Ok, well it isn’t that bad. I left my car in Denver while I was at Affiliate Summit since I commute to Denver for one of my clients. It was in covered parking and all that.. but look at the dirt and grime!
It is fine, but sooo dirty. This is what it looks like clean. (Picture taken right before I bought it)
In reference to my list of working PPC engines, Neil asked, do you test them from the get go or do you only use them if you get a successful campaign in yahoo/google/msn?
You know, I should start with all of them. But really it depends on the niche or my mood, sometimes a combination of both. For example the most recent campaign I created seemed pretty saturated in the big three. I just wanted to run a small test to get an idea of conversion rate, so I picked a tier 2 engine. Since I know historically that the big three usually convert about twice as well as the 2nd tier engines, I can then make a better decision on my campaign when I go full blast with some base conversion rate statistics.
Vlad seems to think that CJ’s EPC is pretty much a joke. I do see where he is coming from.
Affiliate Managers using CJ seem to lean on a high EPC too much. So if an affiliate with a high volume of traffic but low conversions comes along, it can skew their averages and lower their EPC. They think that this will cause them to lose out on new affiliates because no one wants to work with a loser.
There is some truth to this. So what do you do? Well first of all make sure you have a relationship with whoever you are running a campaign for. Make sure there is a real person behind that CJ offer. (I admit I am guilty of NOT doing this from time to time) But if you can build that relationship up, you can find out what kind of traffic and people they are targeting. I personally like to talk to them on the phone, a 5-10 minute conversation can yield plenty of useful information.. what has worked for them, what hasn’t and where they are trying to go. It gives you direction when targeting their offer(s).
I found this one from Mark’s 45n5 site. He listed the PPC people he liked in a recent post. Man I wish I had met Chad. He has some really good information on his blog. I will agree with his stance on 7Search in the past, but lately they have really been performing much better (consistently) vs Miva–for my campaigns.
I thought I would update my list of PPC engines that we talked about at the Ask an Expert ASW08 session
(This updates my previous list)
1st Tier:
MSN AdCenter
Yahoo Sponsored Search
AdWords
2nd Tier:
SuperPages
7Search
AdSonar
3rd Tier:
LookSmart
Enhance
SearchFeed
goClick
Miva
PPC Engines that I have consistently lost money using:
Ask
Kanoodle
IndustryBrains
ChaCha
AdBrite
ContextWeb
Anything in the 3rd Tier I will test for a niche, but I won’t spend much time on it. 1st and 2nd Tier I will spend more time testing a niche.
