Costly Mistake With Google’s Site Targeting (a.k.a Placement Targeting)
In the hopes to driving quicker traffic to my site i decided to try to run a google site targeting. Unlike keyword targeted campaigns site targeting campaigns reside on other people’s content sites. Usually with a keyword targeted campaign your ads primarily appear in search engines and also on the content network if you choose to run it. In this case you are charged a certain amount per click. Let’s say that if your cost per click is 30 cents, each time someone clicks on your add you pay 30 cents. This basically how i’ve run most of my ppc campaigns so far.
Why did i decide to try site targeting?
I felt very bold and adventurous today. I’m also in a product creation phase and wanted to drive more traffic to my squeeze page. I wanted to direct traffic immediately. So that pretty much excluded many traffic tactics (article marketing, seo …). I could have added another campaign and use more keywords but i decided to go with a site targeting campaign. Under the pretext that i would be getting more targeted traffic. I also thought that i could ideally spend a lot less, because you’re charged on a cost per thousand impression. That means if you set your campaign to $1.00 for every 1000 impressions. You only pay $1 and nothing more than that. It doesn’t matter if you get 1000 clicks you still get charged the same regardless of how many clicks you receive. Which is pretty neat.
Why even bother running a site targeted campaign?
Am i crazy!? Humm… yeah lol i am but did you know that you can actually have extremely targeted buyers come to your site that way? Usually someone goes online looking for something and hopefully in my case to buy what it is i’m promoting. So the person jumps on google and types in that product. The person looks slightly to the right and low and behold!! My add is right there for them to click on. That’s great isn’t it? but maybe they were just curious and looking around. The person really had no intentions on buying anything. Well that’s fine and that’s where site targeting comes in.
The person looking for my product is on a relevant site. The person is already in the product buying curiosity mindset. The person reads and reads and sees my ad which has this call to action: Hey i know you’re looking for this, for this particular reason, well come here and get it. I’ve only tried that method for half of a day and i know that it works. Why, because i received feedback from them saying oh i was on a certain site and i saw your add, so i came here to find what it is i was looking for. It’s very nice to get that kind of feedback.
My mistakes:
I added too many sites to my campaign.
I didn’t even stop to think how much that would cost me.
I set my cost per thousand around $3.00 to maximize impressions
And the worst mistake of all was to set my budget at $100/day.
I’m glad i came back to check on my campaign because by that time i had already spent close to $80. Yeah! that’s right $80 in half of the day. That’s crazy!! I was not expecting this at all but it happened. So naturally i paused the campaign. I need to re-educate myself on running a site targeted campaign. On the plus side i broke a record by capturing a total of 40+ leads in half a day. Not too bad.
I learned my lesson and i will try to improve on my site targeting skills.
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How To Deal With Google’s New Display Link Policy
Hey folks how are we doing today? Today’s April 1st and you know what that means right!? Well it’s April fools day, the day where we run around pulling pranks on people. I don’t entirely know the rules, i think the pranking stops at noon..? but i’m not too sure about that. Anyways that’s not why i’m writing this post. I’m writing because Google will officially enforce the new url display policy when doing ppc marketing. The new rule is that your display url must be the same as the destination url. Meaning that if your destination url is TrainingMonkeys.com then your display url must be TrainingMonkeys.com and not anything else (like GetYourFreeMonkey.com… or something along those lines).
Why is this a bummer, why do i care?
Uh very simple big G (Google) doesn’t really like affiliate marketers that are lazy and just provide a link to a merchant. The whole ideology behind google’s search engine is to make sure that the user’s able to get the best possible information for the queries inputed in the search box. That means google wants quality content in order to satisfy its users. Now what many marketers including myself have been doing is simply buying ad space on the search engine in order to refer potential buyers to the merchant’s website. We’re not adding value, we’re just helping the buyer find a site that he or she were going to find anyways.
Because of google’s smart pricing options you can only advertise a certain keyword per website. Meaning if the merchant of TrainingMonkeys.com bids on the term "how to train a monkey", you as an affiliate will have to bid higher than the merchant in order to have your ad seen by others. This method can become quite costly and that is why some of us (me included) would just make up a url in order to bypass the smart pricing issue.
Google has had enough of that it seems and is cracking down on direct linking affiliates. That’s why they came up with their new policies. That really sucks for me as well as other marketers but it’s a great move by google because they continue to force us to become better marketers. There are many many ways to market via google and google just wants you to be able to provide relevant content. Content that’s good enough to satisfy the user. I just read a post by John Jonas explaining in depth what to do to deal with this new policy. He welcomes ppc marketers to learn and improve themselves.
You can read his article here:http://www.jonasblog.com/2008/03/dealing-with-googles-new-rules.html .
Enjoy!
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