affiliate.marketing.with.adwords

8/14/2019 Affiliate.marketing.with.Adwords

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Improving Online Business

Affiliate programs withAdwords


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Content

Content.................................................................................................................................................. 2Introduction........................................................................................................................................... 3Overview................................................................................................................................................ 3How to get started................................................................................................................................ 4

Setting up your affiliate account as a keyword trader ...................................................................... 5Finding Advertisers ............................................................................................................................... 5Start generating traffic......................................................................................................................... 7Product links or deep links ................................................................................................................... 7Editorial.................................................................................................................................................. 8How to find products that sell ............................................................................................................. 8Test, test and test..................................................................................................................................8Evaluate and find more opportunities ................................................................................................9EPI identifier ......................................................................................................................................... 12rey markets and cross country linking................................................................................................15Risks.......................................................................................................................................................15


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Figure 1.2The normal clickflow, from Google to the affiliate site and then to the Advertiser

With modern affiliate programs it is even possible to deliver traffic directly to the affiliateadvertiser, not even passing by your site. You do this by inserting the affiliate link directly intoGoogle. This way you can buy traffic at one price, and directly sell it a higher price becoming atraffic broker.

Figure 1.3Advanced clickflow, directly from Google to the Advertiser, not passing the affiliate site

Why would advertisers allow you to do this? Why dont they buy Adwords themselves? Well,many advertisers buy Adwords themselves. They have in-house people that work solely with this.However, there are so many words, so many situations, and so many languages, that they cannever come up with all the combinations that will actually lead visitors to a sale. Thats way theyare willing to give away a commission to you, so that you can help them get more sales. Also,there are other advertisers that think it is wiser to outsource this whole process to affiliates.

Affiliates will only get paid when they deliver results, but they also have the ingenuity to findnew sources of traffic and increase sales for advertisers continuously.

Affiliates are in reality expanding the marketing budget for the advertiser. Ensuring that ads areplaced in more spaces than if without affiliates. Also, since advertisers are only allowed to haveone ad shown for each Google query, more can be shown through affiliates that act as thirdparties. All in all, from an advertiser perspective the advantages with allowing affiliates to alsodeliver traffic through Google outweigh the drawbacks.

This traffic trading business is very young, but growing fast and today thousands of people earntheir living through trading with Adwords combined with affiliate networks.

How to get started

We will now go into details. You will learn how to set up an affiliate account as a keywordtrader, to find and apply to relevant advertising programs, and become accepted as an affiliate.

The last section describes how you can evaluate performance and minimize risks.

Google Affiliatewebsite

Advertiser

Google Advertiser


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The tracking parameters (see below) are the rules that ensure that a sale delivered by you, willactually be attributed to you. Different advertisers have different tracking parameters. It is veryimportant that these are attractive and ensures that all traffic you send will be credited to you.Tracking parameters are closely related to the tariff structure, since good tracking parameterscan make up for low tariffs.

Tracking parameters and tariff structuresAll affiliate programs have different commission structures and tracking parameters. Thereason for this is the different business models advertisers have. For example an onlinebank might need several weeks to see if someone is eligible for a loan, a CD shop mightsell thousands of CDs with very low margins, a travel agency might have a lot ofcancellations. This all adds up to a need for different tracking and commission structures and these will of course affect your ability to earn revenues on your traffic to theseadvertisers.

Tracking parameters Score

Generous Adword policy?

Allows deep linking?

Have tariff segments for top performers?

Recurring events for tracking multiple sales? *

Cookie duration at or above 30 days? *

Live trackback (No batch, which takes a long time) *

Well-known brand?

Easy sales process with many payment alternatives?

Competitive pricing and quick delivery?

* Explanation of terms (the others are find in the chapter text):

Recurring events mean that you get credited for additional sales that are made by thecustomer after the first sale has occurred.Cookie duration means the time after the click that a sale will be recorded, 30 daysmeans that a sale taking place 30 days after a click has been made will be recorded andcredited to the affiliate.Batch processing means that the advertiser is reporting back to the affiliate providerwhat is sold, instead of the provider recording this in real-time based on the trackingparameters. Real-time tracking is more accurate.

Some of these parameters are easy to find, other you might have to look up yourself, orask the affiliate manager for the program. For advertisers where all the answers to theabove questions are Yes you should spend most of your time. For others you couldshould evaluate and work with the ones who give you the best score. Eventually, it is

only testing that will show you which ones work best for you.

The best score gives you the highest probability of success.

Identify a couple of smaller advertisers with generous tariffs. Ensure that they have goodtracking parameters. See if they have a keyword / Adword policy, this dictates the rules for usingtheir brand in search engines. Also, try to look at yourself from the advertiser perspective. Theonly thing they will see is the information you have provided. Will they accept you as anaffiliate? There is a large chance they will, most advertisers are generous in accepting affiliates.Click the Apply button. Maybe about 50% of the advertisers will accept you, so you betterapply to a couple of programs when you are at it.

