Ad HustlerConfessions Of A Serial Internet Entrepreneur

Around 3 weeks ago I installed a new wordpress blog, on a new domain in order to play around with some software (which will be written about here at a later date).  I spent some time setting up a search engine optimized site with a ton of pages.  I then paid for some social bookmarking, got some link building done and waited.  The site got “indexed” very quickly into Google but the listing looked like this:

www.domain.com

That was it.  I figured it might be a new way that Google pre-indexes sites (without any meta data). I gave it about a week and then grew impatient that the bot still hadn’t crawled beyond the first page nor added Meta data to the listing.  I started digging around and determined that something must be corrupt in the robots.txt.  I checked what the default robots file looked like and it looked like this:

To the best of my knowledge the / indicates that the search engine should not crawl past the first page.  I edited the robots.txt to this

Taking out the / should theoretically let the search engine go past the index page.  I waited a few more days and still no dice.

Today, I was looking through the source of the page to see if anything jumped out at me as an obvious problem and I saw this in the source:

I thought that was pretty strange, especially considering I updated the robots.txt to not disallow anything.  I did some more digging and found that in wordpress under the privacy setting their are 2 options:

1) I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers
2) I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors

Guess which one was checked!

I know that i’m not possibly stupid enough to check that box, so I installed WordPress on a fresh domain.  Guess what?  It automatically checked thae box to only allow normal visitors.  I’m not sure if this is a default setting for WordPress or just on my host but it’s kind of obnoxious.

The moral of this story is that if you are installing WordPress, especially for SEO purposes, check your privacy settings.

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So by this point we all know that I handle some local clients.  This is a case study of how I generated $1,700,000 in auto sales for one of these clients despite a weak economy.  Let’s set the stage:

“ABC Motors (fictitious name to protect the innocent) has a significant overstock of a particular model vehicle.  Let’s call the vehicle the ABCmobile.  All of these vehicles are brand new, same options but they do have a variety of colors in stock.  ABC Motors picked these cars up dirt cheap from other dealers around the country.  Here’s the catch.  The ABCmobile is a niche vehicle that does not sell well.  ABC Motors was baffled about how they should sell all of these ABCmobiles that were sitting in their lots collecting dust.  Newspaper Ads, Direct Mail, Billboards, Cable, Radio would all be a waste of money since these cars do not appeal to most anyone.  These cars needed to be moved fast and when you need to move inventory fast, you call Ad Hustler!”

This case study is about the steps I took to generate highly qualified leads and move these vehicles.

After speaking with the owner of ABC Motors I found out that there was some demographics data that I could use to my advantage.  The majority of the prospects who would be interested in purchasing an ABCmobile lived in about 10 states in the U.S..  ABC Motors had a hookup that made it possible to ship these cars affordably to any of these states, meaning that a deal could be closed over the phone.  I proposed that to get the most highly qualified traffic we do some Search Engine Marketing in conjunction with a landing page designed for this campaign.  Since Google Adwords has by far the most advanced regional targeting capabilities, I decided we would concentrate our effort there.

Step 1: I bought a domain.  I wanted something that would make it appear that we were associated with the manufacturer.  Since ABC Motors is a licensed franchisee of the manufacturer this isn’t a huge stretch.  I got lucky and picked up the domain name 08ABCmobile.com as the vehicle we are selling is a 2008 ABC mobile.  I liked this domain and felt it would be great for quality score considering the relevancy.

Step 2: I setup wordpress on the main domain 08ABCmobile.com.  I created a simple blog about the vehicle.  It had 10 posts with vehicle information and details as well as a few articles I found and spun.  I also used wordpress to setup a simple contact page and privacy policy.  At the bottom of each post I linked to 08ABCmobile.com/offer which was the page the offer/actual landing page will reside on.  I link spammed this blog a bit to get it indexed into Google before going live with the campaign.

