John Hasson

I’ve got a campaign that has been running for a decent while with a couple thousand keywords and a few hundred adgroups that have been slowly built over time.

Yesterday I wanted to try out google’s “opportunities for improvement” feature on this campaign.  But google wouldn’t run on it because the campaign had more then 64 adgoups and more then 2000 keywords.  grrrr

So I took a quick look and found that only about 10 of the adgroups had any conversions in the past 3 months.  I put on my wizard hat and took the s…..   Actually I was just ruthless and deleted all the adgroups that had no conversions in the past 90 days.  Would google let me run their “opportunities for improvement” feature now that I shrunk it down?  No!  But now it just says “sorry, can’t do it” w/o a reason.

Fine I think..  I’ll leave it alone and let the campaign do its thing.

Here is where the awesomesauce comes in:  After wiping out the “dead weight” my CTR shot up by 67.6% my avg position went up by only 2% (nothing significant) cost per click down by 1.2% (nothing significant).  My clicks went up by 56.7%.  This of course resulted in lots more conversions.

So… if you have a really big campaign that has profit in it.  Trim the adgroups and keywords that are not converting, google and you will both be happier.

Tags: Advice, Online Moola, PPC, Pay Per Click by John Hasson
2 Comments »

Dayparting is the fancy word for when you say you only want your ads shown at certain times of the day or that you want to pay more during some time periods and less during others.

I’ve got a campaign running entirely on google’s content network. I scrapped together a quick chart of conversions and mapped them out by hour of the day.

You can see the the spike in the afternoon and the drop in the early mornings..
All times are MST and 1 = 12am (if you are getting confused by the numbering on the bottom.)

Here is how it was converting at this time. Since this was on the content network I had my bids relatively low. 15 cents per click. These stats are for the 7 days before I did the Dayparting adjustment.

Based on this I adjusted my min bid to 5 cents a click and used Dayparting to increase it up to 15 cents per click for the times when I would get the most bang for my buck.

So for everyday I’ll be bidding 5 cents at low times, 10 cents from 8am to 3pm (plus 10pm to 11pm) and then 15 cents at the premium time (3pm-10pm)

So far pretty boring right?

Now look at the stats for the 7 days after Dayparting.

Do you see it?

Lower Cost, Higher Conversion Rate, Higher CTR, and so on.

Long story short I just made adjustments to show the ads to people who were likely to convert. The only thing that went down were clicks and impressions (which makes total sense since I am now showing the ad to more qualified people) This resulted in a 35% increase in conversions and a 46% drop in cost per conversions, this is a good thing.

Tags: Advice, Online Moola, PPC, Pay Per Click by John Hasson
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This is a short video I made of how keyword tracking works. Some people were asking me about it. I figured this should be a decent enough overview of how it actually works.

Questions? Comments…

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Online Moola, PPC, Pay Per Click, Whiteboard by John Hasson
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Well I am not sure what they are thinking, but I am going to be a speaker at Affiliate Summit West 2008 . I am pretty excited.

I sent in a simple proposal to talk about PPC marketing since that is what I do. My proposed session title was “Which PPC Engines Work And How.” It was going to be a nice presentation probably with power point slides

They contacted me and asked if I would “be interested in leading a roundtable discussion for the “Ask the Experts” General Session? This is an environment where attendees will sit at a table to chat with you, and 8-10 of these discussions will be going on concurrently.

Also, there is no presentation involved – you’d be answering questions and talking about your respective issues informally.”

Frankly this was awesome! I just have to relax and answer questions and discuss PPC and so on informally. So… I’ll be there

On a side note, it looks like most of the speakers have titles like CEOs, Founders, Presidents, Owners and so on. I picked “Affiliate” as my title since I think it fit best I’m just a regular guy who has figured some things out well and am still looking to learn and grow more.

My thanks out to the Affiliate Summit people for giving me this opportunity.

Tags: Online Moola, Personal by John Hasson
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In NO particular order at all. This list is for my reference just as much as anybody’s

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

http://www.wordze.com

Also.. those xml feeds from dogpile and metasearch and so on.. look very intersting.

And a good link to some tips for page optimization for search engines it goes along with what I said about SEO optimization.

Tags: Online Moola by John Hasson
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I am going to finish this series if it kills me

Ok.. PPC Traffic. I like PPC (Pay Per Click) traffic because it is easy to measure and quantify results.

You can find an old list I made of PPC Engines that work.
You can also find a list of bottom feeder PPC sources to avoid.

Here is an excellent primer on AdCenter (MSN’s PPC). I didn’t write this but it is so well done I totally recommend it.

