September is apparently peak booking time for theatre tickets in the UK, so I decided to go for a big push on some of the most popular & well known London shows.

I’ve set up targeted ad groups – for these shows, containing well researched long tail keywords (which all have a decent KEI) and have carefully worded the ads, drawing on existing ads by well established companies in this sector. Most of the ads are displaying ticket prices, so the “clicker” knows what to expect & won’t click just to see what the price is.

Most of the ads are displaying in position 1 on Yahoo (these bids are around £1, on Google you are looking at around £3 for these keywords!!!) & the click through rates are currently between 3.5% & 14%, which I believe is not bad.

So, following all the rules & strategies I’ve read over the last couple of years for successful PPC advertising & marketing, how are the ads doing?

Well, I’ve had ONE SALE, from 44 clicks! Admittedly it was a decent sale & my commission will be £12 from it, but it has cost me £25 to get it!!!! On Google, I’d have paid triple that, without any guarantee of more sales. The companies that advertise theatre tickets on Google presumably make more money per sale than I do, but I still don’t see how they can make a profit when they’re paying such huge amounts for clicks!

It doesn’t seem possible to make a profit from affiliate marketing using Google (or even Yahoo), unless you’re using such obscure terms, that you then really should be able to obtain natural search engine positions for if they’re THAT obscure.

So, once again I’ll be grateful to break even on PPC & would love to know if any other affiliate marketers makes a profit from Google Adwords/Yahoo Search Marketing?!

They state “the Search-based Keyword Tool compares the content of your website against actual Google search queries to provide a list of relevant keywords which you don’t currently have in your AdWords campaigns. This new tool can help your business to grow and innovate on your keyword choices by taking the guesswork out of the process. Rather than adding keywords to an ad campaign based on what one thinks a user might search on, this tool enables you to manage your keywords based on what you know users are searching on.”

I visited the tool & was presented with a list of over 800 keyphrases, which Google says have been searched for & appear on relevant pages in my site. I decided to pick all the phrases that had a suggested cost per click up to and including £1.00 (246 of them).

I’ve spent the last 4 hours adding the phrases to my AdWords campaign, targeting the landing pages to the ones indicated by the Tool & using the suggested bids. However, as soon as I checked the keywords, all bar one are not displaying due to the bid amount being too low (even though it was the one suggested!). The quality score of the landing pages are also deemed poor, despite them being the ones that sparked off the whole process!

So, thanks Google; for suggesting I use your new tool; only to find that despite following all your suggestions, you STILL don’t display any of my ads unless I bid some ridiculous amount per click! I’ve just basically wasted an entire afternoon on this nonsense & on top of it, the new interface is rubbish! It’s slow, jerky & very frustrating to use.

What on earth is the point in giving me this information, which appears to be totally useless? Their e-mail ended:

“The Search-based Keyword tool actually found 2954 recently-searched keywords related to your site. For each suggested keyword, the tool will also show you:

• The average number of searches per month
• The competitive bidding level for each term
• The estimated bid to appear in the top three ad positions
• The suggested landing page for each keyword

To see all 2954 new keywords and decide which ones to add to your campaigns, go to www.google.com/sktool, sign in to your AdWords account, and enter your website URL. We hope that you find the Search-based Keyword Tool useful in driving even more business to your website through Google AdWords!”

Errrrrr! No it isn’t useful, has wasted my time & has not given me any new (& reasonably priced), keyphrases that I can bid on!

I will definitely not be returning to AdWords any time soon!

Even where PPC is concerned, Google should provide an unbiased platform offering equal opportunities for advertising products & services. Will Google start providing their own affiliates with a “discount” or other advantage over competitors? They way PPC costs have risen for affiliates over the last couple of years has indicated that they’re are not affiliate friendly, but maybe this will all change now they’re running their own network!

About Google Affiliate Network

Performics was founded as the first full-service affiliate network in 1998 and was acquired by DoubleClick in 2004. Today Performics Affiliate operates as Google Affiliate Network and remains committed to delivering affiliate channel growth for advertisers and publishers.

So, I’ve signed up to see what they offer – maybe it will all be American merchants for now, but it will be interesting to see how it develops!

The share price for Yahoo has been falling after rejecting Microsoft’s takeover bid & shareholders have been very angry at what they feel was a bad management decision. Yahoo has been under pressure from shareholders, for major management changes, while others have even filed lawsuits. This deal with Google is meant to assist Yahoo!’s under performing revenues & appease the shareholders.

With Yahoo! now only achieving 19% search market share, it appears that they have now abandoned the PPC market, its users and advertisers. Google have now increased their already dominant position and bought even more market share, which can only reduce competition & increase costs!

