The Unofficial DP Winter '06 Affiliate Noob's Challenge thread

ROTFL!!!! HAHAHAHAHA

 

Still a lot that puzzles me about adwords at times but I thought I would pass on what most of you may have already known but I have only just worked observed.

If you type in the word suicide (I'm fine btw ) into google.com.au coming via a US proxy (TX) you will get a .com.au ad, however you don't get the same .com.au ad if you type it into google.com via the US proxy. However you do of course get all aussie ads if you come in via AU on both .com & .com.au

So it looks as though some .au advertisers must be selecting to have their ads viewed by users in the US but if that was the case why are they not being displayed on google.com?
I quickly setup an adgroup and tested suicide in both just au and all territories (not the keyword tool) both were 13 cents.

Anyone have any thought on this?

Thanks
Jim

 

Thanks liquid, will read your post more careful tomorrow. Hopefully G get's my money... can't wait to start my experiment haha

 

Maybe it's targetted by Google version country instead of where the visitor is from. Meaning Google sees google.com.au as Australian platform. No matter where the visitor is from it will show Australian ads, since it's not likely for someone from the US to use the google.com.au search engine unless he has some kind of band with Australia. In other words that means when you have your ad displayed at google.com.au it will show up for both locals and foreigners as long as they use google.com.au. And that also means that as long as you are only displaying ads for Australia it won't be shown on the result pages of google.com or google.de etc.

So the ads shown at search result pages might not be based on the visitor but on the country of the google search engine.

Makes sense right?

 

Hi Liquidboy.....I think you may show a loss however it was a good idea to put Adsense ads on those pages, could make a difference, I average ~ $0.10 per visitor on a site with a page like that.

I actually checked out a couple of hotels on your page, I might holiday at Laguna beach sometime.

Jim, good point about .com.au ads or not showing from here in the US, it's supposed to be The "World Wide Wed" yet here in Australia we only get to see Aussie adds. It's bloody stupid, we buy stuff from overseas.

I'm about to sell my house on the Gold Coast and thought I would set up a webpage and use Adwords to promote it. I haven't looked into it yet but I think Adwords will let my ads show only in my area if thats what I want. I know you can do that in the US,
If thats the case the CPP should be very low.

PS: I don't know why people persist in buying .com.au domains, they are very expensive and can actually work against you.
My daughter is a wedb designer and is always talking her clients out of buying .au and instead getting them to buy .com.

 

Liquid boy I am very interested to hear what the final numbers were like. Thanks for the write up!

-- Back to my drawing board...

So I started up a new AdGroup for my Direct to Affiliate campaign. I picked an item that is new and fadish with a CJ affiliate that pays reasonably well. Sales should be worth $5-$15. I have no idea how long this item will remain popular, but there is virtually no one advertising for it

The product name has some common English words in it, so the keyword bidding was weird with some KWs conflicting with totally unrelated items.

AdGroup "Fad X" $10 max/day

Date Imp/Clicks/CTR/Avg CPC/Cost/Avg Position
1/28/06 971/38/3.9%/$0.13/$4.90/1.1
1/29/06 2,352/95/4.0%/$0.11/$10.30/1.2

Clicks and CPC for Jan 30 is down. Right now I am at 70 clicks and .05 CPC.

I had a sale for $8.22 - so maybe it is working

 

very Nice ROI alext

 

Stats are delayed so it might work out ok in the end

 

AdGroup "Fad X" $10 max/day

Date Imp/Clicks/CTR/Avg CPC/Cost/Avg Position
1/28/06 971/38/3.9%/$0.13/$4.90/1.1
1/29/06 2,352/95/4.0%/$0.11/$10.30/1.2
1/30/06 2,592/93/3.5%/$0.06/$5.19/1.3

Sales (Date is when sale is reported not when it happened. I assume a 24 hour delay.)
29-Jan-2006 $8.22 (1 sale) ~2.6% CV (estimated)
30-Jan-2006 $13.61 (3 sales) ~3.2% CV (estimated)

Ads: $20.39
Income: $21.83

Considering ad reporting leads sales reporting I would say this one works! Some of the sales are lower than what I expected, but there are enough of them to make up for that.

Clicks are down today, but CPC, CTR remains the same. So I expect about 50 clicks.

 

I think that you are on the good way.
Do you use country targeted ads, and keywords with [] and "" ?

 

I am having problems with Amazon text link.

First, I'm using Overture/Yahoo instead of adwords.

Second, When I go to Amazon and select a text ad in my affiliate account it gives me html code.

So my question is how do you add an affiliate link URL to the ad? It won't take the html?

 

Use the only http://and-your-link.html in that code

 

you need to look at that code and parse out the actual url, including the user id gobbledygook that is the last part of the url. Use only that url in your ad, stripping out any html tags.

 

So let's say I want to sell a Book from amazon and am given this html code. I changed the code so its not real code but for this example:

<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&tag=this-is-a-test&camp=1234&creative=1234&path=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fgp%2Fproduct%2123321232%2Fqid%123232323%2Fsr%3D2-1%2Fref%3Dpd_bbs_b_2_1%3Fs%3Dbooks%26v%3Dglance%26n%23231322">this-is-a-test</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=this is a test &amp;l=ur2&amp;o=1" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" />

What would I need to parse out?

Would I use this as my URL in Overture or Adwords?

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&tag=this-is-a-test&camp=1234&creative=1234&path=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fgp%2Fproduct%2123321232%2Fqid%123232323%2Fsr%3D2-1%2Fref%3Dpd_bbs_b_2_1%3Fs%3Dbooks%26v%3Dglance%26n%23231322

 

Is it actually against the TOS of Amazon to be linking directly to them from an AdWords ad? I read the Amazon Agreement over quickly but I couldn't see anything in particular.

 

Yes,that is it

 

Mark: Yes.

Skimmy: No. However, Google's rules state that for any given keyword only one affiliate can link back to the Affiliate master site.

So three hundred Amazon affiliates can bid on the term "widget", but only one will be allowed to link the ad right to the Amazon Widget page. The rest will all need to direct their ads to landing pages they create elsewhere.

 

Thanks, for the help I'll see how it goes and report back.

 

I target EN/US only. My site is in English and so is the product. I can use EN/foreign traffic in this case but I hadn't thought to. If traffic drops off, I might consider opening it up. Thanks for mentioning that! Edit: And in fact I just added UK and Canada.

As to the KWs, I am using about 20 non exact phrases that are very specific to the item. As I said initially, the product name has some common English words in it, so picking KWs was tricky. So most of my KW phrases are 4 words with some shorter ones with specific identifiers in them for example, say like a model number, or unique abbreviation.

I can't wait to see tonights stats to see if the trend continues

 

My listings in Yahoo/Overture were denied because they say my URL's were broken?

I can click on them and the work fine?

I'm going to try a landing page tonight and hype my product up a little before sending them on to Amazon.