Step 3: 08ABCmobile.com/offer needed to be created.  We’ll go into what I did with the landing page a little later.

Step 4: I setup a Google Adwords campaign targeting the geographic areas that I was told were particularly good.  I made 1 ad group and within that ad group bid on a few broad keywords.  Heres the general concept of what I did

08 ABC mobile
ABC mobile
ABCmobile
etc.

My goal here was to be bidding on only a few very relevant keywords and use negative keywords to get rid of the junk that would be searched for.  I started with the obvious negative keywords and then added to the list as I watched the sitelogs of what searches were leading to the site.  Here are some obvious negative keywords I used:

-parts
-service
-free
-used
-insurance
etc.

What this keyword method accomplished was generating large volume traffic that was still relevanct, and increasingly relevant as I got more data of what keywords paired with my main keywords converted.

The ads used in the campaign were pretty straight forward.  Since we were enticing people with a rather large discount off of MSRP, that was mentioned in the text ad.  We split test a bunch of ads to see what got the best click through rates.  Overall the campaign had 5%+ CTRs.

The landing page being used was a “thin” data collection page which is why we setup the wordpress blog earlier.  When I set the ads up, I directed all of the ads to 08ABCmobile.com.  I then set all the keywords at the keyword level to 08ABCmobile.com/offer – This resulted in a stellar quality score.

Those are the 5 main steps used to create this campaign.

Let’s talk a little bit about the landing page.  I can’t show you the landing pages due to an agreement with the client but that doesnt keep me from drawing you a rough diagram of what we did.

Landing Page 1:

My original thought was just to let the visitors get a quote on ABcmobile.  This would leave negotiation leeway between the dealership and prospect.  Here is a rough sketch of the original landing page

We found that a lot of the prospects were not as qualified as we may have hoped.  ie. virtual tire kickers.  The new idea was to just lay all of the information out there and if someone responded, they would surely be qualified:

Landing Page 2:

This was the winning landing page:

The above page is the one that generated the most leads and ran for the majority of the campaign.  Leads were tracked through the form as well as the tracking 800#.

Below are the stats of the campaign:

Total Ad Dollars Spent: $32,133
Clicks: 19,537
Email Leads: 852
Phone Calls: 647
Vehicles Sold: 68
Approximate Vehicle Sale Price: $25,000
Total Revenue: $1,700,000

After all of the negative things I told you guys about local, I wanted to show you a campaign that actually worked out for the client.  Online Advertising is going to be huge for local small to medium sized business in the years to come.  Print is dying and dollars are shifting.  Will you be a part of the action?

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When I decided to do this local online marketing series I asked my good friend Dennis Yu of BlitzLocal to write a guest post.  Since you people love case studies, I asked for it to be a case study.  He obliged.  Below is a case study on Facebook vs. Google Adwords traffic on a local level.

—————————————————————————————————————

For our case study we sent traffic from both Facebook ads and Google Adwords to MyEstateManager.com. Below we’ll compare the data from each source and discuss the unique advantages of Facebook, as compared to Search Engine ad networks.

• Below are graphs of Impressions vs CPM for both Google and Facebook paid traffic over a six day period. Note: Impressions are the vertical axis, and CPM is the horizontal one.
• Google traffic is represented by an “Estate” ad group that contained keywords closely related to estate management.
• Facebook traffic is represented by advertisements that were directed at the demographics we had identified as being the most common customer of MyEstateManager.

