new Amazon store front plugin, but I’ve been absolutely LOVING ReviewAzon. I can’t say enough how great this plugin is. If you’re interested in working on your Amazon affiliate efforts, please pick this plugin up. Only $79, you can’t afford to NOT try it.

Incoming search terms:

identify which ePN clicks come from search results

Is EPN stressing you out?

admin — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 16:03:49 +0000

So, is EPN stressing you out with the new rule changes and another apparent wave of bannings?

Over the last few weeks EPN announced various changes ranging from validating domains, no longer allowing URL shortening services and grey area of trademark domains. Also, it appears that they’re cracking down on round tripping (either via eBay about me page, store or PPC via YSM). Reading the forums, we’re now seeing the ‘I got banned’ posts which makes things a little uneasy. Here are a few things that you should be doing.

Validate your domains via EPN’s control panel (Account -> Domains)
Archive and stop all sites that are using trademark domains in the FQDN
Add eBay sites to your exclude lists in your YSM account
Make sure you’re not round tripping anywhere
Make sure you’re not purchasing eBay items through your eBay link (I would clear all cookies prior to bidding).
Do not post auctions on sites you don’t own (WordPress.com sites, Blogspot.com, Twitter, Squidoo, etc).
Do not use URL shortening services.

If you do get the email it’s important to be professional and persistent and try to create a line of communication with them to correct the issue and be re-instated into the EPN program. Do not give up and focus on re-establishing your account. With that said, it’s also important to be diversified into other areas (CJ, Amazon, PPC to offers/products, etc).

These changes and wave of bannings does concern me, but I feel like I’ve been very quick to make my appropriate changes to comply with the new rules. Don’t be lazy folks, and get on it.

Sourcing EPN traffic from eBay hosted domains is bad.

admin — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 17:59:04 +0000

A visitor brought this to my attention a few days ago. He was currently running YSM campaigns for EPN sites, and received a email from EPN stating that they were receiving traffic from eBay hosted sites.

eBay currently displays Yahoo Publisher ads on their site, so it’s important to understand that if you’re running YSM campaigns, you need to block eBay hosted domains so your ads do not appear on their sites. I personally did this a while ago, but only for the shop.ebay.com domain, so I made a modification and added the other domains.

Here is the actual EPN rule/policy

Per Section (b)(1)(viii) of the eBay Advertiser Terms and Conditions:
All eBay Programs disallow redirecting end users from the eBay website to an Affiliate’s website where one of the possible outcomes of this redirection is that the end user clicks back to the eBay website via a Link that places a cookie for the Affiliate.

This is the list of domains that should be added to your Blocked Domains on your PPC search campaigns:

ebay.com
ebay.com.au
ebay.be
ebay.ca
ebay.fr
ebayanuncios.es/ebay
ebay.de
ebay.at
ebay.com.hk
ebay.in
ebay.ie
ebay.it
ebay.com.my
ebay.nl
pages.ebay.com/nz
ebay.ph
ebay.pl
ebay.com.sg
ebay.ch
ebay.co.uk
ebay.chodientu.vn
tradera.com
shopping.sanook.com
gittigidiyor.com
eachnet.com
ruten.com.tw
mercadolibre.com.ar
mercadolivre.com.br
mercadolibre.com.mx
auction.co.kr/default.html
half.ebay.com
kijiji.com
www.microplace.com
www.paypal.com/ebay
prostores.com
rent.com
shopping.com
skype.com
stubhub.com
stumbleupon.com

To do this is in YSM, simply log into your account. Click Administration and then click on the Blocked Domains link. You’ll be able to do a bulk add to include the full list. Michael.. thanks for pointing this out!

PPC to Offers and Leads

admin — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 17:30:33 +0000

I’ve been doing PPC to EPN and CJ based store fronts for some time, and I would say I’ve been fairly successful over the years. Nothing to brag about, and something I would like to improve further. Recently, I’ve been wanting to start up a few campaigns and promote offers and leads. I personally think this is where the big dough is, and I want to get more and more diversified. I’ve had a few attempts with Neverblue Ads and CJ offers, with limited success, basically breaking even. I recently joined up with Hydra Network and I’m already impressed with their selection offers and quality of customer service.

