Posted by Ad Hustler | Posted in Search Engines | Posted on 31-03-2009
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?
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.
Search Engine Strategies is a 5 day show. I decided to go to one of the days which was yesterday. It’s not my first time to Search Engine Strategies. I was there last year as well. This years show was pathetic.
First, the expo hall had very few vendors. Compared to Ad Tech hosted at the same venue (The Hilton on Avenue Of The Americas) it almost seems like Search Engine Strategies didn’t even try to get vendors. If there were 500 booths at Ad Tech, there were 50 at SES. A good deal of the booths were SEM agencies which is very little help to people that do their own or have their own in house SEM’s. There were a couple of email vendors, a couple of software vendors and a couple of ad networks. Nothing too prolific or that I hadn’t seen before.
There were also very few people that I knew there compared to an Ad Tech or Affiliate Summit. I went with Ian Fernando & Waynedog, we saw Shawn Collins from Affiliate Summit and one of our friends; Cousin Vinne and that’s about it. There were very few people even attending the event, it almost seemed ‘dead’ at times. As I said, i was at this show last year and it was no where near as bad. I’m wondering if the down economy kept a lot of businesses from coming out because they are spending less money on search engine marketing or if this show is just dying.
I would not recommend Search Engine Strategies at all. There are much better conferences you can go to.
It’s pretty well established that local online advertising is the next frontier. Local businesses have and will be jumping online to spend their advertising dollars. Local search has grown at an exponential rate over the last few years. I happen to have vast experience in the local search arena as I have done it for years. Local search is more difficult then national search for a few reasons. The clicks tend to be more expensive and the targeting is not all that precise. MSN’s local targeting is almost non existent. Yahoo’s is not too great as it only really targets on a DMA based level. Google boasts the most comprehensive local targeting out of any of the search engines. Unfortunately it has some major major problems that not everyone knows about.
Google targets local users in a number of ways but the main way is by IP address. IP address targeting is not all that reliable which makes Google’s local targeting also not too reliable. Clicks also tend to be quite expensive.
For a current campaign, I’m paying $4-$6 per click for specific keywords related to my niche. The traffic however converts very very well which makes up for the price. The region I’m targeting is a suburb of NYC. I am targeting it using the polygon tool in the targeting options of the Google Adwords account. Here is a screenshot:
I also use Google Analytics to track my traffic. This helps determine where visitors are coming from. Here is a screenshot of the last 30 days:
By looking at the targeting and the report all seems well. The analytics report shows a few clicks from outside of my targeted area but nothing major. No biggie right? All is well in regional targeting world……NOT! There are some major issues because a decent chunk of the leads being derived from the campaign are coming from WAY outside my targeted area. Since I have full access to the leads generated I can see the users location. Here are some examples of leads derived in the last 30 days and where they came from:
Central San Diego County, California
Jefferson City, Columbia, Missouri
Metropolitan Boston, Massachusetts
Central Dallas, Texas
New Hampshire
Buffalo, New York
Those are just a few examples of the leads derviced out of the last 900 or so clicks that are unacceptably outside my designated targeting area. This problem has been going on for years. Even though Google Analytics shows most of the traffic as within the area I’m targeting, something obviously is wrong since all of these leads are coming from outside the market area.
This is a problem that the internet advertising companies/networks are going to have to get right before local internet advertising is a viable and accepted advertising medium for small businesses.
