We finally got a click.  3 of them actually!

Nearly 6,000 impressions netted us 3 clicks.  The cost per click (CPC) was about $0.15 so we owe Google $0.45.  Our Click through Rate (CTR) is a meager 0.05%.  That is very low.  Should we be concerned?  Yes and No.  You CTR does not affect your quality score on the Adwords content network.  It does however affect things on Google’s search network.  We don’t have any impressions on the search network yet so don’t have to worry about that yet.

So what happened with these clicks?

Well, we can find out with our Azoogle sub report.  Do that by logging into your Azoogle account and clicking “Statistics” then “Sub Report”.

Next, make sure you can view the search criteria, click “Show Search Criteria” if you can’t.  Select your dates and enter your offer id number in the search box.  You should see the offer pop up.  Click on it and then click “Get Report”.

I won’t have screenshots for this part because my screen looks a little different than most (because I have soooooo many sub ids Azoogle makes me come back for the results).

Eventually you’ll get this information.  Note: Mine comes from Excel.  Your screen will look different.

The first line is jaygeiger1 and has 2 clicks.  This is from a link that I put on the first page.  This was clicked on by people like you looking at the offer.  We can disregard that one.

Next look at the lines with “kw_t1_S” in them.  We got no clicks for search.  What are these?  Well, Google likes to send out its bot to your page.  The page may change per variable so Google caches each one to assign it a quality score.  We can disregard these ones as well.  So basically all that we are interested in for now is the following.

I will go to “Text to Columns” in Excel and split the sub field by “_”.  I then ad some quick labels and only look at the valuable columns.

So why 5 clicks and not 3?  2 came from ps3.ign.com so maybe they were really the same person.  Perhaps 2 of the clicks had some sort of error.  You click count will NEVER match exactly.

 

So we are dealing with 4 keywords and 4 websites.  We can take a look at these websites and see if they suit our needs.

Well, the first one “gamehousegames.com” is a MFA site (Made for Adsense).  It only has garbage on it.  We don’t want our ads showing on it.  So we want to exclude this from our Adwords campaign.  To do this we open our campaign in AdWords and click “add” by the excluded sites.

We then just add in gamehousegames.com to the next page and click “Exclude Sites”.  Make sure you click “Save All Exclusions” to have the exclusion list saved.

Good.  Now off to the next site. playkidsgame.com.  WTF?!  Another MFA site?  Well, we’ll exclude them too!

So now we are down to 3 clicks that we can look at.  Maybe Google figured that part out for us before however those 2 sites are excluded for life from our campaign.

The next 3 clicks came from about.com and ign.com.  These are 2 very reputable sites.  Also note that the keywords are for “PSP”, “PS3″ and “XBOX”.  Now those sound like groups!  We need to do some re-arranging and create a different ad group for each of them.

Now here is the part that gets boring.  I am going to create the following 8 ad groups.

Nintendo Game Rentals Exact
PS Game Rentals Exact
PS2 Game Rentals Exact
PS3 Game Rentals Exact
PSP Game Rentals Exact
Wii Game Rentals Exact
XBOX 360 Game Rentals Exact
XBOX Game Rentals Exact

Each ad group will have keywords just for itself.  I’ll export the keywords and ads at the end of setting them up.  I will also post an example of the ad.  I do have to change the URLs for each though.  I am leaving the video game rentals campaign as it is but changing the link to be…

http://x.azjmp.com/02JGH?sub=videogames_kw_t1_{ifContent:C}{ifSearch:S}_{creative}_{placement}_{keyword}

The one for XBOX will be …
http://x.azjmp.com/02JGH?sub=xbox_kw_t1_{ifContent:C}{ifSearch:S}_{creative}_{placement}_{keyword}

That way I can track which group the click is coming from.

Here’s the campaign as it stands right now.

http://www.jaygeiger.com/examples/gamefly1.html

Here’s the results after Day 1.