Competition also breeds innovation – for both search consumers and the advertiser & without it, will Google now rest on its laurels & just rake in the money? The paid search market is still relatively young and has been going through rapid changes and growth. But with the battle already won, the need for product innovation is gone. Microsoft may very well have deep pockets and control of the desktop, but Live Search lacks the traffic to be a true competitor – and they also seem to have diverted their attention elsewhere – at least in the short to medium term.

A lack of competition also means that advertisers are likely to pay more for each click. Advertisers will be forced to pay for Google, rather than the cheaper Yahoo! rate & without an alternative, the Google monopoly will mean that they can increase their charges as and when they like! Whilst this is great for Google & the Yahoo! shareholders, it is not great for anyone who is already struggling to make a return from PPC marketing.

Whilst a combined Yahoo!/Microsoft might not have been perfect, it at least would’ve provided competition for Google, benefiting advertisers and searchers alike.

With the small advertiser being frozen out of PPC markting by the big players with big budgets, it looks like search engine optimisation & high natural search engine listings will be even more important for affiliate marketeers!!!

Selecting the correct keywords for your campaign is essential. It’s no use paying for under performing keywords that will just drain your account, with no ROI (return on investment).

So how do you know which keywords are classified as the “right keywords”?

1. Start with a List
Generate a list of keywords based on words defining your product, location, product/services etc. Carefully consider what terms users are likely to use in searching for your products/services. It is essential to use the keywords searchers use, rather than the ones you and your organization use to describe your product/service. So things that may seem obvious to you, are never searched for & vice versa.

2. Choose Specific but Not Popular Keywords
You’ll need to select keywords that are specific to your product or service offering, but you need to be careful not to select keywords that are extremely popular, as this may deplete your PPC funds sooner than expected. Certain phrases may cause your ad to appear constantly & therefore clicked on by people not really searching for your specific product. For example, I have recently run a campaign on car hire, airport parking, airport lounges & airport hotels for My Travel Extras. Although many people may search for these phrases, you have much more competition & therefore less chance of standing out from the crowd & getting a return from each click.

3. Use Phrases instead of single words.
You stand a better chance of winning the search engine wars as this helps to narrow down exactly what people are searching for. As mentioned above, rather than car hire as a search term, try using
“alicante car hire” or “car hire at gatwick”. These phrases will narrow down impressions to those people only searching for these products, who are more likely to buy as they are specifically looking for what you are offering, rather than paying for clicks for people looking for general car hire information.

4. Consider misspelled keywords
Everyone makes mistakes when they are typing, so who’s to say that your searchers don’t make this same mistake when typing in search queries – take advantage of this.

5. Constantly Change Your Keywords
Keywords should be evaluated frequently for performance. This can be done by reviewing your website statistics to see which terms are being effective in driving traffic to your website. Use Google Analytics for this as it’s free for anyone with a Google account & extremely comprehensive.

So don’t waste your hard earned money on keywords that just won’t give you customers. Take these tips into account when evaluating your keywords and see the increase in your ROI.

There are a number of tools available to help you research keywords: Google has its own Keyword Tool which also shows the volume of searches & number of competitors.

I also use Internet Business Promoter & Keyword Elite for generating keyword lists & also investigating the level of searches/competition for keyphrases.

So, when Facebook started taking ads, it seemed only sensible to consider this as a new advertising arena for affiliate marketeers. I originally set up a couple of ads for Cashback Shopper, but these were rejected by Facebook for contravening their terms & conditions / It would appear that because my cashback site contains a section on Gambling sites, it cannot be advertised, presumably due to the Americans laws on internet gambling!!!! Don’t get me started on how ridiculous I think that is!

However, I decided to leave the Facebook ads for a while but placed a few yesterday relating to My Travel Extras.

Facebook ads let you target the ad to a users interests, so I decided to create a separate ad for each product on the site. For example, Theatre Tickets targets “people age 18 and older in the United Kingdom who like Billy Elliot, Buddy Holly, Dirty Dancing, Going To The Theatre, Grease, Hairspray, High School Musical, Les Miserables, The Lion King, London, Lord Of The Rings, Musical Theater, Musical Theatre, Musicals, Nights Out, Oliver, Oliver Twist, Phantom Of The Opera, Restaurants, The Sound Of Music, Theater, Theatre, or Wicked.”

Facebook’s ad creation system is VERY picky about punctuation & proper use of capitals & symbols, so a few mistakes led to repeated rejections & a lot of frustration! However, once you are familiar with what you can & can’t do, it was pretty straightforward to create ads for Theatre Tickets, Car Hire, Theme Park Breaks, London Theatre Breaks, Airport Parking, Airport Hotels, Airport Lounges & Short Breaks.

Initial assessment of the stats shows that click through rates are pretty low compared to what you would be aiming for from Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing, so the jury is still out. The best result so far is from Airport Lounges, with 0.12% click throughs! I’ll give the ads a week to see if they are worth continuing with.