I found a offer that looked good. It pays $5 per sign up (first page). There were a few things I wanted to see in the offer.I personally want it to be a ethical product or service. Something I feel that I can stand behind. I look at their lander and form submit. If it looks professional, I feel like I can promote it better. After selecting the offer, I wanted to create a landing page for it. I already have a ‘generic’ .info domain that I thought I would use. I like to use subdomains for managing offers to domains so I made one that works. I would check with TOS on the offer, some business (ie: eBay) will only allow names after the 3rd slash, so a subdomain with ebay in it would violate that.

I was going to outsource the landing page, but I wanted to get my feet wet first before throwing more cash at this offer. If this works, I might outsource additional landing pages. The reason I want to outsource is strictly to save time. I created a landing page that somewhat matches their theme on the form page. I don’t want to throw visitors off when they go from my lander to the form submit or destination site.

I looked into keyword tracking, mainly tracking 202, but decided to roll my own for now. I think I’ll look into that in the future, but for now, I just wanted to get something up. I wrote a simple function that would parse inbound keywords from Bing, AdWords or YSM and add it to the sid from Hydra on the redirect.

All that was left was crafting the ads. I decided to promote this in YSM initially since I’m most familiar with YSM Yahoo Search Marketing and already have other campaigns rolling there. The ad text used were basically provided by the offer company for emails. I figured they’ve been working on their ad text, so I would start with those. I made five ads. Keywords were then selected to match my offer and submitted. I initially bid the keywords at .40, but later up’d that amount to .60.

To date, I only have one conversion, but oddly, hardly any clicks for the keywords. I believe it is due to the high competition related to the offer. I’m currently working on more keywords and long-tail keywords to help my ad position. PPC with offers is definitely different than with the storefronts. The next step will be to jack the keywords higher to see if clicks increase. I will also try to promote on Bing.

No matter what this is a great learning experience, and I’ll need to keep pushing forward. I’ll be sure to post any updates on my PPC to offer efforts. If you have any tips or suggestions, please feel free to comment!

Accepted to Hydra Network

admin — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:07:54 +0000

I’m super pleased to have been accepted to Hydra Network. Several affiliate marketers have recommended that I go with Hydra for better paying and converting offers. They have a pretty thorough acceptance process. I first had to apply via their web application form. After filling out the form, I was told that I would receive a call from them with further questions and to verify the phone number they had on file. A week went by and never received the call, so I called them (people you should always be aggressive when trying to join a program).

I spoke with a Hydra associate and she asked various affiliate marketing questions. For example, how will I be promoting offers. If I had any affiliate marketing experience and how long. If I did PPC, how much did I spend, how long have I been doing it. What other networks am I member of, etc. Immediately, I felt the impression that they were just seeing if a) I had experience and b) if I was serious. I answered truthfully and honestly, letting them know what I’m very serious, but I am short of my goals and hoping that their offers might help me achieve my goals, etc.

Shortly after the phone call, I received a welcome letter stating that I was accepted to the Hydra Network! The next day I received another phone call from newly assigned affiliate manager. She seemed very nice and helpful on the phone. You need to mail, email or fax your W-9 form in to view any offers, but she already had some recommendations for me. I told what areas I was interested in and was able to hook me up with compatible offers right away.

I’m impressed with the hands on interaction with Hydra. Nothing like talking with a AM right away with suggestions. This week I’ll be promoting a few offers using YSM/PPC… so we’ll see if I can start getting in on the PPC to offer action. I’ve learned a lot since my past attempts, so let’s hope they’ll translate into earnings.

If you’d like to give Hydra Network a try, click here.

Optimizing your keywords for better CTR (YSM)

admin — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 18:35:28 +0000

Today, I wanted to talk about optimizing your keywords for better CTR. This is specifically for YSM, but could be applied to Bing or AdWords. Lately, I’ve been seeing better results in having fewer, more targeted keywords then a ton of random, possibly related keywords.

The reason being that I wanted people interested in the specific item I’m trying to promote. I don’t want to attract ‘readers’ or random surfers. For example if I wanted to sell dog supplies (food, containers, toys, etc), but I was bidding on ‘dog’ as a keyword I would most likely get plenty of impressions but low clicks. My ad would show up if someone was searching for ‘dog trainers’ or ‘dog bites’, etc. What this does is give a lower CTR percentage on my overall campaign. Low CTR % will then raise my keyword costs since my ads are not targeted and performing well.