The evaluation period to approve or decline your application is usually a few days, but some doit in hours, and others takes weeks. You will receive an email with your status.


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When you have been accepted as an affiliate it is time to do business.

If you start with big brands and do not deliver results you might lose your status as an acceptedaffiliate to the advertiser. A lost status as accepted is difficult to recoup. Once you have startedto master this trading business it is time to move up to the bigger advertisers. When they see the

results you are providing to others, they will surely accept you as a partner.

Start generating traffic

Go to the TradeDoubler website and login. Look up the advertiser you have been accepted to.There is a shortcut under Your Programs. Find the place where you generate links, and readabout how to create your own links. You find this under Graphical Elements or Link Matrix.

Figure 1.4Copy and paste the tracking code

Take the highlighted tracking link (in the format of http://tracker.tradedoubler.com/click?...) andpaste it into your destination URL in the Google edit ad interface. See figure 1.4 above.

Product links or deep links

You get the best effect by using Product links, or deep links that it is sometimes called. Thismeans that when someone clicks on your URL at Google they will be linked directly to the pagefor the specific product at the advertiser site. This increases the likelihood of a sale or conversion.

Look for products that are good sellers, some advertisers inform about this. Some networks, havedetailed sales reports that can give you hints. Read more about this research process in the infobox how to find products that sell.
http://tracker.tradedoubler.com/clickhttp://tracker.tradedoubler.com/click


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Create a link directly to the product page for the product you have identified. Create thetracking URL according to the guidelines setup by your affiliate network. Below is a guideline:

How to construct your own URL at TradeDoublerhttp://tracker.tradedoubler.com/click?p=15657&a=407311&url=TARGET_URL

Replace TARGET_URL with the full URL to the product page you want to link to.

The different parameters in the URL mean:P = program id, equals the advertiser idA = affiliate id, identifies your siteG = optional, identifies a graphical element or other type of linkEPI = optional, see below, unique identifier that is reported back to you if a sale or leadoccurs.URL = optional, an override URL that the traffic should be sent to. Must be in the samedomain as the standard URL. Try to use a landing page that is focused on encouragingsome kind of action, instead of the first page.

You find the parameters on the right hand side on the program page for eachadvertiser.

Now, take this link and paste it into the Destination URL on Google.

Editorial

The text you write in your ad is vital for success and takes time to master. Use the advertisers URLas the visible URL on Google. Sometimes you have to add the word affil. or affiliate to thead. But we recommend you wait until Google notifies you of this, since it disturbs the ad andtakes valuable space.

How to find products that sell

When you start to work actively with Adword and traffic trading, your mind will start to look forhot selling products or products that are advertised on TV or similar.

Look for new product launches, new artists giving out new records, new movies, authors thatreceive prices, etc.

If a company is advertising for something on TV, people will search for it on Google. If a productis mentioned on a show, people will search for it. Buy the Adwords that relate to these products,you can even buy the whole product name. After a while you will start to understand how to

analyse things in happening around you in order to maximize your return on investment online.

Test, test and test

When you feel comfortable about the links, editorial and Adwords, it is time to do a testcampaign. You must receive at least 1000 clicks over a period of 30-40 days before you can do aproper evaluation. This means that it takes time and you should probably run a couple ofcampaigns simultaneously to get up to speed faster. Think about this when you setup yourbudget in Google.

Once you have affiliate links setup and live at Google, you must test them. This is a must, URLstend to become more complicated and it is easy to mess them up. You will probably find thatthey dont work the first time, at least this always happen to me. Then you have to go back andsee where the problem is. First test the link you created to the advertiser. Test it by pasting it


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directly into your browser. Does it work? Ok, then you have to look for errors when you put itinto Google.

Sometimes long URLs with foreign characters do not work well. In these cases you must ensurethat the URL is URL encoded. If you do not know what this is, then search in Google for URLencoded and you will get an answer.

Evaluate and find more opportunities

It is not until you get a couple of campaigns working that the real opportunities arises. We willnow go through the different tools you can use to evaluate performance and how you can spotnew opportunities.

When you have a couple of campaigns going with 5-10 advertisers, it is time to start working onevaluation and return on investment measurement (ROI). You have to make sure that youbenefit from the campaigns that work best, and shut down those that dont work. The ones thatwork best can give you further ideas on how to find more Adwords that can deliver results.

Your primary report on TradeDoubler is of course the Overview report. Run this in parallel toyour Google reports for the same time period to compare results.

Figure 1.5 Screenshot from Google Overview report

This is the first report you get when logging on to Google Adwords administrative interface, youhave seen this in earlier chapters. Here you can see that in this example you have spent SEK 49.22today.


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Then you log on to TradeDoubler (do this in another window so that you can have both opensimultaneously) and load the Overview report for the same date.