There are a few things to note.

- There were no Search impressions.

- Less than 4,000 Content impressions.

- No Clicks.

- The ad has a Google Checkout image.

 

I’m not worried about the low impressions.  We just chose a simple list of keywords to start.

We shouldn’t worry about no clicks either.  If we were showing on the search network then no clicks for 4,000 impressions would be a bad thing.

Having the Google Checkout image is a really good thing.  It draws more attention to our ads however, this may only be shown on search impressions (not certain but I think that’s the case).

 

So how do we proceed?  Well we proceed by adding more adwords.  We really need some search impressions.  This time around I won’t get too creative but will take a stab at it without doing too much keyword research.  More to come on this one in the next post.

You need an AdWords account.

In Adwords, login and click on Create a Campaign: Keyword Targeted.

This brings us to a page where we can enter more info about our campaign.

I named this campaign “Video Game Rentals”.  My first ad group will be called “Video Game Exact Direct”.  I added “Exact” and “Direct” to the name.  “Direct” was added because this group will go directly to the offer with no intermediary landing page.  “Exact” was added exact because I will only be using exact keywords.  Find out more about “Exact” later.

We will only target English speakers for this campaign so we will leave the “Target language” as English.

Next we choose where this ad will be shown.  For this answer we need to look back at our Azoogle Offer.

This offer only wants traffic from the United States so we won’t add to that.  Always check this though, especially for software related offers.  Canada usually goes hand and hand with the US.  Also the UK, Australia and New Zealand pops up quite often.

Now we need the link from Azoogle.  This is on the Azoogle offer page.  For this I typed in the word SUBID in the “Sub ID” box.  You can see that it adds “?sub=SUBID” to the query.  The sub id can be changed dynamically.  The idea behind Sub IDs is that you add information to them that tracks the ad, ad group, campaign, date/time, keywords, etc… so that you know what works.  A lot of people mask these so that NOBODY including the affiliate company knows the keywords and demographics that they use.  We will keep it simple in our experiment because we don’t expect to make money either way.

We copy that link and we will ad it to our ad back in AdWords.  We are going to replace “SUBID” with this long string.

kw_e_ta1_{ifContent:C}{ifSearch:S}_{creative}_{placement}_{keyword}

“kw” tells us that this is a Keyword Sub ID.
“e” tells us that this will be only exact keywords.
“ta1″ tells us that this is Text Ad #1.

{ifContent:C}{ifSearch:S} : This gets replaced with a “C” if the visitor comes from Google’s content network  It is an “S” if the visit is from Google’s Search Network.

{creative} : This is the internal ad number that Google uses.  It is almost useless because you have to view AdWords source page to view the ad number.  Maybe Google will add in a way to see this easily at a future date so we just leave it in there.

{placement} : This is the base URL that the add was shown on.  It is very useful to track the placement so you know which sites work better than others.  If a site performs super well for you you can create a new campaign just for that site.

{keyword} : For search this is what the user was searching for.  For content this was the term on the page that triggered the ad to be shown.  They are slightly different but related.

So the Destination URL we put into Google is x.azjmp.com/02JGH?sub=kw_t1_{ifContent:C}{ifSearch:S}_{creative}_{placement}_{keyword}.

The page that visitor will end up on is www.gamefly.com.  So we set the Display URL to www.gamefly.com.  If you have a different URL than your end URL, your ad will be rejected.

For the ad text, we are keeping it simple.

Headline: Video Games by Mail $8.95
Line 1: Rent video games for $8.95
Line 2: 10 day free trial. No obligations.

I like to get the price in the headline.  You get less clicks but each visitor is more likely to signup if they know the price.

For line 1 I started out with the word “Rent”.  This is because I wanted the visitor to realize we are renting games for $8.95, not selling them.

For line 2 I want the user to realize they can signup for a free trial.  They still need to enter their credit card info but aren’t obligated, they can cancel within the 10 days and not be charged anything.

