Posts Tagged ‘google’

Posted by: Bob Dunlap, Director of Marketing

Virtually all mature markets have at least two strong, if not dominant, competitors.  Right now, Internet search has only one, named Google.  While Google is clearly the 800lb gorilla, competitors like Yahoo and MSN are always working on their algorithms, tools, and partnerships in an effort to take some of Google’s market share.

Now, Google may have yet another competitor. Former employees of the Mountain View, CA firm have launched Cuil (pronounced “cool”), a new search portal. They say it delivers more relevant results than any other search engine (yeah, I know, we’ve heard that before…). Will it be as good as or better than Google? Will it deliver the results that surfers and affiliate marketers are looking for? It’s way too early to tell.

Putting a dent in Google’s search dominance has proven to be a very tall task. Is this finally the one to watch? We’ll all stay tuned to see if “cool” lives up to its name.

Posted by: Beau Blackwell, Marketing Coordinator

Many of our product publishers and affiliates turn to Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, such as Google Adwords, to help drive quality traffic to their sites. While there are many ways to improve the performance of PPC advertising, one of the most useful, but occasionally overlooked, methods is a technique called daypart bidding.

Daypart bidding, also known as Ad Scheduling in Google Adwords, is a tool that is offered by both Google and MSN’s AdCenter. It allows you to adjust your bids in a particular PPC advertising campaign, based both on the day of the week and the time of day. You can turn off campaigns completely, or boost your bid to double your normal bid or more. It’s quick and easy to use, and gives you a great deal of control over your advertising.

While this technique can be especially useful for businesses with specific operating hours, it can also be very advantageous for online-only businesses like ClickBank clients. Since ClickBank reports the time of day of every sale, it can be helpful to analyze what days and times deliver the most value for you, and then adjust your advertising bids accordingly. For some people, this may be during normal business hours, but depending on the product it could be late at night or on the weekend.

Once you’ve identified your “prime time,” you can adjust your bids to make sure your product or site is getting maximum exposure at that time. Likewise, if there’s a particular day or time that your site just can’t seem to convert, you can turn down your bids during those times to save your advertising budget for more effective periods.

One great thing about daypart bidding is that you can make use of it even if you don’t have any kind of Web site analytics installed. All you need are the PPC advertiser’s traffic reporting and ClickBank’s sales reporting to start improving your advertising efforts and getting the most return on your investment. To achieve the biggest improvements, though, you should combine ClickBank’s reporting with Web site analytics and testing to get a complete picture of your site’s traffic and sales.

If you haven’t already tried daypart bidding, give it a shot and see how much more you can get out of your budget!

Posted by: Beau Blackwell, Marketing Coordinator

If you’re an affiliate who runs your own site and promotes it through Google Adwords, improving your Quality Score can be the difference between an advertising campaign that’s mediocre and one that’s extremely profitable. One tactic for improving Quality Score is to make sure that your Web site has a privacy policy, and that your landing page directly links to it. Many affiliates skip over creating a privacy policy on their site, especially if they have created many different Web sites to feature different products.

If you don’t have the time or inclination to become a legal expert, BBBOnline has created a privacy policy template that you can modify to fit your Web site. You’ll just need to plug in a few details about your site, and add or delete certain sections of the policy to reflect your site’s details and marketing policies. Then you’ll need to create a link to the page, preferably in the site footer so it will be linked to from every page within the site. For 10 minutes’ worth of work, it’s one of the easiest ways to improve your site and get better performance out of your advertising efforts.

Even if you don’t use Google Adwords, having a clearly worded privacy policy can make your site appear more trustworthy to visitors, leading to higher conversion rates. One of the biggest hurdles to making a sale online is convincing nervous visitors that their personal information is safe with you, and a privacy policy can go a long way to reassuring them that they can trust you. It’s unknown whether Google rewards sites with a privacy policy in natural search results, but for the small amount of effort required, it’s well worth adding a privacy policy just in case they do.

Posted by: Kristen M., Marketing Communications Manager

Technology advances and so does your business. A recent post talked about how people’s behavior and uses of search and small screens change on weekends.

Now, with the new $199 iPhone arriving this month and Google’s Android on the way, more pressure than ever will be placed on all cell phone and PDA makers to up their game. Odds are, more and more people will be using the portable device for finding and using information, especially as surfing the Net from these devices becomes faster.

