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I just sat in on a teleseminar with Perry Marshall and Richard Stokes of AdGooRoo.com
I’m not familiar with AdGooRoo.com so learning about them was interesting. Essentially they *claim* to have a load of sophisticated data covering the paid search world, including who’s spending what, what people actually spend per click, etc. They sound like a Fortune 500 market-targeted version of SpyFu.com or KeywordSpy.com
I’m going to give you my notes (what I felt was important) along with comments –
1. Perry Marshall: his assessment of affiliates and Adwords are nothing short of uneducated assumptions – period.
I have to get that out of the way. It just bugs me and I suggest caution when accepting his advice.
2. The Biggest Verticals . . . Interesting but not surprising
1. Personal finance – anything that has to do with the wallet – loans, credit cards, investing, etc. 20% of all searches, according to Stokes.
Did you get that? 1 out of every 5 searches online has something to do with a desire for money (or the sense of lacking it).
2. Technology and computing – computers, handhelds, cell phones, etc
3. Travel – accounts for 6% of all searches
Of note, “Health and Fitness” only accounts for 2% of all searches according to Stokes. Of course 2% of a 213 MILLION searches PER DAY in the U.S. ALONE isn’t exactly insignificant. (That would be 6.4 BILLION searches per month for the math challenged at home).
My vote for the “What the hell are you talking about” moment of the call:
Perry says, “OK. That makes total sense. We’ve got our wallet and we’ve got our cell phone and we’ve got our travel and airplanes. Yeah. Yeah. That makes total sense.”
Money in Wallet + Iphone + Airline Tickets = Almost everything anyone really wants or needs.
How did we not already know this?
Maybe you had to be there.
3. According to Stokes only 10% of advertisers on Google were on Bing/Yahoo (formerly MSN Adcenter) at some recent point in the past (not sure, I wasn’t paying attention or it wasn’t stated). That number has grown to about 25%.
It’s time to take a closer look at Bing.
57% of Bing users are women and we all know women spend the majority of the money. J Actually, this isn’t a joke. It’s true. Compare that to Google where male searchers slightly outnumber women.
It’s time to take a closer look at Bing.
And the final shocker . . . Bing users make more money than Google users.
In summary, Bing is growing . . . Bing is used by women who have money (and we can assume they like to spend it).
Did I mention we need to take a closer look at Bing?
4. SEO is a factor – perhaps a significant factor – for Quality Score.
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this in the past, once or twice. 
On page optimization is critical but here are a few new things I learned.
1. Inbound links have become critical for paid ads too. Before you submit a site for an ad campaign, make sure you’ve established some inbound links that establish what you say your site is about. Tests show sites with inbound links get higher QS than sites that don’t and if QS is an issue for you then it is *possible* no amount of on-page changes are going to help you without some inbound linking love.
2. Landing page load time is highly important. Does Google get paid if a searcher clicks your ad but doesn’t make it to your site? I don’t know that for sure, but if slow page load is an issue . . .
3. Size of page matters; page bloat gets penalized. In other words poorly coded pages – and possibly long form sales letters will get killed.
4. CTR, of course.
5. SEO, Link building and keyword density. Kind of almost sounds like (aside from link building) SEO circa 2002 matters when it comes to PPC. That is keyword stuffed pages have shown to do better in PPC but I wouldn’t hang my hat on that as a long-term practice.
My two cents: I am finding common denominators with affiliates having problems with Google Adwords.
What? Not all affiliates are dead? Hell no.
But let’s consider Amazon or Zappos versus the average run and gun affiliate.
Amazon and Zappos are both well-established sites with links pointing to them. I don’t think it’s necessary to have hundreds of thousands of links pointing to you but any site with *no links* pointing to it probably isn’t site that anyone likes or trusts.
That’s one.
Two . . . Amazon doesn’t have ad campaigns running to 100 different sites. They have ad campaigns running to ONE site.
This is a big change to note. In the past I’ve been paranoid about exposing too much of what I’m doing in one place. But the game has changed and your affiliate sites now need to look something more like an authority site. In fact, I think that’s exactly what they need to look like going forward.
5. I’ve been saying this for several years now, but this is significant and Google has clearly pursued this thought with a vengeance . . .
Over the last six months Stoke’s company has seen an average of 7 ads per search page on Google decline to an average of 4.5 ads on those same pages . . .
