Gee’s Blog

Wow I just got this e-mail from Amazon and its pretty big news IMHO. I used to bid on keywords and send them directly to affiliate web sites and Amazon’s Associate program was great for this. In fact, LOTS of people still do this and it generates good money for those that do it successfully. These people are going to be mad!

Amazon used to have a pretty open policy of letting associates bid on keywords and send the traffic directly to Amazon.com, but I guess they finally figured out that this is costing them lots of money… so as of 5/1/2009 you can no longer do this. If you do, you simply won’t get paid. I wonder how the publishers will respond to this..

Here’s what the e-mail said: (more info here)

Dear Amazon Associate:

We’re writing to let you know about a change to the Amazon Associates Program. After careful review of how we are investing our advertising resources, we have made the decision to no longer pay referral fees to Associates who send users to www.amazon.com, www.amazon.ca, or www.endless.com through keyword bidding and other paid search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines, and their extended search networks. If you’re not sure if this change affects you, please visit this page for FAQs.

As of May 1, 2009, Associates will not be paid referral fees for paid search traffic. Also, in connection with this change, as of May 1, 2009, Amazon will no longer make data feeds available to Associates for the purpose of sending users to the Amazon websites in the US or Canada via paid search.

This change applies only to the Associates programs in North America. If you are conducting paid search activities in connection with one of Amazon’s Associates Programs outside of the US and Canada, please refer to the applicable country’s Associates Program Operating Agreement for relevant terms and conditions.

We appreciate your continued support and participation in this advertising Program. If you have questions or concerns, please write to us by using the Contact Us form available on Associates Central.

Gee Advertising, News Advertising, affiliate, amazon, associates

Got an e-mail from Google today… here are 7 tips they included for getting the most out of your AdWords account:

1. Have at least two ads in each ad group
2. Include keywords in your ad text to make those phrases bold
3. Have tightly themed ad groups (preferably three or more)
4. Set a unique destination URL for each group
5. Have at least 50 active keywords in your account
6. Focus on 5-15 keywords in each ad group
7. Remove keywords with a clickthrough rate (CTR) less than 0.1% in the search network

These may or may not be news to you, but in my experience with using them I think its some very good basic advice for anyone starting out.  You don’t have to necessarily follow every one of them, but if you implement the majority of these, you should be well on your way to a successful Adwords campaign

Gee Advertising, Tips

Just a quick tip to make sure and monitor your PPC advertising accounts on a regular basis!  Its easy to let them cruise along on auto-pilot for weeks or even months at a time… but don’t be surprised if something looks way off the next time you decide to login to your AdWords account.

Here are 2 examples from my own experience as a PPC marketer:

1) The meanings of keywords change over time!

This one is pretty random, but here’s the story… I have an e-comerce site that sells unique No Drip Umbrellas that I import and fulfill through Amazon.  You can imagine the keywords that I bid on in the search engines: umbrella, umbrellas, etc. etc.

The campaign was working pretty well for a while… generating a decent number of sales and some even better leads for large quantity orders etc.  I obviously did not feel the need to monitor this account daily.  Enter Rihanna and her uber hit single “Umbrella“…  I’m sure you can see where this is leading.

As soon as it became a hit, the number of impressions on “umbrella” related keywords skyrocketed almost overnight!  You would think people would be smart enough not to click on an ad that said “Rain Umbrella on Sale”, but then you’d be wrong.  The number of clicks spiked as did my costs.  I doubt even 0.01% of the resulting clicks were from people actually looking to buy an umbrella, so my conversion rates plummeted.  It took me a while before I caught on, and by then the damage was done. The result was a large amount of wasted ad dollars.  Granted, it wasn’t THAT much money, but remember… you never know when one of your keywords will become the title of a hit single.

For those interested, the solution was to add a whole bunch of negative keywords, “-Rihanna”, “-lyrics”, “-mp3″, “-download”, etc. etc. :-/

2) Identity Theft

I pride myself on the fact that I would NEVER click on a phishing email, let alone fill out the resulting login form… but apparently I’m wrong.  One day I noticed there was a $15,000 charge in my Google Adwords account for just one campaign on one day. Apparently someone had “broken into” my Adwords account using my login credentials and created an ad with travel and flight related keywords that pointed to a page full of Adsense ads.  The bids were all in the $5.00 range and that’s why it racked up so many clicks in such a short period of time… talk about the perfect Adsense arbitrage setup (0 cost)

I quickly contacted Google and they halted my account.  They then looked into my claim that this was fraud and got back to me within a couple days.  They happily refunded my money and suggested I run some antivirus and anti-spyware programs… to this day I have no idea how they stole my login credentials.  I was very pleased with Google’s response and to be honest I hadn’t expected anything less from such a great company.  The biggest damage was that this particular AdWords account is no longer usable.  This could have been really bad, but luckily I had already started to phase this one out and wasn’t using it for much anymore…

So, the point is to be careful out there!  Keep an eye on all your advertising accounts and be sure to optimize, optimize, optimize… you probably can never 100% prevent cases like Identity Theft, but at laest you’ll be right on top of things to minimize the damage

Gee Advertising, PPC, Tips