BlogRush Is Here

So I stayed up for the launch of John Reese's BlogRush. A cool new blog content syndication network that's going to get major attention over the next few days/week/month/years. Sign Up was quick, faster than the 5 mins mentioned in the video. Looks cool so far, however stats are still missing. Not much of a big deal since it's beta.

Check out BlogRush, I'll do a longer post and review once I've looked around better.

Google AdWords Site Targeting Is Hot Stuff

I've always felt Google's Site Targeting for AdWords could be a powerful addition to many PPC search campaigns, however I will admit that I haven't really spent as much time with it as I would have liked.

However over the past few months, I've been working with a client who had a pretty good site targeted campaign already in place. With a bit of looking into and tweaking, I was able to tweak it to go from good to fantastic. As of this writing, his site targeted campaign brings in more traffic, leads, and profits that his regular search network campaign.

Here are a few tips to help you out

1.You Must Use Conversion Tracking
If you are not using conversion tracking you are going to be wasting a lot of money. In fact, stay away from site targeting, if you can't track how well it's working for you. If you are running a campaign without tracking, stop everything you are doing and put conversion tracking codes on your site today. I like Google's own home brew the best (Analytics and Conversion Tracking) because of how easily it integrates with AdWords.

2. Reports Are Your Friend
The New Placement Performance report helps you see which domains and urls are working for you. In the settings, I recommend choosing a url report instead of a domain report since this give you a break down of which pages are actually working and converting for you. You'll find out that some pages on a domain convert much better than others. This report is probably worth reviewing daily.

3. Watch Out For Rogue Sites
Upon inspection, it turned out that the best converting site in the campaign was also burning a lot of cash. As a whole, the site was converting very well, with lead costs well under requirements. However my Placement Performance report showed that ads on the home page were costing us over $80 a lead. Other sub pages were working so well that the over all lead cost for the domain was under $20. It turns out the site in question was automatically refreshing the home page every few seconds driving costs through the roof. After fixing this issue, by removing our ads from the front page, our lead costs are now less than $4 on most days and the number of leads we get a days is actually up. This fix alone saved the client at least $3000 a month in wasted advertising costs. This saving has now been diverted to the urls that are working the best, so you can imagine ROI is up.

I could go into this topic a bit further, especially advice on how to pick the best sites for site targeting etc. But I'll leave that for another post.

Blendtech Blended iPhone on eBay

A few days ago I watched in shock and horror as Tom Dickson from blendtec blended a brand new iPhone in a Blendtec Total Blender. I was obviously too distressed or entertained by the video that I missed the part where he says "I might put this on eBay!"

Anyway the blended remains of the iphone are now on sale at eBay. Current bid is $1,151.00 and you even get a new Blendtec blender when you win. Even better is the fact that 100% of the winning auction bid will go to the Primary Children's Medical Center.

If you missed it, here's the video of the iphone blending. The guy shouting "nooooooo" is me :)




There are even more videos of other stuff being blended at willitblend.com so check them out. These guys have done a great job with viral video. I know that when I'm in the market for a new blender, the blendtec total blender will be on my list. I wish they had an affiliate program, hint hint, I'd be first to sign up.

Google Search Counts Tool: 2 New Features Added

In an attempt to make my Google search Counts tool (aka Google Keyword Metrics Tool) more useful I've merged in the functionality of my AdSense preview tool and also added a new AdWords ad preview to the results it generates. Both the AdWords preview tool and AdSense preview tool are available as stand alone applications. With the AdWords preview being the newer of the two.

I haven't done much to promote the AdWords preview tool until today because after developing it a week or two ago I kind of felt it wasn't of much use as a stand alone tool, however it may be because I don't know what to do with it yet. However when added to the Google search counts tool, it becomes much more useful.

Finally, I've also enhanced the report generated by the search counts tool and AdWords preview tool with Snap Shots technology. This lets you preview landing pages without clicking through to the site. However if you want to click to view the actual landing pages, you can go ahead because I've removed any tracking links from the URL that would cause the advertiser to pay for the click.

The next feature I'd like to add is the ability to select a geographic location for previewing ads. I'll most likely add it to the AdWords preview tool first. After that I'll figure out whether it's worth adding to the version on the Google search counts tool. Or even better yet, let me know if this is something you'd like to see added or not.

Apple iPhone Craze + AuctionAds = Cha-Ching !!!

So the Apple iPhone just launched today, and geeks all over the country are in a mad rush to get their hands on one. Unfortunately for them (and fortunately for you) limited quantities mean many of the will have to turn to eBay for a chance to purchase an iPhone.

Have you seen the crazy prices the iPhones are selling for on eBay? At the time of this writing, the top closed price for an 8GB iPhone is $2500.

The eBay Affiliate Sales Report Tool Now Uses eBay API

After my last post about my "eBay Affiliate Sales Report Tool" I immediately took some time to get acquainted with the eBay API. As of yesterday afternoon, The eBay Affiliate Sales Report Tool is 100% API based.

As expected, it only took a few minutes to recover my username and password. After that I spent 2-3 hours reading documentation, applying for tokens, and trying out the sample code. I had to call it a night(morning) when the eBay API went down. It was displaying Http/1.1 Service Unavailable for my requests. Looking back it was probably a good thing since I may have been up all night coding.

I initially thought I had been blocked or something because I went to check shoemoney's auctionads system and saw it was still serving ads. But then I remembered that they also had a killer caching system in place, so it was very likely that it would take a while before their own systems went down.

This is one major problem with living off a 3rd parties API. You also have to suffer through their system downtime, unless you have a system in place to keep going for a while. Certain types of API based applications can withstand API downtime better than others.

My app is based on returning data that I don't know I have to return until it's requested. So it makes it almost impossible to prepare for API downtime. One work around would involve switching to the good old system the app was developed with whenever the API is non responsive.

Another new problem I now have to deal with is the 5000 eBay API calls a day limit for the eBay API. However after certification the limits will go up to either 1.5 million calls a day for the application, or a user-based limit of 20,000 calls per user. My other option is to have users install the app on their servers and have them use their own API quota. I'll be evaluating both options over the next few days.

New Tool For eBay Affiliate Program

I've been active in the eBay affiliate program for a little over a year and a half (If I remember correctly) and it took me a while to realize that the auction ids for the sales you generated were hidden in the csv reports from cj.

Anyway after this little discovery, I've been manually hand picking different line items to id. Basically the process is as follows.

1. I log in to cj an check sales for the day.
2. I notice a big commission from eBay and export the report as csv
3-4. I search for the sale, identify the auction id and plug it into eBay search to find out what I just sold.

Steps 3-4 are repeated for every interesting line the the csv file.

I don't know why this info wasn't just included in the csv file. I also don't know why it took me over a year to site down and write a script to automate this task.

So anyway last weekend I did something about it, and so I now present:

"The eBay Affiliate Sales Report Tool" or eASRT for short. Don't you just love the original name?

It's still in beta because it's not yet perfect. First of all I'm not using the eBay API yet. I have a developer account from years ago, and because I've not done anything with it I have no idea how to sign in or anything. I'm sure I could recover in info with 5-10 mins of digging around, but I wanted a good excuse to sharpen my regular expressions skills.

Now that I have a semi workable script, I need a good excuse to get acquainted with the eBay API. The next revision of the script will use the API. This should definitely improve the speed of this tool quite a bit. I've had someone tell me they had to wait 3mins for a large report to run. Yikes!

Anyway check out "The eBay Affiliate Sales Report Tool", I'd like to hear your comments, and suggestions.