Ad HustlerConfessions Of A Serial Internet Entrepreneur

I was a little apprehensive about starting this blog.  I didn’t know if I could actually add anything to the whole affiliate marketing, internet marketing and make money online community because there are SO MANY of these types of blogs out there already.  I’ve heard a lot of positive things so far.

I was surfing through WickedFire and noticed I had a private message.  I checked it out and saw a message from a young chap in Sweden:

“Your post about the content network actually inspired me to try PPC for the x:th time.. Never had any luck with it before but I threw up a campaign based on your ideas last week and it actually turned a profit.”

For some reason this little compliment made me feel good so I share it with you.

What does this comment teach you?
Just because you tried something and failed does not mean you shouldn’t try it again.  Look for good information and different ways to make something work and you WILL succeed.  Tenacity pays off.

That is all.

Ad Hustler

While managing some of my camapigns today I have found one bug with the new Adwords Quality Score.  Most people are now able to see a quality score rating out of a total score of 10 as well as ways to fix it.  It looks like Google has completely ignored geographically targeted campaigns (by radius).  I happen to run quite a few regionally targeted (by radius) campaigns in Google Adwords.  Although you can see the Quality Score In words (Great, OK, Poor), you cannot get any more information then that.  Here is a screenshot:

Google Adwords Quality Score Bug

This poses a rather large problem to local advertisers, or at least people advertising locally on Adwords.  Google has always presented larger hurdles to local targeting then to national based targeting.  Hopefully they fix this.

Ad Hustler

It looks like the new Google Adwords Quality Score algorithm was rolled out today.  So far, so good.  I haven’t seen any major surprises.  Most of my ads were between 7/10 and 8/10 on the quality score ranking scale.  Any time Google decides to change something it’s a little scary, but this change actually looks like its for the better.  They are offering advertisers considerably more data to help analyze what the heck is wrong with their campaign.  If Google wants to last, and develop long term mutually beneficial relationships with their advertisers, they are going to have to work on transparency.  Tell the advertiser what is wrong with the ad, let them fix it and make more money.  This is a first step towards a more transparent Google.

So far this looks like a good move on Google’s part.  Let’s hope there is no other motives at play here.

Ad Hustler

SocialMedia.com Metrics

Targeting

Site: Myspace
Country: US Only
Max CPC: .10 Cents
Max Budget: $10

Traffic

10,565 Impressions
112 Clicks
1.06% CTR
Cost: $10

Results

Offer Niche: 1 Field Offer
Clicks Reported On Affiliate Network: 133
Conversions: 5
Revenue: $7

Summary: For this SocialMedia test I changed the offer up to something I thought would be easier to convert.  I chose a simple “1 field” offer that had a nice landing page and that I have a record of high conversion rates with, and used it as the offer.  As you can see I did get 5 conversions totaling $7.  I spent $10 so it’s still a $3 loss but it shows more potential then the other tests so far.  The thing that sucks about social media is that the demographic targeting is very weak.  You can choose your country and site you want to target but you can’t target anything else such as age, sex, interests etc. which makes creating a winning campaign with Social Media pretty damn tough.  If you choose an offer that men will like, your female clickers probably will not convert.  If you choose an offer targeted towards the young and the stupid and you get older clickers they won’t convert either.  I need to think this out a little more and figure out the right offer to turn a positive ROI on a SocialMedia campaign.

Ad Hustler