46 and 47 » Affiliate Marketing

Kicked To The Affiliate Curb By A Commission Junction Advertiser

47 — Tue, 05 May 2009 04:00:04 +0000

One of our favorite advertisers on Commission Junction (CJ) booted us out of their affiliate program. They said we were “expired” because of our low sales volume with them. I suppose that’s understandable but it’s still disappointing. We actually did generate some sales for them. It wasn’t a lot of sales (a tad under $2,000 worth of products) but it definitely wasn’t zero either.

All of the sales came organically from one niche website that I’ve been slowly expanding and slowly marketing. I’m a little bummed because I’ve got a couple of additional pages of content promoting their products ready to publish. I’d planned to put them up relatively soon too. I think I’ll still add them to the website but I’ll probably end up sticking AdSense somewhere instead of using affiliate links.

It sucks being a little guy (and little girl) sometimes. I like the company and personally use their products. Oh well. Business is business and apparently we’re wasting their money. I emailed them to find out what kind of sales numbers they wanted. It’s doubtful I’ll hear back from anyone or get us reinstated though.

Another advertiser on CJ automatically rejected us as an affiliate when we applied a few weeks ago. The thing that sucks about that is we’ve got another niche website that’s perfect for them. It get very targeted traffic, it’s monetized using AdSense right now, and they already advertise on our site through AdWords. It doesn’t get a massive amount of traffic but it’s one of our most visited websites.

Sounds like a win-win doesn’t it? Well, it could turn out the eCPM stinks and we’d go back to AdSense. I’d like to find out at least though. Maybe if I pester them enough they’ll give us a chance.

What do you think about CJ? How about the whole getting “expired” and auto-rejected thing?

47
Knows that one day people will beg us to promote their products.

Yahoo Search Marketing Allows Direct Affiliate Links Now

47 — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 17:37:19 +0000

Commission Junction sent out a pretty exciting email last night. It said Yahoo Search Marketing changed their editorial policy to allow direct links. Well, happy Valentine’s Day to affiliate marketers! Apparently, CJ got the exclusive scoop on this because they drove this change.

Second, you heard it here first – YSM has asked us to communicate this change to the affiliate community.

I went to relevant page in the YSM Editorial Guidelines to see for myself and found the good news.

Advertisers may not list a site they do not control (or an exact copy thereof) unless they are affiliated to the owner of the submitted URL.

In case the old guidelines are not familiar to you, like us during our first adventure into pay-per-click, Yahoo required advertisers to send traffic to an intermediate landing page in the past. So if you suck at creating landing pages, like me, you probably used Google AdWords to send clicks directly to the affiliate landing page instead. Now, I think intermediate landing pages are better in the long run but requiring their use was a big strike against Yahoo. That was too bad too because I really like YSM and so do many others.

It will be interesting to see how much, if any, this affects bid prices as more advertisers get on the YSM train. One thing is for sure though. I am about to spend a lot more money with Yahoo.

Affiliate Managers Hold The Keys To The Kingdom

47 — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 22:52:58 +0000

We got the most amazing email about making money online a couple of weeks ago. Since we are doing some PPC and adding affiliate product links to a few of our sites, we signed up for a bunch of affiliate programs like AzoogleAds, Commission Junction, Neverblue Ads, and Amazon Associates. Needless to say, we get a lot of email from each program and the affiliate managers (AMs). Most of them do not hold my attention for very long but one hit the mother load.

It was a report of cost-per-action (CPA) offers separated by type of traffic (paid search, email, etc), payout for a lead/sale, eCPC (effective cost-per-click), and the conversion rate. I was floored. That basically tells you how much revenue people are making from a click (eCPC) and a bit about how they are doing it (the traffic type).

It seems obvious now that an AM would know those things and I feel like an idiot for not asking for this earlier. This information will not automatically make you successful but it is a pretty darn good place to start. Sneak a peak at what works for other people and then try your hand at that.

Facebook Blocks Specific Words In Ads

47 — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 19:14:06 +0000

I opened a Facebook account for the sole purpose of advertising a few weeks ago. No, pwning them was not my intent. Ethics aside, I am such a newbie that I would screw it up anyway. I just heard rumors of $0.05 clicks and we started doing PPC recently.

I figured the scholarship offer mentioned in that pwning post was dead and buried after a month but I thought I would try running it anyway. I needed something that would appeal to college students and that offer seemed as good as anything else for a first campaign to learn their system.

Well, I did not get past the first Flyer creation page. It took a few minutes to figure this out but they do not let you put the word “scholarship” anywhere in the ad copy. Once I removed that it let me move to the second page to enter a maximum CPC and daily budget. Not surprisingly, just adding a direct affiliate link to that offer in your ad gets it disabled right away too. You also get a message saying do not ever run this ad again with links to the Terms of Service (TOS) and Advertising Guidelines. I tested this with their new advertising system, Facebook Ads, a few days ago and saw a similar thing.

The real problem did not have anything to do with the ad copy or the link or the offer though. Someone violated the TOS by opening multiple accounts to get around the maximum daily budget limit (which does not exist anymore) of $50. Maybe it is just me but I wish Facebook would find a better solution than this.

How Accurate Is Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool?

47 — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 05:52:50 +0000

We started using Google AdWords in addition to Yahoo Search Marketing for our small PPC campaigns. I like Google’s Keyword Tool a lot for doing niche market research but its estimates are way, WAY off compared to one of our real-life campaigns.

The tool says our ads should show up in position 4-6 in the search results and get 20-30 clicks per day at $0.10 per click. In reality, our average ad position is over 90 and we do not even get 20 impressions per day. Oh yeah, that is at $0.50 per click!

I am not a PPC or AdWords expert by any means but that does not make sense. These are exact match keywords so there should not be overlap. The quality score could play a factor but that seems like overkill. The keywords are cyclical not seasonal. What am I missing?