Sometimes, you can learn a lot from your competiton.
We are buying PPC traffic on Yahoo for our affiliate marketing campagin. Our ads are in the top 3 spots, but lately we’ve noticed that our ad quality has dropped from 5 out of 5 to 2 out of 5.
We know from experience that better ads mean lower costs per click, so we took a moment to do a search on our keyword and see what showed up.
And… we couldn’t figure out why our ad quality has dropped.
- We didn’t recognize any new ads on the keyword. We still beat all of the other affiliate marketing ads and we haven’t touched our keyword bids.
- We’re still on average in the top 3 ad positions for our keywords..
- The change in our ad quality happened over the last few days - maybe it has something to do with the recent change in the way Yahoo deals with keyword bidding. Maybe everyone’s ad quality has dropped. (Then again, maybe not.)
So, we do what we always do. (Panic. And then try something new)
- Our 5 out of 5 ad quality ad used the phrase, April Savings! We are in the middle of April, so perhaps that’s not as appealing for some people.
- We created another ad to run against our current one. The search engines will pick out the most successful one.
- Our ads seem to be converting well. (The last two days, we’ve spent around $20 and made around $40. But, there were a few days in the middle of the week where we spent more on advertising, so we’ll have to see at month’s end how we did.)
- The landing page for the advertiser hasn’t really changed. (In December, the advertiser changed their landing page to promote an in-store sale. We think that took away some of our traffic who went to get the in-store deal.)
And, then we tried something completely new. We clicked on our competition’s ad.
We didn’t do it in a mean, black-hat, try-to-increase-their-advertising-costs kind of way. But rather, we wanted to see what other people’s landing page looked like. After all, we direct link to the advertiser’s landing page. (This advertiser allows direct linking, not all do.)
The link was a 301redirect to the advertiser’s page. But we wanted to see what their actual webpage looked like. (They used a .info domain name and we had recently bought .info domain names) So we just typed in their domain name into our web browser.
What we discovered was a bunch of mini-sites for various affiliate products. One page was neat. You could see a pre-sales page load up, but then it automatically loaded the affiliate link.
We couldn’t figure out how they were doing it, so we looked at the source code and here’s what we found.
Redirect your traffic automatically, instead of loading your presale page.
<title>Untitled Document</title><meta HTTP-EQUIV=”REFRESH” content=”2; url=http://www.affiliatelink.com“>
<script language=”JavaScript” type=”text/JavaScript”>
<!–
function MM_reloadPage(init) { //reloads the window if Nav4 resized
if (init==true) with (navigator) {if ((appName==”Netscape”)&&(parseInt(appVersion)==4)) {
document.MM_pgW=innerWidth; document.MM_pgH=innerHeight; onresize=MM_reloadPage; }}
else if (innerWidth!=document.MM_pgW || innerHeight!=document.MM_pgH) location.reload();
}
MM_reloadPage(true);
//–>
</script>
</head>
Seems a little black hat. Your traffic is automatically getting sent to the affiliate page without actively clicking on the link.
I think they use this code because Google sees a proper website page loaded with keywords. So perhaps this webpage does well in the natural search engine. (Perhaps not. I don’t know if Google is fooled by a meta refresh)
Maybe they do this because Google AdWords is cracking down on direct linking to the advertiser’s website. But I assume Google would still know that you were automatically redirecting towards the advertiser’s page.
Bottom Line: We’re going to have to monitor our ad quality and figure out why it’s dropping. We’re also going to have to do some more research on this redirecting traffic issue. (But, we wanted to store the code here in case we figure out why to use it.)
Question: Why would you use this redirect code in your affiliate marketing strategy?
(1 votes, Rating: 3 out of 5)
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April 22nd, 2008 at 3:35 pm
This seems sneaky. Does it mean you could get around using affiliates that do not allow direct linking?
I paused all my campaigns for now as I wasn’t getting anywhere with them and am looking for a new Affiliate to try it with.
April 23rd, 2008 at 2:13 am
I think the quality of post is the most important and blended ads is good too. Especially if the ads show as like the topic about you’re posting, it will give you high earn. But until now my site doesn’t have a yahoo index. I don’t know why but I’m not try to do something like SEO things, because I want my site grow naturally but it is takes time
Andi Eko’s last blog post..It’s about Wining lottery number
April 23rd, 2008 at 4:37 am
Hey Forest Parks - I don’t think you can get around affiliates that don’t allow direct linking because if they think something’s fishy and check out your site, they’ll see it automatically redirects to their site. I was wondering that too - whether 301redirects, meta redirects or any other kind of redirect counted as “direct linking.” I think it does.
Good luck with finding an affiliate program that works. I just counted in our CJ control panel 26 affiliate programs that we signed up for. We have the one working PPC campaign, a few others that occasionally pull in a trickle, and haven’t had much success with the rest. (We did get some affiliate clicks on our domain names project and our SkypePro review, but for the most part, nada)
We’d share the name of our affiliate product, but to be honest, I think it’s a fluke that we’ve got it going. If we can get a few other affiliate PPC campaigns running, we might share who we’re with.
Good luck finding something that works!
April 23rd, 2008 at 4:40 am
Hey Andi - have you submitted your site to Yahoo?
Thanks you guys for leaving comments in here. It’s nice to have someone to talk to. Hope you win the $25 contest.
April 23rd, 2008 at 7:07 pm
Ya know what, with all the Google smack downs and KNOWING the others will follow suit, mixed with all the misc. garbage trouble one can get into, I try never to even go off-white.
It’s just not worth it…it might take a little longer, but you know you won’t be taken out.
Dennis Edell’s last blog post..Sell More To Your Existing Customers: The Up-sell
April 24th, 2008 at 3:50 am
Hey Dennis - You’re right. This trick seems a little dodgy. We haven’t tried it yet, but it was neat to see what other people are doing. Personally, I’d be more afraid that the publisher would ban me from being an affiliate than getting google slapped. (We haven’t made it out of PR0 with this blog)
By the way, what do you think about running cash contests to get backlinks. I just realized that we’re offering a $25 comment contest, and we’ve gotten 4 posts linking back to our site. Seems a little bit like we’re paying for sponsored posts… but one person is getting all of the money. Is that a little gray?
WebDiggin’s last blog post..PPC Affiliate Marketing - Learn from your competiton
April 26th, 2008 at 9:03 am
To make money online is a large percentage of today’s population goal in the recession that is upon us. Small business owners and most major companies are looking to make money online too. With webhosting ranging from 6.95 to 20 dollars per month start up cost and monthly fees are far less than running a brick and mortar business.
April 27th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
Hey Make Money Online with Homebizseo,
(Ok, Dennis. I see your point about keywords as names
)
Even though your comment looks like a drive-by commenting, I’ll pretend it’s not. Thanks for reminding me that North America is in a recession. I don’t think you need to pay $20 per month for a web host. We’re on Bluehost for $7.95 per month, plus we got over $100 of free credits at Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing. (Now, they’re offering another $75 coupon with MSN Adcenter, so we could have received $175. !@#$)
But you’re right. Making money online might be a way to deal with the recession. Maybe. Right now our PPC search marketing campaign is targeting Canada. But, maybe we can find products that would sell well in Europe or Asia.
May 9th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Oops, somehow I missed your follow-up question.
I’d bet Google is aware of the contest craze and you’re certainly not the first. I’m thinkin’ as long as the post clearly states it’s for a contest, there shouldn’t be a problem.;
Dennis Edell’s last blog post..Broken Links = Broken Business. Fix ‘em Fast! I’ll Show You How.