Online advertising also has the benefit of it being easier to reach your target audience. Whilst you can try to ensure that your television adverts are placed during the correct programmes and magazine features are in appropriate publications and facing relevant articles, the chances that you are missing out on potential customers. However, by advertising your products at the point where people are looking to purchase a similar product, i.e. when they search for one online, you are far more likely to have a higher proportion of sales per advert.

Another key advantage that online advertising has over other forms of advertising is that an individual campaign’s success can be very accurately measured.

The success of other forms of advertising, such as television adverts and newspaper pieces, is very difficult to measure. The companies paying for these campaigns have to rely on statistical information gained by surveys or users using a special phone number or coupon code. Then, the companies have to extrapolate information obtained by these means and apply it on a wider scale to try and estimate how successful the campaign is.

However, with online advertising, using text adverts, banners and adverts on social networks, it is much easier to track the return on your investment. This is especially true if you use an online advertising service.

Monitoring the success of any advertising campaign is essential. Accurately knowing the weaknesses of your advertising campaign allows you to fix them and ensure that you continue to increase the return on your investment.

However, these advantages don’t always mean that the online advertiser is better off. If you only rely on conventional tracking methods to tell you the effectiveness of an online campaign, you could miscalculate the benefits of your adverts. This will happen if you do not consider the weaknesses of online advertising tracking.

The first weakness of online advertising tracking is that sales tracking relies on a pixel being triggered in the event of a sale. However, sometimes, the pixel will not be fired. This is most common when a buyer is using several different browsers or browser windows at once. If the buyer clicks on the advert in one browser and buys the product on another, the pixel will not be fired.

The second weakness of tracking is that sometimes adverts are successful indirectly. A user will see your advert many times and so be aware of your product but never click directly on the advert. However, when the user needs your product, they will search for it directly and so purchase it without clicking on your advert. Methods of tracking the success of offline advertising take this “awareness” into account as a key factor in the monitoring process.

On the other hand, online advertising measuring services often ignore this characteristic of online advertising. Most online marketing monitoring services do include brand and product awareness in their tracking system. They observe direct search engine entries and similar searches to see if searches suggest increased brand awareness as a result of your campaign. However, the focus of the monitoring tends to be on conventional methods such as number of clicks etc. Meanwhile, many people are wary of clicking directly on adverts they see on websites for fear of inadvertently downloading harmful files and so this skews the results of the monitoring services. Therefore, you should make sure that you don’t ignore this crucial aspect of your advertising campaign.

By combining all these tips, you can ensure that you make the most out of your online advertising campaign.

Why it is harder to get traffic from placements campaign?
The answer is with how the ads behave in each of these campaigns that affect the bidding algorithm that works differently for each of the situation. You can almost consider it as two different systems.

When you set a bid in a placement campaign, you actually bid on the all spot. You will notice that with a text ad, the ad will hold the all placement. In a content wide campaign, the ad will be display next to other ads while your bid will determine the ad position.

Of course that there is more involves here but the actual bid. Variables like keywords relevancy and landing page score, are all been take into consideration. But for the purpose of this article we will ignore the other parameters, assuming that they all the same – the same ad copy, the same keywords theme, and the same landing page.

If you will take an ad group from a content wide campaign and copy it to a placement campaign, then adding to it the specific website you already know that the ad group triggered traffic from it, you will have to start increasing the bid to compensate for the fact that you are now taking the all spot. Or in other words, to make sure Google will still get at least the same income from this spot. Because at the end of day what Google care about is to make the most out of their inventory.

In a transition from a content wide campaign to a placement campaign, in order for your ad to keep showing, you need to make sure Google will get at least the same income from their inventory; otherwise Google will not sell that spot to you.

If your ad was on the first two top positions in a content wide campaign, usually you will need to start increasing the bid by 10%-15% to acquire that ad spot exclusively, as we know a placement content campaign behave. If you need to increase the bid more than 40%-50%, I would recommend you to work on your ad copy and your landing page score. Your ad probably was at a lower position from the start.

Today I would like to share with you my thoughts about this Google move. How affiliates marketers might get affected.

The display ads market is been controlled by several players like double-click (now own by Google), right media and others while the biggest Google competitor on that market is Yahoo.

The display ads market worth lots of money. The biggest companies in the world, big names like Amex, Coca-Cola, and GE are spending huge amount of money every month.

The PPC affiliate business model is based on arbitrage. We buy traffic, hopefully cheaper than what we get in return, whether it’s a CPA offer or revenue share.

When Coca-Cola advertises on the web they would like to keep the awareness for their brand. A brand campaign is different than a typical affiliate campaign. The goals are different and are been measured differently. Brands campaigns are known with their high budgets. And where the big money is, Google would like to be!

So after Google acquire double-click their next step was to integrate double-click inventory within their Google content network. Now Google enhancing their tracking system to meet the big firms brands campaigns. With the new feature that was lately released we can learn something about Google future intention, at least for the display ads market.

There is no doubt that this change will affect the affiliate industry:
1. More competition on every spot – in these case rich competitors
2. Brands campaigns, especially with the big names, includes huge budgets. This will increase the effective CPC (usually brands campaigns are been calculated by CPM).

If so far we got used to compete with performance based competitors, who are looking for a positive ROI, now we have to deal with a different players playing by a different rules.

I believe that this is only the start of a bigger move after the top advertisers on the web. The affiliate marketing industry is a major part of Google income but it’s also one of their top biggest headaches, caused by affiliates who use Google AdWords to promote gray products. At the ends of day Google is the one who need to deal with their users complains, maintaining support teams etc.