The next step is to pick your keywords.  I will start off with a very simple list.

[games rental video]
[ps2 game rentals]
[ps2 games rental]
[ps3 game rentals]
[ps3 games rental]
[psp game rentals]
[psp games rental]



[wii game rentals]
[wii games rental]
[xbox game rentals]
[xbox games rental]

We went put all of our keywords in square brackets.  We did this so our ad would show only when the exact words were typed in.  If we didn’t have them then our ads would show for things like XBOX GAME RENTALS SUCK or HOW TO GET FREE PS3 GAME RENTALS.  We only want the exact for now.  We’ll expand our keywords later and will branch out into Broad Keywords and another type called Phrase Keywords.

Next we set the budget.  I am going to do $100.00 per day and pay $0.25 per click.

We then can see how much each click is estimated to cost us.

Then we just go to the next page and save our campaign.

Here it is.

There is still a lot more that can be done.  This will be detailed in more posts.

My estimates right now is that this campaign wouldn’t earn any money and get VERY few clicks.

You can expect posts about “Finding More Keywords”, “Tweaking Campaigns”, “Tracking Performance”, “Writing more Ads”, “Creating Landing Pages” and “How to Deal with Losing Campaigns”.

I haven’t gotten much feedback for my Azoogle/AdWords demo.  A lot of people are interested in this kind of thing.  They just aren’t motivated to give much feedback.  They probably don’t think it will be worthwhile for them.  They also don’t want to give up their Niche.

I am not asking for your niche.  It may be good to suggest a niche that you’ve failed in.

1.  You want a product that isn’t going to go away.  Choose an offer that has been around for a while (I’ll show you how below.)

2. Choose an offer that isn’t flooded/overpopulated.

3. Choose an offer you believe in or know a lot about.

 

1. In Azoogle, the older offers have a lower offer id.  Simply sort by this offer id to find the older offers.  The older offers are more likely to be staying around in the future.  Newer ones may not work out and may be deactivated.  So if everything else is equal, choose the older offer.

 

2. Some offers that are flooded include ALL ringtone offers, Blockbuster, NetFlix, VOIP, VistaPrint business cards.  You will want to stay away from those ones for now.

3. If you don’t know a lot about your offer, how to expect to convince others about it?  Imagine a car salesman that can’t tell you the horsepower or gas mileage of a car.  The same goes for landing pages.  You need to understand the product/service AND the people who want to use it.

 

So for me personally I think that I will try offers 3143 and 3423.  These 2 offers are for free 10 trial from GameFly.  I would have liked to see an older offer but these 2 have been around for while.  Azoogle is almost up to 6,000 on their offer ids so this offer probably won’t be going any where and if it did some other company would probably offer it.

I don’t think this offer is as flooded as ringtones and business cards.  Also there are certain niches that can be be exploited.

I know a good amount about video games so this will suit itself well to me.  Next up, how to promote an Azoogle offer straight on AdWords.

Thanks Azoogle for the food!  Meat and Cheese is definitely the way to my heart.

 

I ended my Kontera test before the $1,000 mark.  I ended up spending $848.50 for a total of 3,394 clicks.  I had impressions of 17,550 meaning my click through rate (clicks/impressions) was 19.33%.

19.33% is incredibly high.  Good campaigns in AdWords and Yahoo Search have a CTR of between 2-4%. Having 19.33% is unheard of from them.

Did I make money?  Well, No.

I brought in $338.50 in revenue making my losses $510.00.  I did this for you, my people.

$.25 was just too much to pay for a click with Kontera with the market I was promoting.  Also, it was hard to track which clicks were converting and which sites had them converting.

I will love to try Kontera again when they have an interface that I can manage myself and good reports.  Otherwise I would consider them if I could get $0.05 – $0.10 clicks.