Figure 1.6TradeDoubler Overview report

The Overview report shows the advertisers performance in a chosen period. Imp meansimpressions, since you are making your own links and letting Google to the Adserving you willnot be able to see this metric through TradeDoubler. UV means unique visitors, and is thesame as clicks in Google. CTR is not applicable since impressions are not counted. Leadsare for affiliate programs that measure this instead of sales. LR (leadrate) or CR conversionrate shows you the conversion from click to sale. Total com shows you have much you haveearned in commission on the different programs.

In the this report you can see that in total commission during this time period you have earnedSEK 886. Hence the preliminary profit you have made this day is 886 49.22 = 836.78. SEK 836.78is not bad at all! The overview report gives you an overview, and is used to show you thateverything is going well. You cannot draw any conclusions from it; we need other reports for

that.


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The second report you should look at is the Event breakdown report. This report shows youwhat is probably the most important information. What are you selling? Are you selling theproducts you expected to sell, are you selling others things? Maybe you can get ideas on newproduct specific Adwords to use from this report.

Figure 1.7Screenshot event breakdown report

Event in the report above shows you the merchant specific event that was triggered. This isusually nothing to care about. The Order value shows you the value of the order youdelivered. The Product number and product name is reported by some advertisers and give youvaluable information. Not all advertisers have implemented this tracking feature.


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EPI identifier

In order to track the ROI of each campaign, you can inset an identifier into each tracking URL. InTradeDoubler it is called EPI, which is short for Enhanced Publisher Integration.

How does it work?

Once your account has been enabled by TradeDoubler, you can add an extra parameter to thetracker link called "Epi" and then assign any value you wish to each tracker link. The parametercan be both letters and numbers or any combination thereof. The parameter can at the mostinclude 64 characters.

The tracker linkThe Epi parameter can only be implemented for links that you generate yourself, so it not possiblefor you to download them directly from the TradeDoubler interface. The link looks like this (this isan example link and does NOT contain your site ID):

http://tracker.tradedoubler.com/click?p=123&a=654321&epi=YOURCODE

Instead of YOURCODE you can for example write adword_nokia3110 if you are running acampaign for this phone.

You can either use your EPI parameter to identify traffic from ad groups on Google, or as anoverride on specific keywords by using advanced settings, such as below:

Figure 1.8 Google power posting

The number in the above box is optional and gives you the possibility to set a manual maximumprice on specific keywords.


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The results from using the EPI parameter can be seen in two useful reports on TradeDoubler. Thesimplest one is called EPI report and shows you the sales or leads that have been generatedthrough your EPI links.

Figure 1.9Screenshot EPI report

The second more advanced and useful report is called Keyword report. To access this reportyou must inform TradeDoubler by email that you want this report, it is free and anyone can getaccess to it just by asking.

Figure 1.10Screenshot Keyword report

The dedicated keyword report at TradeDoubler is designed to give you feedback on the specifickeywords you buy, what the conversion to sales. Another great benefit of this report is that you


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can also see the exact phrase that was entered. These phrases might contain other keywords,which might give you ideas on other keywords you could buy.

If you use the EPI parameter to reflect your campaign groups it is easier to find what campaignsare actually delivering sales in this report.

Moving up in the world: tariff segmentsMost advertisers have different tariff segments for different affiliate categories. This means thatthey usually pay more to affiliates that deliver high volumes of traffic with really good quality.Advertisers pay these affiliates more since they do not want to loose them to the competition.This means that when you become better and deliver better results, you should contact youraffiliate manager (the person who is managing the affiliate program) and ask for a bettersegment, if available.

EPC report

Figure 1.11Screenshot EPC report

The report shows you earnings per 100 clicks and is a good metric to ensure that you on averagehave higher revenue from every click, that what you pay for it at Google.


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rey markets and cross country linking

When you have a winning formula you need a source. You might discover that some Adwordswork very well, but that they do not deliver the volumes you want. Then you have to find moresources. Either you can try the same word in different languages, or you should start to findother search engines. When you do this, you become an advanced traffic broker.

Risks

Buying and selling is not without risk. In every business there is a risk that the things you havebought are not sold, or that the one you are selling to do not pay you on time. But where thereis risk, there are also opportunities.

You take a risk, which the advertiser is not willing to take. You do it since you have betterknowledge about your area, language, or the marketplace in general. The risk you take can berewarding if you manage to deliver good quality traffic. This is easier than you might think, asyou have seen from some of the screenshots in this chapter. All screenshots are taken fromactual tests that the authors have done.

You do this at your own risk and we want to warn you. You might invest in traffic, and in theend not get paid for it due to several reasons. It could be as simple as tracking problems with anadvertiser, or that you enter the wrong URL. We recommend you to limit your budget andspending the first months and slowly increase once you understand how everything works.Today we know that a couple of hundred persons in Europe work like this for their living. Youcould be next!

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