Google probably prefer to sale their inventory to the less choosy– Brands campiness. It’s not that Google have something against affiliate marketer, it’s just easier to work with big accounts rather with those who spend $100,000 per month (no it’s not a typo, Google will prefer account of $5,000,000 a month). As Google will fill those spots with Brand campaigns, more and more affiliate accounts will be banned and/or more restrictions will be added to AdWords policy. Either way, it’s not going to be easy for affiliate marketers, at least not at the Display Ads market.

I believe that during 2010 we are about to experience some major changes with the way Google treat affiliate marketers. In my opinion those who will play by Google (changing) rules will survive (Especially those who spend lots of money each month).

Affiliate marketers have ever been and will always be the smatters among the online advertising businesses. It’s something that no one will be able to take away from us. So keep your mind open and be ready to hear more from Google. I’m sure it will come soon.

In this post I would like to tell you about a real story: How a an affiliate marketer, my friend, left money on the table just because he was lazy to pay attention to the details.

I sat with my friend this week in a coffee shop. We do that from time to time, sharing with each other ideas. My friend showed me one of his new campaigns landing page that he has been working on in the last two months.

As a veteran affiliate, he did A/B testing with two versions of the landing page. He checked the effectiveness of his landing page in terms of click through – The percent of people who visit the merchant website via his website. But that’s the point where he stopped, because in his opinion the difference between the landing pages performance is negligible.
How negligible? 43% vs 37%

In this niche there is no doubt that 40% click through (CTR) rate is fairly acceptable and even a bit higher than the average. Probably this is why he was impassive about the A/B testing results, knowing that his campaign perfuming relatively well. That’s the problem with veteran and with newbie’s as well – we tend to forget where to put our effort in terms of time consuming.

Before you start struggle with your traffic make sure you did all in your power to improve your landing page performance (CTR). In this case the 6% difference worth more than $1,000 in net revenue per month!

But you will probably not get convinced, as my friend was not, until you will see the math behind it. So here we go:

The average daily clicks to his page is 600 (yep, it’s a small/mid campaign)
The conversion rate within the merchant website is 4%
The payout is $24

The gross sale for LP 1 is:
600 * 0.43 * 0.04 * 24 = $247.68

The gross sale for LP 2 is:
600 * 0.37 * 0.04 * 24 = $213.12

Since we are talking about the same traffic, with the same cost, the difference between these landing pages results is NET PROFIT.

So the total net profit will be
(247.68 – 213.12) * 30 = $1,036.8

With less than 5 minutes of work my friend will get an addition of ~$1,000 per month depends which landing page version he will choose.

Think that if you have 5-7 medium PPC campaign, 6% difference within your landing page can give you more than $5,000 per month.

More than that, to get the same addition net profit using the landing page with the low CTR you will need to raise your traffic by more than 16%!
(Assuming that the converting ratio will be kept for the new traffic as well)

Keep this in your mind next time you try to think how to increase your PPC campaigns performance.

For those of you who are not familiar with this term, Google Slap is a situation where for a specific domain (at least in my case) you stop getting any traffic from Google AdWords.

Since I am not familiar with this situation, at first it looks like that there was a problem with the AdWords billing. When you pay via invoice, potentially, there is the risk that Google will not record your payment on time. In that case they have the right to suspend your account. Few days after I spoke with one of the Google AdWords support team representative about it I’ve got an email from them saying that there is nothing wrong with my billing but Google decided that my website does not meet their guidelines and therefore the website got a low quality score.

To be honest I was surprised to get this email. From day one I kept the principle of doing things in the right way. I develop website with a clear added value to the visitor, using a unique content. I don’t use one page landing page just to send the user to the merchant website. But at the end of day, I’ve got my first Google Slap.

Obviously, it’s not a great feeling to get a Slap. You lose income, and you have no one to hear your complain. Google are kind of a giant that don’t care much that you paid them 15K a months for a single campaign. They have their own agenda and they will not reveal it to you, although they will direct you time after time to their guideline page.

However, I think there something that I can learn from this Slap.
I asked myself what’s the difference between this campaign and the other that did not get slapped. It’s a theory that you might want to check with your campaigns as well.
Please note that I am not sure how solid this theory is.

The campaigns that I’ve got slapped with belong to a very crowded niche. Lots of affiliates are sharing the same inventory to advertise their products. With the campaigns that I did not get a Slap (most of them), there is less competition on the inventory.

So they key might be the inventory popularity!

Google might not like the fact that too many affiliates sharing the same inventory. Experienced affiliate marketers know how to get more for less: raising the page quality score in order to get low bids, using the right ads to get a high CTR and also by that lower the bids.

It’s easy for Google to see which keywords are most wanted. And it’s easy for Google to slap those who make her less money. Google will not slap you if you are the only one who bid on a keyword. When Google don’t have alternative advertiser, Google will lose money!

Google never tell you why you’ve got a slap. Their guidelines don’t tell you much; especially if you followed their guidelines – they will keep redirect you to their guidelines instead specifically tell you the reason for the slap. It’s a convenience way to make sure they will get the best ROI for their inventory, keep doing business with you and yet stay away from the authorities who keep their eyes after their actions.

But you know; if you can’t fight it, join it.
Using Google AdWords I made lots of money. I believe that for any difficulty in life there is a solution that you can adopt. I know from my colleagues that every Google slap forced them to try harder. They all end with a higher income, comparing to the time before the slap.

Try to look for niches that the inventory is still not so crowded. You might find my theory good for your needs as well.