So lets find an offer on Azoogle and start promoting it.  I’ll try going through different strategies and even spend a couple hundred bucks on AdWords to promote it to see if we can make money off of it.  The key factor here is that I am not going to hide keyword lists, ads or stats.  Here are the first 2 steps.

 

1. Find a product (or service) from Azoogle.
2. Create an Adwords campaign for the Azoogle product.

 

Now note, we will have at least 3 ad groups to start.

The first ad Group will be a direct to offer ad group that will be mainly targeted at the content network.

The next ad group will have a landing page(s) at Jay Geiger.com.  This group will be content only.

The 3rd ad group will be just like the second but only be for the search network.

 

So I am now taking ideas for niche/products.  Please comment to suggest one.

This post is inspired by Shoemoney’s Americans are Fat and Lazy.  Instead of arguing the whole thing I will argue against a couple of Shoe’s points,

1: “…Well I tried to put up a good argument but he kept pulling the card about how he makes good money working 16 hours a day but most American’s prefer to be on welfare living the easy life.”

2: “… compared to other countries we are getting out labored. We probably have been for a long time. I think that became aparent when the Japanese started taking over the US industry in the mid-late 80’s but then came the big tech boom and we started rocking it. We had the economy so really if you were just smart and had a great idea you had a audience that could afford your product.”

3: “…I am not ready to say that Americans are fat and lazy but I think our future generations are in real trouble. It has been a long time since this country has had such a poor economy and while people would like to believe its our politicians I would offer that its more that the world has changed and Americans have lost the economic advantages that came from just being born in the USA.”

My rebuttals

1: Most American’s are not on Welfare.  It’s silly to think that.  About 2% of Americans are on Welfare.  I attribute at least half of that to the a$$hole factor.  For every 100 people you know, at least one of them is an ass.  So it makes sense that at least 1% of the population, half the welfare population, are just abusing it because they are lazy jerks.  The other half might just have gotten screwed over in life for a little bit.  The best thing they can do in that situation is get educated and get a better job down the road.  Growing up, my household may have needed government assistance, but I went to a nice little state school, got a good job and have definitely repaid in taxes many times more than the $7,000 a year that the average family of 3 with dependent children got back in 1992 (it hasn’t increased that much since 92 either).

2: Labor in America is a touchy issue.  This is mostly due to unions.  The truth of the matter is that we shouldn’t want to be the best at dumb jobs.  Think of the adage “Work Smarter NOT Harder”.  We want to work with smart machines that do the job of 100 and intangibles like finances.  We work smarter and longer than most countries (we are #9 for GDP per Person).  For a nation we are #1 (Unless you count the EU as a nation).  We are actually 3 times bigger than #2.  The US accounts for over 27% of the world’s GDP.

3: Have we lost some of economical advantages?  Yes, perhaps even the majority of them.  However there is still a ton of economical advantages.  There is absolutely no reason why somebody can not go to school.  If you’re too poor, state schools are basically free.  There are loans otherwise.  This lazy, work smarter not harder mentality is a good thing.  We don’t want to be the ones that work 16 hours a day driving a cab.  We don’t want to make pennies an hour assembling toys.  We don’t want to die in our late 20′s from toxic chemicals from dismantling old tankers.  If we are fat, it’s because we’re too busy thinking (other than the 1% that are just a-holes that is).

So I added an add through NeverBlue ads last Monday for Picture.com to my Favorites website.  I haven’t been making any money with NeverBlue  this month after getting PWNED by Google last month.  I have a pretty high click through rate (over 8%) but ZERO conversions.  Here are my stats for all of NeverBlue for Favorite Part.

Nearly 10,000 impressions, over 800 clicks 0 conversions!  WTF?  I don’t think this is a tracking thing.  I think that converting for Picture.com’s offer is krap.  You are supposed to get paid a $1.85 when the visitor uploads a picture.  I am kind of surprised that not one conversion happened.  NeverBlue shows that the average CPC (Cost per click) is $0.283.