For a successful PPC campaign you will need:

1. Quality landing pages that relate to the ad text (and convert)
2. Short and Long Tail Keywords
   A Short Tail Keyword is: flowers
   A Long Tail Keyword is: buy red flowers for my girlfriend in vegas

   The short keyword is going to be expensive to bid on because everyone is bidding on it (thus driving the price up)
   The long keyword is going to be very cheap because no one will be bidding on it AND it will convert well because someone typing in a phrase like that is ready to buy.
   (buy KEYWORD is better then KEYWORD)

3. Ad Text That matches your landing page.
   Dont use something totally generic.

   Not So Good:
   Flowers
   Buy Flowers Here

   Better:
   Looking For Red Roses?
   Special Deal On Two Dozen Red
   Roses With Free Delivery $24.99

   The better ad tells the user exactly what to expect before they even click on the ad. You are pre-selling them. If they click they are more likely to actually buy the flowers since they already know what to expect. Just make sure the landing page has a picture of some beautiful flowers and a clear cause to action (button to click to buy the flowers) (see #1 in this list)

4. Tracking!
   This is the most important and most glossed over aspect of PPC. And this is why PPC can be so powerful. You need to track the combination of landing page, keyword, source, and so on of each user coming in via PPC. Then track what they buy (or if they fill out a lead form). Use this to determining how much profit (or loss) you make from each click for each keyword. If you are losing money on a keyword butt getting conversion lower your price per click for that keyword. If you are making a TON of money and your position is low you can try raising your position by raising your click cost. But be careful and remember what it was. If you have found a sweet spot you want to know what it was so you can go back it raising your position results in more clicks but fewer conversions.

This ought to be enough to make you dangerous in PPC. Reading all about online marketing is great but you do actually need to get out and do something.

Tags: Online Moola by John Hasson
1 Comment »

I was talking with a friend about an idea they had for a site. It was essentially a directory site. You know.. kinda like a yellow pages site for their particular niche. There are a two ways to do this.

1. By Hand. Create a page for each city and add listings by hand.
   This is only for people who don’t want to learn anything new and have time and patience to do it this way.
2. Build it with a database and a simple web application.
   I personally use .NET and SQL Server, but that is only because I’ve been using them for a while now. PHP and MySql isn’t that hard either though. If you are starting fresh and just want some simple things I’d say go with PHP and MySql. The hosting is usually cheaper and there are plenty of free tutorials and examples out there.

Now that you know how to build it, here is how I would make a directory site.

1. Organize your listing by city/region/whatever you are going to use.
2. Build your template/site reading off of a simple database you have put together
3. Test.
4. Test
5. Optimize for SEO
6. Test
7. Populate the data from sources that you have permission to use.
8. Test

Constantly Update The data. Building a list slowly over time “organically” will do better for you in the long run then a quick full blast of everything you can find.

Bonus Points: Build a system to automatically find new data (that you have permission to use) and have it add the new listings daily so your site grows a little bit each day.

Extra Credit: Allow people to correct listings/add reviews or comments and rank the listings.

So.. thats how I would do a listing/directory site.

Tags: Online Moola by John Hasson
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I’ve left them alone for a few days. You can see an updated chart here.

Program 1 finally panned out. Not bad for spending a few dollars and leaving it alone. Program 3 seems to be struggling a bit so I’m tweaking the keywords. (Turning some off and so on).

For Program 3 it really seems to be more profitable when people are at home (not 9-5). Too bad my PPC program doesn’t support turning campaigns off during certain hours. However there is an easy fix to that. Just write a program to log in and turn them off for me in the morning. Then have it log in again in the evening to turn them on. I won’t do that till I’m certain of a pattern.

Tags: Online Moola by John Hasson
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In this experiment I broke just about all of my rules hoping to put something together quick. And you will find that some rules are more important then others.

First rule I broke:
I used a direct to vendor landing page. I fixed that with a cursory website and saw success.

Second rule I broke:
I didn’t build a full on site (or mini site) around the offers, I just threw them up on some existing domains I already had other offers on. This affects some offers more then others.

Third rule I broke:
I did a halfway job on my keyword research. I found a winning combination anyways (this is due to a combination of luck and experience).

Fourth rule I broke:
I didn’t use ANY of the big three PPC places for traffic.

Results:
Before you see these, note that I actually ran more then three offers but these three are the only offers that got any sort of significant traffic.

This is as of 15 minutes ago. (15 minutes because I kept fighting firefox and blogger on pasting a table from excel. I found a compromise )

Program 1:
It was an offer for long term care insurance information. I think program 1 would do better if I built a full fledge website around it instead of just a landing page AND used a different traffic source. I’m still running it since it is on very low traffic, I may hit something long term. So I am leaving it alone for a while.

Program 2:
This is one of those fill out a form and complete some offers and win a free $500 gift certificate/ipod-xbox/etc offer. It didn’t do as well so I just shut it off till I can find some traffic that converts how I like.

Program 3:
This is ALSO one of those fill out a form and complete some offers and win a free $500 gift certificate/ipod-xbox/etc offer. Except the landing page was very different and I was able to tweak the keywords to a winning combination. Then I tweaked the keywords again after looking to see what words weren’t performing well and now I am just watching it.

That is it. Find some offers, build websites around. Drive traffic to them and concentrate on ROI. Rinse and repeat.

But wait?! $20 a day isn’t much. Yeah but $20 a day * lots of different sites and offers is a lot.

Next up… PPC

PS. This was just a small sample. Sometimes I lose a lot more before I find something that works. Usually I lose less then $100 before finding a winning combination (of site, keywords and traffic) or I give up and move on. The most I ever lost before I found a working combination was $750 in the hole; and when I did get it profitable, it was (and still is) only pulling about $4 profit a day. I have 160 days left before that project is in the black

Tags: Online Moola by John Hasson
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Instead of talking about how to make money online, I’ll just do another site.

I’ve already found an offer with ABC Leads. I’m going to put together a quick web page and start promoting it with PPC. I’ll let you know how I do

I’m off to make some cash.

Tags: Online Moola by John Hasson
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