What I like to do is to start with 50 or so keywords that are fairly specific to what I’m offering. I then let the campaign run for a few days. I then look for keywords that have high impressions but low clicks (poor CTR) and I pause the keywords. Your overall campaign or ad CTR % should go up. Personally, I like to hit around 2% CTR. I’m not sure if this is good or bad, but in my experience, that seems good. I’m usually rewarded with higher quality score and lower cost keywords.

I’ve seen it mentioned with AdWords to create a ad for every keyword (using AdWords Editor and other tools to automate the process). And pausing ads with low CTR %. This will keep your keywords bids down overall, since each ad will have a high CTR. I’ve yet to try this, but I’m planning on firing up my AdWords campaigns again for additional testing.

Incoming search terms:

how to pause keywords in ysm

Simple EPN Keyword Tracker for PPC/Organic Searches

admin — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:12:55 +0000

I’ve discussed in the past on how to capture keywords for EPN store front sites. Basically, if you’re driving traffic with PPC to your store fronts, or even if you’re promoting them with SEO, you’ll want to know what keywords are actually converting them.

To do this, you need to capture the keyword in your site and then pass it as a customid field to eBay. From there you’ll see the keyword in your transaction reports. I’ve worked on my function(s) for this, I still want to tweak them further, but I’ll provide them here so you can play with them in your own application. I want to first explain the general idea of how it retains ‘state’ throughout my site though. If you’re the visitor and clicked on one of my PPC ads (either Yahoo, MSN or Adwords), the referring URL passes some useful information to my site. My function looks for particular information and then determines if it can grab a keyword that was passed from the ad. Each program passes information differently. Once a keyword has been determined, my application then appends that variable (kw) to all links within the site. That way the user can visit multiple areas of my site before going to eBay, and my keyword will follow him.

I’ve considered sticking this in a session or cookie object, but for ease, I left it as a GET or POST variable depending on the situation. I know this part has confused others in the past.

I’ll try to break down the functions below and describe them as best as possible. Please feel free to comment or email me if something doesn’t make sense. This is all written in PHP (compatible with versions 4 or 5).

The first function is the primary getKeyword() function. This function has nested functions since I want to take advantage of code reuse:

function getKeyword(){
global $attributes, $rootpath;
$kw    = ”;
if(isset($attributes[‘kw’]) && strlen(trim($attributes[‘kw’])) > 0){
$kw    = sanitize($attributes[‘kw’]);
}
// check yahoo
if(isset($attributes[‘OVKEY’]) && strlen(trim($attributes[‘OVKEY’])) > 0){
$kw    = ‘ysm’.sanitize($attributes[‘OVKEY’]);
}
// check handling for msn
if(isset($attributes[‘a’]) && $attributes[‘a’] == ‘m’){
if(isset($_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’])){
$kw    = breakQstring($_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’], ‘q’, ‘msn’);
if(!strlen(trim($kw))){
$kw    = ‘msnUnknown’;
}
}else{
$kw    = ‘msnUnknown’;
}
}
// check handling for google
if(isset($attributes[‘a’]) && $attributes[‘a’] == ‘g’){
if(isset($_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’])){
$kw    = breakQstring($_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’], ‘q’, ‘goo’);
if(!strlen(trim($kw))){
$kw    = ‘gooUnknown’;
}
}else{
$kw    = ‘gooUnknown’;
}
}
if(!strlen(trim($kw))){
// now ad passed, check for organic
$kw    = getKeywordOrganic();
}
$kw    = eregi_replace("([^a-z0-9]+)",”,$kw);
return urlencode($kw);
}

When I create ads at various PPC networks, I add the following to the URL www.domain.com/a=y. This would pass a=y which would tell my app that the ad is Yahoo. Once it’s know where it came from it needs to break the querystring and get down to the variable that contains the keyword. That is what the breakQstring() function is about. It requires the referrer, the variable that contains the keyword, and the label for add source. If no keyword is found (because no ‘a’ variable is passed from a ad), it will then check if this is a organic search result with getKeywordOrganic().