• What we found was that Google Adwords has far more competition between advertisers than Facebook Ads. On the low end of Google’s price spectrum for our targeted keywords, we were able to get 7000 impressions in a day at a $1.6CPM. Compare that to Facebook, and we were able to get targeted traffic at equal volume for under $.15CPM – that’s less than 1/10^th the CPM on Google! +1 Facebook
• The bounce rates between the networks varied a bit as well. Google Adwords maintained a bounce rate of 48.38%, while Facebook’s was 41.54%. +1 Facebook
• Elasticity of both curves is important to note as well. Facebook’s curve is exponential, while Google’s is basically linear.
• Key Factors: One reason for that is the difference between network ad space and placement. Google has 10 ad placements on the first page, while Facebook advertisements only have the chance to appear in about 3 different spots. You can steadily bid up on Google to increase your ad position, while all the inventory on Facebook is divided amongst a few placements—if you aren’t showing up in these, you aren’t showing up at all. Another factor is competition; Facebook doesn’t have nearly as many publishers competing for the ad space, so a small change in Facebook CPM will make a greater difference than the same change in Google CPM.

Facebook Targeting as an Alternative to Search Engine Targeting

• There is other value in expanding advertising campaigns to Facebook that separates it from other Search Engine ad networks. In Facebook, users self-identify (gender, age, vocation, interests, etc) and can be targeted by who they are. Search Engines, such as Google restrict you to primarily targeting keywords, which means you target people based off of what they are looking for. That can lead to some difficulties depending on what your strategy is; for example, if you are a company that does primarily B2B marketing you may have keywords that show up in both B2B oriented searches and in consumer searches—take the keyword ‘cell phone cases,’ for example, a business that makes cell phone cases that are sold through other stores (Best Buy, Radio Shack, etc) wants to get business from people who will buy from them in bulk. They’re not interested in Joe Teenager who wants a shiny new case for his iPhone. On Google, it’s difficult to to screen out Joe Teenager and get John Executive Purchaser. On Facebook, because of the self-identification data, it may be a bit easier.
• Target your viewers effectively: Below are several targeting tips to apply to your Facebook campaigns.
  • Separate your ads to target males and females separately: men and women will almost always click at different patterns.
  • Tighten your age groups: instead of targeting all males or all females, narrow it down to 4 or 5 years apart max. Different ages require varying ad copy as well.
  • Make your users feel like your product is up to date. A good way of doing this is mentioning the month in your ad copy, or even related current events.

  

The main difference between these two ads is the picture, but that makes a significant difference. The ad on the left maintained a CTR of 0.08% vs 0.03% for the one on the right. Lesson: Users are more likely to click on an image that includes a person’s face.

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Does anyone else notice that Google has been just about stagnent with their Google Adwords system?  Yea yea they are releasing a new interface and if making our lives harder every day wih stupid quality score changes is considered an upgrade to their system, then I guess they are doing that too.

I have a feature request.  I want real time stats!  If not real time stats, at least stats that are somewhat close to real time.  I can launch a new campaign and see tons and tons of traffic flowing through my “spy” on prosper202 but not see an update to my cost data on Google for over an hour.  That is a ridiculously long time to wait.  Even Facebook gets you faster stats then that.

This is the big G here.  They expect an awful lot of their advertisers.  Why shouldn’t their advertisers be able to expect a semi-simple thing like knowing how much they’ve spent when they look at their stats?

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As affiliate marketers it’s always fun to see big numbers.  A lot of us use PPC and PPC can produce tremendous results in a short amount of time.  My question to you is: Are You Overlooking Organic SEO as a revenue stream.

About 2 years ago I had the idea of creating a rather complex coupons & deals website to push organic traffic into merchant based affiliate programs.  Such programs as you would find on Commission Junction, Linkshare & Shareasale.  After a dispute with my developer and deciding to focus more on PPC to CPA type offers, I gave up on the project.  We had loaded the site with a decent amount of content and since that day it’s just been siiting dormant on the web.  Every month I get a check from CJ or Linkshare and don’t even know what it’s for.  I log into my accounts to find that this dormant site is generating sales.  All of my development costs that were basically wasted were paid back to me in strangling commissions.  Pretty amazing if you ask me.

There are so many great tools out there like PHPbay, BB Wolfes WFReview Plugin etc that can help you build content rich sites in minutes.  It may be worth your time to cast your net out there and create some sites that will pull in a stream of commissions without much work or expense.

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