Look@Landingpages Blog

Another month passed by and our SEM showcase rocked again: We are still making some gooood money! Have a look a last month’s performance:

Every month my little affiliate page makes more money and becomes more profitable. This is not a self runner! Its some work involved, not too much, but you have to spend some time on it. You have to check the performance and optimize bids constantly, at least once a week. I would do it every single day if more money was involved. But after some rounds of optimization the campaign is very stable now and I can let it run for a while without shivering or panic.

Since I started posting about this showcase I experienced growing competition in this sector! I think we – let’s call it “inspired” – some affiliates to try a little flower page themselves in the hard online flower delivering industry, hehe.

Unfortunately most of these guys do NOT use any kind of keyword tracking. Why is that? Let me give you a hint: I think its almost impossible to do profitable SEM without keyword tracking, especially in areas with high competition like this. So people: Try your flower pages if you like, but please do yourself a favor and use keyword tracking!

To be honest with you: I never expected to make good money with this showcase anyway, due to high competition from advertiser’s SEM agencies. But we are above 30% return on investment – constantly!

Now you give it a try: Build good landingpages and conquer your niches!

Last week we released a new version of Look@Landingpages. That means we are only some short steps away from the final release, our official version 1.0 of Look@Landingpages! But for today I’m gonna tell you about changes in the current release. We fixed some smaller bugs and implemented two new key features:

• Support for international char-sets. The Excel LinkGenerator supports all char-sets now, so you can track international AdWords campaigns also in languages like Russian, Chinese, Polish, etc.


• More color in online statistics. We colorized the columns showing profits in our browser statistics. If an item (i.e. a campaign, adgroup, keyword or day) is profitable we show it in green, if it looses money we mark it red. This improves the presentation of the selected data.

Enjoy using the new version and please give us feedback on how things are going!

On June 18th, we invited a hand-selected number of well known German publishers in search engine advertising to our (S)EM Event to Munich`s Café Reitschule to discuss relevant topics about adwords and Co. and enjoy the European football Championship together.
As we always like to include a wide range of viewpoints we got external support from the usability specialist: Prof. Dr. Miriam Yom, eResult GmbH and the well known SEM Blogger: Lennart Paulsen.

Of course our Look@Landingpage tool was on the agenda as well. The open discussion gives us the opportunity to focus further developments for the tool. So please make notice of new, interesting features!

You find some nice pictures of our SEM event at Flickr!

Besides: There are still some (S)EM-Master shirts available! Go get them!

Read this tutorial to see how easy it is to increase your AdWords profits step by step with Look@Landingpages!

1. Preparation

• Keyword research, I do it mainly with Google’s Keyword-Tool.


• Stay close to the topic of your advertisers products; don’t use keywords that are too generic.


• Give your campaign a very fine structure. Take only a few keywords per adgroup.


• Always book keywords in all three matching types!


• At the beginning, set bids only on adgroups and never on single keywords!


• Use seperate campaigns for Google search and for Google’s content network.

2. Collecting Data.

• Set up landing page tracking correctly.:-)


• Now run your Adwords campaigns for some days. Make shure you collect enough clicks and performance data before you start setting new bids for adgroups and keywords. You need a sufficient data base to start optimizing cpc bids.

3. Identify best and worst performing keywords!

• Open up LPT online statistics and create a performance report per keyword.


• Sort the keywords according to profit.


• Open up AdWords-Interface to set new bids.


• Bid-down all keywords, that…
  
  
  
  • have a lot of clicks but no transactions.
  
  
  • have a negative cost-value ratio, that is all keywords wich generate less transaction provision necessary to cover the bidding costs.
  
  

• Raise bids for keywords that…
  
  
  
  • Have a lot of traffic, many transactions and a good cost recovery.
  
  
  • In doing so pay regard to the average position of the ad. If the ad is already at a top position (No. 1-2) further action won´t have much effect.
  
  

• Advice: For mere content campaigns you don´t need to bid on keywords; point 3 does not apply.

4. Evaluate ad-groups separately!

• Open online statistics and generate a report for ad groups.


• Open adwords-interface and go to the ad group level.


• Now sort both windows according to the same criterion ”ad group name”.


• Make a separate bid for every ad group in the same way like for single keywords.

5. Optimize constantly!

• Let the campaign work for a few days and gather performance data.


• Use the data and repeat step 3 and 4 constantly until the campaign works profitable and all mavericks are under control.

6. Extend your campaigns!

• Add new ad groups to your campaign


• Take keywords into account which doesn´t seem applicable at first sight.


• Try more generic keywords.