. . . and yet Google revenues continue to climb?
How is that possible?
A) Because as I’ve said all along, who wants an advertiser willing to pay .05 per click competing with an advertiser willing to pay 1.00 per click? You increase profits by removing the .05 per click choice.
This isn’t a volume deal for Google where they’re going to sell 100 Pintos for every Lamborghini.
That nickel ad isn’t going to produce 25 times more clicks because it’s cheap.
That .05 advertiser often also happens to be an affiliate.
Look, this is where the men are separated from the boys. Who do you think is more committed to offering value and building a business? The person willing to invest in their business and make a real effort to please a prospect, or the person who’s just slapping stuff up hoping something sticks while putting as little on the table as possible?
I’M GOING TO SCREAM THIS AT YOU . . .
IF CHEAP CLICKS ARE YOUR GOAL, YOU HAVE NO PLACE WITH GOOGLE. THAT ERA IS LONG OVER.
As a related aside: I found this following quote FROM Google -
“Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline’s homepage when the airline’s name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want.”
6. Here’s an idea to try. Many accounts suffer from a poor past history and those are the people losing their accounts. If you’ve put up ad campaigns pointing to 20 different sites and 15 of those sites are poor quality according to Google, you’re going to get banned – and everything else will be that much more difficult for you.
I have recommended for years to start all campaigns highly targeted. IE, use very few keywords that are very specific to your landing page.
But I’d also try this -
Setup some campaigns that are hyper-targeted and that send traffic to Wikipedia. This will establish you as a highly credible advertiser because you’re not going to find better SEO’d pages than you will on Wikipedia.
Side note: Taking content *from* Wikipedia, re-writing it and putting it on your own site *does not* work. Trust me.
7. “Shock the Monkey” . . . Shock the Monkey is mentioned not because it has any real merit; Perry sounded like he was just making something up to feel he had something “Wow” to contribute to the call but in the end it was summed up with “I don’t have any proof and I haven’t figured out any way to prove it but I think it works.”
“Increase max CPC during low traffic hours – it may have an impact on overall reach.”
In other words an attempt to manipulate what Google thinks you’re willing to pay for a click could mean that your ad will be shown more widespread.
Perry’s belief is that by tripling his max CPC in a campaign for an hour or so per week he’s getting broader coverage of his ads.
Stokes said, and I’d have to agree, that an hour per week probably isn’t enough to influence Google one way or the other.
My two cents . . .
1. Attempts at manipulating Google usually backfire. I think we have a pretty strong history to support that claim.
2. If you’re going to try this tactic then I’d triple that max CPC – or double it, or whatever – by using day parting. Up that max CPC during the hours when nobody is going to do much in the way of search anyway.
But this is really underestimating Google’s sophistication. Because if they provide *me* with a tool that tracks and measures performance so I can maximize *my* revenues then don’t you think they do the same? Don’t you think they know that during prime time someone else’s ad is going to earn them more than my ad regardless of how I attempt to manipulate the system for an hour per week – or even twelve off hours per day?
Seriously people.
Have you ever watched the television show Lost?
It’s like the castaways originally assumed The Others were a bunch of unsophisticated hillbillies. In large part because that’s how the Others wanted themselves to be seen. Of course, the castaways were dominated until they recognized and acknowledged the true nature of The Others as being *highly* sophisticated and calculating.
You’d be best served by assuming Google are The Others.
They’re dangerous to play with.
They keep us in the dark and they’re INTENTIONALLY AMBIGUOUS.
They’re smart and they’ve probably already planned out the next decade for us.
They’re cute little logo and corporate image is a front.
Don’t be fooled by them.
Don’t set as your goal, “beating Google” or “beating Adwords”. It’s not going to happen.
Don’t underestimate them.
Instead, learn to think like they think and infiltrate. Beat the other advertisers trying to game the game. Patience is a virtue.
The days of gaming the system are dead.
Stop trying.
Instead focus in one direction, provide real value, and paint the target on your competition.
There are great advantages that you have as an affiliate – but you’re going to need to increase your level of sophistication to stay in the game.
Lucky for you, your momma didn’t raise no dummy, eh? J
All the best to you – X
Related articles
- Bing Creeping Up On Google A Percent At A Time (kwiksocial.com)
- Bing Turns to Facebook for new Social Search Results (webmonkey.com)
- Is Bing Cheating? (fool.com)
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