function getKeywordOrganic(){
global $rootpath;
$retVal   = ”;
if(isset($_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’])){
if(eregi(‘google.com’,$_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’])){
$retVal   = breakQstring($_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’], ‘q’, ‘orgGoo’);
// end google check
}else if(eregi(‘search.yahoo.com’,$_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’])){
$retVal   = breakQstring($_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’], ‘p’, ‘orgYah’);
// end yahoo check
}else if(eregi(‘bing.com’,$_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’])){
$retVal   = breakQstring($_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’], ‘q’, ‘orgBing’);
}
}
return $retVal;
}

getKeywordOrganic looks at the referrer again and looks for the appropriate variable where the keyword is normally found. This function will handle Google, Yahoo and Bing.

function breakQstring($inRef, $inVarCatch, $inType){
global $rootpath;
$kw    = ”;
$xstring = explode(‘?’,$inRef);
if(sizeof($xstring) > 0){
if(isset($xstring[1])){
$varstring = explode(‘&’,$xstring[1]);
if(sizeof($varstring) > 0){
for($x = 0; $x < sizeof($varstring); $x++){ if(isset($varstring[$x][0]) && $varstring[$x][0] == $inVarCatch){ $valstring = explode(‘=’,$varstring[$x]);    if(isset($valstring[1]) && strlen(trim($valstring[1])) > 0){
$kw    = $inType.sanitize($valstring[1]);
break;
}
}
}
}
}
}
// clean up
if(isset($xstring)){ unset($xstring);}
if(isset($varstring)){ unset($varstring);}
if(isset($valstring)){ unset($valstring);}
return $kw;
}

breakQstring() is designed to disassemble the querystring and filter it down to simple variable value pairs and stop when if finds what it’s looking for. If there is a value, it will return the keyword to the parent getKeyword(). I simply call this function and set a local $kw variable. I want to note that I’m using $attributes, you’ll probably need to use $_REQUEST or $_GET or $_POST depending on your situation.

After you have a local $kw variable, you would then pass that to your rover link and add it to the customid field of that link. You should start seeing keywords, search network and organic information in your transaction reports at EPN.

Incoming search terms:

customid=http_referer

NeverBlue Ads

admin — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 17:18:04 +0000

In preparation for starting various PPC campaigns relating to offers and products, I thought I would first start by joining various networks. I’m already a member of a few ‘product’ type networks, but when it comes to offers, I’m really not with anyone. Based off of some of the things I saw on the Top Affiliate Challenge, I thought I’d start with NeverBlue Ads.

Applying was easy, but I was disappointed to receive a rejection email. It stated that I did not answer the phone when they called for verification. This is odd. I have my phone on my 24/7 and never received a call. I gave them a call to discuss and getting approved with NeverBlue was a snap. It was also cool to talk with my affiliate manager and immediately bounce some ideas and offers around. He gave me a few leads of excellent performing offers, so I’ll start with these.

I think initially, I’ll be adding a few banners to existing sites to see if I get a few nibbles, before jumping immediately to PPC. During this, I’ll be doing additional research on keywords and working on a landing page strategy. I want to have a plan, budget and goal before I launch anything in the PPC arena. I also need to decide if I want to go with YSM or just jump straight into Adwords?

I’ll keep you posted!

Changes to EPN and YSM – Where is hanji?

admin — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 17:54:37 +0000

I previously apologized for my lack of posts during the TAC (Top Affiliate Challenge) post. So where have I been? Well, I’ve been working my ass off with my web development business. Projects definitely picked up, and I wanted to give EPN a rest. I was sorely disappointed with EPN after the migration from CJ, and wanted the dust to settle before focusing any more efforts to it. Prior to the switch, I was making almost $2,000/month off of eBay on CJ. After the switch my earnings plummeted, which you can read more about in the post titled EPN Status. There was a definite problem, and things have been slowly improving. May and June were my best months since the migration. I made $1,200 each of those months, which is still down, but with the improvement of ACRUs and their announcement of a MakeGood on ACRUs, things could improve even further.

During the migration phase, eBay decided to change Category IDs which also led to more frustration. Some of my sites were un-affected, but a few of them were completely hosed with this change. I took the opportunity to fix all the sites as well as add Privacy Statements to comply with Google AdSense’s new TOS. Talk about a rough Spring dealing with all these unprofitable changes. So during this, I was just putting out fires and not creating any new sites or spent any times to promote or optimize the sites.