• Constantly repeat steps 1 to 5!

You all will know it. Its not a surprise. Especially not for Germans, but:

GERMANY PLAYS IN VIENNA SOCCER FINALS!

Last week we had a small SEM event with some of our publishers and got some nice, white soccer trikots printed. Slogan (German): “(S)EM Meister 2008”!

We have some nice shirts left and wanna give them to YOU! But nothing is completely for free, hehe, so we have a little CONTEST for everybody who wants to have a zanox soccer shirt. Here is what you have to do:

• The topic is: zanox, EuroCup, afiliates and most important: SEM.

• The task is to create a short, funny video or photo greeting, so be creative.

• Load them up to Youtube or Flickr, tag them with the keywords given above and post the link in a comment to this page, so we can keep up with all participants. Don’t forget to add your name or account name.

• The first ones and the best ones will win the shirts (one per person only)! But remember: Time is short, the finals are on Sunday. Last day of the contest is therefore Sunday the 29th of June.

Here you see our marketing fairy Alexandra wearing one of the shirts:

(she’s wearing a belt on top of the shirt, its not a waisted trikot, hehe)

So good luck and be fast! Greetz, Denis.

UPDATE: Since we played the worst match ever, I realy can’t see these shirts any more! So please: TAKE THEM AWAY! Just write a comment to let me know your email …

May was definitely the best month for our showcase so far! This was no big surprise, since the week before Mother’s Day is the most important business time for flower deliverers. Lets have a look at the numbers first:

This month the overall search volume for keywords like “flowers, flower delivery, etc” was extraordinary high. Due to Mother’s Day we tripled the turnover of our little showcase and doubled the profit! I added another pic showing the run for Mother’s Day on a daily base:

Mother’s Day was on May, 11th this year. The whole week before was amazing. Ad impressions were almost 10 times higher than a week before and afterwards. Also the conversion rates were higher during this period: Everybody was mad about sending flowers around the globe! But also the competition raise during this period. I had to go up to 80 Euro-Cents per click only to mantain the average position of my ads.

I made a little mistake at the end of the hype: The two days before Mother’s Day I lost some money, cause the search volume was still very high, but conversion rates were going down dramatically. Explanation: People want to get the flowers delivered just in time on Mother’s Day – but this is only possible if they order two days before! Otherwise the flowers come one or two days later. Nobody wants that. So  people go on looking out for flower shops that do deliver in time, they find any and go on searching. I knew about it, and reduced bids by 30 %. This was way too less! I should have reduced bids by 60 to 80 % for these two days in order to stay profitable…

Find out more about trends and bidding strategies in our next posts. Stay tuned! 

On Monday next week (June, 2nd) will be the Affiliate TactixX in Munich. It’s a meeting of publishers, merchants and networks. We will present Look@Landingpages to the audience and we invite all of you to use our new keyword tracking tool! I will be there also, so please contact me there if you see me and are interested in testing it!

UPDATE: You can read again our (german) presentation of Look@Landingpages Kristin was presenting at the TactixX. Find it here: Look@Landingpages auf der Affiliate TactixX 08. I think the presentation very short and tells you exactly how the tool works.

History of all video tips. I decided to post all videos here for those of you who missed some out or like to watch them again!

1. SEM Rap by 101


2. Matt Cutts talking about snippets

To be continued …

Keyword tracking means: Full controll over your AdWords campaigns! Look@Landingpages shows you the important part of information, that no other tool can do at this very moment. Take a look at this!

Switch between your AdWords and your Look@Landingpages acount in order to optimize campaigns for maximum profit. Increase bids for profitable adgroups and keywords, decrease bids for bad keywords or delete them. After a little bit of campaign optimization you should see amazing results.

Apply for Look@Landingpages now, it’s a free keyword tracking tool for SEM affiliates!

This is a common mistake. If you see click-ins and SE-costs in the online statistics but no click-outs and no transactions at all, go on reading! A screenshot of the problem would look like this:

A lot of affiliates have a big, grown chaos in their zanox accounts. Good practise is, adding a new advertising space if you start a new website. bad practise is, taking the partner links of a former adspace to avoid going through the confirmation process. Normally there is no technical problem with this. But Look@Landingpages relies on a “clean” account structure!

Each Look@Landingpages account is connected to one specific adspace. You can add one LPT account per adspace, but each account will only track transactions belonging to partner programs of the connected adspace!

To get this right, you have to replace all partner links belonging to other adspaces by correct partner links for this adspace. In the worst case you will have to get confirmed again to some of your programs with the adspace you created the LPT account for …