How Can I be this dumb?

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testonej

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Nov 12, 2006
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Austin, Tx.
First, a little background....
-I do all my own hosting on dedicated boxes
-I have been playing in the PPC=>Affiliate offers area since Dec. '06
-During the Jan-Mar Time frame, I was making about 7K a month profit(on average).
-I got "out" of things for a couple of months (believe it or not, I really was just too busy)
-Started playing the "game" again around June of '07


Here is my Setup:
-Have tested about 15 diffrent offers through Azoogle and Copeac including ringtones,vista print business cards,dating,cash advance,wine,myspace stuff, Insurance Stuff (home, auto, etc.), Ink cartridges, Blockbuster, Video Game Rentals, Bob Greene Best life diet, Diet Pills, Dr. Seuse Books, Web hosting, Credit Report Stuff, and some others.

-I have a stats system in place to monitor where ever click comes from, what engine, which campaign, which adgroup, which ad, etc. and what offer it was sent to and if it converted or not.

-I have very targeted adgroups of 5-15ish keywords that have ads with the same keywords in them (not DKI since they are very targeted) and I send the offers to domains with the same types of keywords in the name where they hit my landing page where I do have dynamic keyword insertion setup using php to ensure that keyword is in the title, meta tags including description, it is in an H1 tag, usually a couple of places in the body and a couple of alt tags for images. I also usually have some outbound links at the bottom of the pages to wikipedia or other sources of reference surrounding the offer.

All in all this seems like a very "text book" example of how to setup a PPC campaign.

Here is my problem :
-No matter what search engine I setup the account in (Google, MSN, Yahoo) and no matter what AD CTR I have (some of them have been 12% or greater because of all the targeting) I start out bidding something reasonable and my traffic steadily declines to nothing. I have spoken with multiple people at Azoolge looking for advice, I have called support centers for YSM and Adcenter and I get the generic BS (not high enough quality, etc.).

At this point I am at my wits end and am wondering if I am just cursed and should no longer be involved in affiliate marketing. I have read through many, many posts here looking for any sort of direction or help but have been unable to figure out what to do from here.

I would be happy to share keywords, adcopy, urls, domains, etc. with anyone willing to help. At this point I am not making much money off of any of this so what would it hurt, right?

Thank you in advance for any advice you can offer (besides telling me I really am just this dumb). :Yahoo_29:
 


not at all. Nothing change, no new ads, new bid prices, new adcopys, new urls, landing pages, etc. As an example. I ran an insruance campaign where I got about 60 clicks the first day which translated into about 8 leads. The google QS column told me the 5 words in the adgroup all had a qs of "good" or "great". AD CTR was 9% 2 days later 0 clicks, 0 leads, 0ctr, still having a qs of "good" or "great". Let the campaign run for another 5 days with 0 clicks, etc. throughout the rest of the campaign.
 
Doing anything they may not like that you haven't posted here?

As for getting a bunch of clicks immediately, that just means their scripts ok'd your campaign for immediate release, but a human reviewer is going in later and finds something they didn't like. Normally this is due to the landing site and domain the campaign is hosted on. A crappy landing page attached to a crappy landing site will drop your impressions and your clicks signficantly. Just because you're putting the keywords in the page, doesn't make it a good landing page. They could be labelling a bridge page still.
 
Well the only other thing I have thought about is that because I may have had a bad landing page for a diffrent URL, it would still be on the same server and IP. Could someone like Google, yahoo, etc track that a certain IP is all marketing crap and penalize me for that?

Like I said thought, I really might just be cursed...
 
I say you're just cursed and give up... but shit, hit me with all that info you were talking about :-D j/k

Why would the bad landing page "tied to a different url" be linked to your campaign that directs traffic to the good page? (different url correct?)

It is something else... but I deff. don't think its the bad landing page on a seperate URL from what you are listing on current ad groups.
 
Well where I was going with that (obivously grasping at straws) but wondering if Google flagged the Ip address of the box that hosts all these sites as a "crappy box" or something and was penalizing some of my campaigns or something.


I donno man, you can see how I would come to the cursed solution... ;-)
 
Ok you said you been outta the game awhile right? How "crappy" was this landing site tied to the IP of that box?

Plus you stated you have several boxes... each with its own IP? Host your shit on a different box than the box containing the prior Bullshit you ran...

BTW- What was the crappy page?
In other words, how bad could you have violated TOS for and IP ban?

Thats the more important factor on gettin around this
 
Just to be clear, I have not done any cloaking, arbitrage, or other "grey area" approaches to landing pages. I don't know of any sort of "IP Ban" that may be in place for this server. I am going to look into moving some of this to another set of boxes to test out if the IP has anything to do with it or not. On top of that, as far as I know, i have not violated any sort of TOS with google adwords, msn adcenter, or yahoo's overture systems, or at least not to my knowledge willingly.

I do appreciate all your suggestions so far. it helps to get another persons perspective to this problem.
 
Check out where the traffic was coming from, and if any is still coming from there.

I had a campaign that for shitloads of about.com traffic, and converted nicely. But when the big G released that report that shows the advertisers where they are getting traffic from, it seems my traffic was not quality enough for about (HA!) and they put me on their exclusion list.

No more traffic from about means little money now... :-(
 
I'm not going to be able to help you with this, far too much of a newb here. However, if it were me and I were at my wits end (as you seem to be) I would go ahead and post your url and let the smart(ass) people here take a swing at it. Like you said what do you have to lose? Good luck :)
 
The weird thing is that you are saying this happens on ALL the networks?

If that is correct, then the problem is obviously at your end. (but I don't know what)

Have you tried static pages instead of dynamic keyword insertion?
 
dsiomtw said:
Maybe I'm dense but the obvious question is, are your ads still showing? When you say your clicks drop to nothing do you literally mean nothing at all?
Click to expand...

In most cases they keywords stay "approved" and the ads stay "approved" I just get 0 impressions and cant go find them anywhere when I search for those terms.
 
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