Yahoo’s YSM also made a drastic change. They changed their keyword bid structure, and now it’s more like Google AdWord’s. They promote that as a ‘good thing’ since you can pay below .10 threshold, but I’ve not seen that. All I know is that my PPC campaigns went through the roof after this change, since I needed to ‘up’ my prices to keep the keyword due to minimum bid was increased. After seeing how my campaign budget was now unacceptable, I started to pay close attention to certain keywords and starting pausing high clickable keywords.. but low converting keywords. I think my PPC campaigns are better, but my margins were affected with this new change.

With affiliate marketing, it’s critical to adjust and bend with the situation. It’s important to react and be patient with the changes. I think it was odd that Spring 2008 was a weird time with drastic changes across YSM, EPN and AdSense, but I think I weathered the storm, and now it’s back to figuring out how to make ‘more’ money. I still want to diversify, and the first step will most likely by related to upgrading my PopShops account to Enterprise and start cranking out a few more PopShops sites. I’m also still working on a comparative shopping site using CJ datafeeds. I really need to get this done and launched. It’s basically complete, but there are a few loose ends and I’d like to run it against a few more testing cycles. I’m still really interested in PPC/offers. I think the big money is in there.. unfortunately, there is some big risk there as well, so careful study and planning is required.

I’ll keep everyone posted!

Incoming search terms:

where is hanji

Great post on PPC at DigitalPoint

admin — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:52:52 +0000

I was at DigitalPoint today, and came across a great thread “Adwords and ebay?How necessary?“. I personally don’t like to use AdWords (I prefer Yahoo’s YSM), but I wanted to get some basic tips for PPC in general… since I’m always wanting to learn how others are doing it.

Anyway, manx posted the following post, which I thought was extremely useful. I wanted to put in here, so I could easily reference it in the future… but some of you might find it useful as well. It’s basic, but the basics get easily lost when you dive into PPC.

“I have found that if you use extremely targetted keywords/keyword phrases in the ads with the destination url going to the exact product, you can make a profit with ebay & adwords.

For example — doing a “handbags” ad or even a “designer handbags” ad has not worked for me, but if I do an ad something like this:

“brand name” handbag
Looking for “brand name” handbags?
Huge selection at bargain prices.
Display URL: yourdomain.com/brand-name-handbag
Dest. URL yourdomain.com/brand-name-handbag

Then the keywords you would use would be:
brand name handbag
brand name handbags
Buy brand name handbags
bargain brand name handbags
brandnamehandbag .com

AND, use broad, exact and phrase

Or you can take it a step deeper with
“brand name” red handbags

BUT! Before you even decide to advertise a product that is on eBay, you should also do research on whether the thing actually sells.

To do this, login to ebay. Go to Advanced search, Enter the Keyword in the Search box, Check the box for “completed listings only” then click search.
The results will show you All the listings in the past 2 weeks (I think) that completed. The ones with $’s in Green were “won” or sold. The ones with
$’s in Red were NOT sold.

If the product had a lot of listings, with alot of “red” dollars — it means the product hasn’t been selling well.

NEXT! Just because a product sells on eBay — doesn’t mean people are searching Google for it! Alot of people just go directly to eBay to buy products.

So, you should use Google Adwords Traffic Estimator (although it can be very inaccurate) to check and see if the keywords (products) you are targetting are actually being used in searches.

If the product passes the above two “tests” it is recommended you start your bids at .10 cents and go no higher than .15 or .16. If you have to bid more to get impressions/clicks — then you have a problem, because very rarely will you get an EPC (earnings per 100 clicks) from ebay higher than $20.
If you bid higher, then you will just break even or lose money.

So, there you go — One way to make money with eBay and Adwords.

Hope this helps”

With the recent change to ePN, I’d be pretty weary about jumping to PPC with eBay store fronts. I’ve been contemplating pausing my campaigns at YSM, but feel like I need the traffic to help determine if I have linkage/tracking problems at eBay. From my record month (March was a fantastic month) to a totally crappy month for April… this sucks. I’m staying optimistic, and focusing on other revenue streams (like I always preach).