This is going to build more demand for products and services, and not just technology widgets, which can be delivered on that platform. It’s a hot market that is waiting for ClickBank product publishers and affiliates to tap into its potential.

Posted by: Kristen M., Marketing Communications Manager

Businessweek has an interesting story this week about the different Web uses – one on the “big” screens of laptops and desktops and the small screens of PDAs like BlackBerry and the iPhone – and the difference between weekday and weekend usages.

The stats show that people’s habits change away from Google and Yahoo! when they are searching for information on a portable device. The story reports that “The fastest-growing mobile-Web categories relate to weather, entertainment, games, and music.”

Clearly, for product publishers and affiliates, this presents a business opportunity – what is the next generation of products and offerings that will appeal to people on the smaller format?

Posted by: Beau Blackwell, Marketing Coordinator

As an online businessperson, one of the most important assets you have is your Web site. While many people spend a lot of time early on building their Web site and getting everything exactly how they want it, they often neglect an important next step to success, which is testing. By testing, I mean consistently trying out new text, images, offers, and site layout, to make sure that your site is achieving your goals as efficiently as possible.

In the past, performing testing and analyzing the results meant spending a lot of money on a Web stats package, or paying an outside consulting firm to analyze your data and make recommendations that weren’t guaranteed to pay off. Fortunately, these days there are free Web-based tools that make it easier than ever for small business owners to understand how their Web site is performing and make adjustments that have a positive impact on their business.

Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer are two of the more useful free tools available. If you’re not using them, you’re missing out on vitally important business data. I won’t go into details here about how to install or use these tools, as Google has lots of good advice and FAQs to address those issues. Fortunately, these programs are designed with the average website owner in mind and don’t require a lot of technical knowledge to set up and use.

First off, if you’re not using Google Analytics or some other Web stats package, you should be. Google Analytics has revolutionized Web businesses by helping Web site owners understand where their traffic is coming from, and what visitors are doing once they’re on the site, for free.

Second, once you’ve got a good grasp on what is happening on your Web site and what your traffic is doing, you should consider trying Google’s Website Optimizer tool. It’s also free, and integrates easily with Google Analytics. The Website Optimizer allows you to quickly and easily change out text, images, and layout on your site and see what effect the changes have on your site’s ability to convert visitors into customers. Google automatically handles the tedious process of swapping out the HTML code and provides you with a series of reports that will show you the best combination of content for your site.

Rather than merely guessing at what your visitors want, it makes a lot of sense to actually put your Web site design to the test and let the data tell you whether it’s working as well as you’d like. No matter how successful your online business is already, chances are good that your site could convert even better with some simple tweaks. One thing to remember is that even if you make some improvements to your site through testing, keep at it! Every small change you make that improves your conversion rate also helps your bottom line and makes you more money in the end. Since the testing is totally free except for your time, it’s one of the smartest ways you can grow your business. Now get out there and start testing!

Posted by: Bob Dunlap, Director of Marketing

If you are an internet marketer, I’m sure you are watching the merger (takeover?) talks between Microsoft and Yahoo with the same level of interest that we are.

We don’t have a dog in that fight, but it still has far-reaching implications for our industry. A lot of successful affiliates are successful because they’ve figured Google out – among other things. Google is a verb for a reason. They are the 800lb gorilla. But what if the merger goes through?

If there is a merger, Google won’t be displaced overnight. Recent market research shows that Microsoft and Yahoo would still have a long way to go in trying to dethrone Google. Maybe the combined search engines wouldn’t have an impact on the search marketing industry at all, in the short term. Combining the number two and three search sites together, though, might change some of the rules of the game, bring a new twist to the paid search marketplace, and make Google sweat a little. Who knows how that would impact searches – or pricing for keywords?

Even if this merger doesn’t end up happening or takes a different form than the original takeover plan, it’s an important reminder that the online world is never stable. Just when we think we have it mastered, a new player comes along that changes the rules, like Google did for search, YouTube did for online video and MySpace did for what we now call social media.

The rules that have applied to our brick and mortar friends for years apply to the online marketplace as well – the people that stay in business the longest are the ones that quickly adapt to changes in the marketplace. That’s why we’re always innovating at ClickBank, and we’ve seen that the most successful affiliates are always ready to innovate, too.

Would a Microsoft-Yahoo merger change the way you operate as an affiliate? If so, tell us how by leaving a comment.