I always look at where traffic is coming from, especially from traffic that I purchase. Back in November a client’s site had a huge spike in traffic from junk ad sites. Most of the site ad ads from Yahoo and due to Yahoo’s less than optimal ad software I had to block these sites manually by domain. I had noticed in Compete.com’s site that competitor sites had also been receiving a lot of traffic from these sites.

Today (ok – I let this sit for a while LOL) I think I have uncovered at least one source of traffic to sites like that and confirmed my belief that the sites are as I had suspected junk click sites built for the sole purpose to generate content advertising publishing revenue.

Here’s how it works:

1. Internet users sign up for a site like www.treasuretrooper.com
2. They are offered 5 cents to click on links. When I first joined I was offered 7 links and could come back the next day to click some more.
3. There’s a message that says: “Receive 5 cents for each of the links that you click below! After clicking, please click any link that interests you on the page that pops up. You may click each of these links once every 24 hours. Please note that cash click earnings do not count towards reaching minimum payment.” and a few links:
   1. Asthma Relief Online
   2. My Diabetes Center
   3. Best Online Teaching Degrees
   4. Find Nursing Degrees Online
   5. Best Psychology Degrees Online
   6. Best Guide For Fitness
   7. Bank Account Wizard
   8. When I clicked Find Nursing Degrees I ended up here: Nursing Degree Answers which is a short page with a bunch of Yahoo ads.
   9. That site is similar to a lot of others I have seen that dynamically serves up Yahoo Publisher ads. Search on any topic and you will get different ads.
   10. TreasureTrooper.com is well ranked in countries like Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Pakistan, and India which is not bad by itself but if you are a US company doing business only in the US who don’t need that foreign traffic. Although according to Alexa almost 50% of their traffic in the US.
   11. In Alexa one of the suspect sites has 100% of traffic from US which I find hard to believe. However three of my client’s competitors receive between 5% and 11% of their traffic from India but they don’t do business in India.

There’s surely dozens of affiliate sites like these signing up people from low wage Asian or Eastern European countries where a $50+ a month can buy a lot. There’s something terribly wrong about this as someone makes $0.05 cents to click on a link where the advertiser is charged $1-$10+. For the advertiser is results in excessive clicks that don’t convert. If they are not aware of these sites they’ll end up paying a lot more for their online advertising budgets than they should.

Pay Per Click Campaigns

Pay Per Click advertisers only pay when an advertisement they placed on a Search Engine, Web Site or Blog is clicked to access the advertised content. From a cost perspective doesn’t matter how many impressions you receive since you only pay for clicks.

A PPC campaign is effective when properly managed. There are pitfalls which must be considered before initiating any Pay Per Click campaigns. These are:

* If not properly managed Pay Per Click can be expensive
* It’s possible to get involved in a bidding war drastically increasing PPC costs
* Advertisements placed on inappropriate web sites or content networks deliver un-targeted traffic, increase cost and lower campaign ROI
* As traffic increases so does the cost

Prepare PPC Budget

It is imperative at the outset of your PPC campaign to prepare a budget for the advertising campaign based on profit driven campaign goals such as; increased sales, leads for the sales department or other objectives identified through business Strategic Planning.

Decide on PPC Providers

There are many Pay Per Click providers available with the leaders being Google, Yahoo, and Bing. However Google has the most traffic and if you are tight for resources you can by with advertising just in Google as creating and maintaining a PPC campaign by yourself can be time consuming.

Although there are other PPC providers I prefer to work with the “Big 3″ as I have personally experienced “Click Fraud” and poorly targeted traffic when using other PPC providers. However, even when using the primary Pay Per Click providers, you must pay attention to where you ads will be displayed. The use of Google’s content network does have the potential to deliver poorly targeted traffic which is unlikely to convert into your company’s identified goals.

Watch out for “search network” or “content match” content on Yahoo & Bing as saavy black hat publishers have setup many sites that are 100% ads and often have offshore people clicking on ads all day. You can easily rack up $100s of dollars worth of useless traffic in a day. Yahoo allows you to blacklist sites, so keep an eye on your referrals and track traffic by keyword to be sure you are getting conversions on the right keywords.

Keyword Selection

The selection of keywords is critical to the success of your PPC campaign. The keywords are used to develop your ad title, ad content and landing page content, and therefore must capture your target audience’s attention immediately.

Investigating potential keywords is essential to obtain a reasonable ROI from your PPC investment. Cost per click varies depending on how popular the keywords are, and how much traffic they are likely to generate.

Paying for the #1 position is not always necessary, often the best strategy is to pay for positions 3 or 4 which are still highly visible and less expensive. You will receive less clicks but generally your conversion rate will be higher on the clicks you receive so the end result is the same and you pay less money!

To do more Keyword Research use a tool. Two very good services for keyword suggestion tools are Wordtracker and Trellian’s Keyword Discovery, both use different processes providing varying results. Another tool which should not be overlooked is Google’s Keyword Tool.

Ad Creation

The key to effective Ad creation is writing ad title and copy that uses the keyword / keyword phrase in an attention grabbing manner using very few characters. You only have seconds to grab your target audience’s attention, thus the importance of writing attention grabbing ad copy.

The use of action verbs, limited time offers, specials and identifying the benefits of your service or product are important factors in developing your PPC advertisements to encourage the “click”.

Landing Page Development

For each ad campaign you can greatly improve your conversion rates by developing landing pages specific to the ad content.

There are two types of landing pages: Reference pages and Action pages.

Reference pages provide the visitor with detailed information about the ad offers and should be relevant and include the keywords and phrases used in the advertisement. Action pages should include motivation to encourage your visitor to complete the transaction or conversion identified in the Pay Per Click planning process.

Key items in a Landing Page Include:

* Headline – Relevant call to action
* Prices, bonuses and special offers appropriate to advertisement
* Page Body Copy – Easy to scan copy detailing product or service benefits
* Sub Headers and Tag lines – action orientated, problem solving
* Buttons and Links – Easily accessible and identifiable to encourage conversion

Multi-variation Testing (A/B Testing)

It is important to test the effectiveness of your ad and your landing pages. Typically A –B testing is the most informative, enabling you to compare results from advertisements and landing pages which are similar but different while targeting the same keywords and keyword phrases. However, it must be remembered that without significant traffic volumes A-B testing results can provide inaccurate results.

It is now time to try out your Pay Per Click strategies, one final comment is; Start your bids low and build, that is one key factor to keeping within your Pay Per Click budget and obtaining maximum ROI.

I received a question from Carol from Ballantyne Home Staging about how to place ads at the top of Google’s results. Here are some tips for making your AdWords ads on Google stand out.

1. Make sure your advertisement is Relevant to the keywords you are buying. (e.g. if you ad says you are doing home staging but you are buying a keyword like “home sales” you will rank lower as it is less relevant. In some cases Google won’t even let you buy clicks when your ad quality score is too low (e.g. you try to buy ads for X-Men or Pizza)
2. Increasing your Cost Per Click and Daily budget. The more you spend the higher you will rank. That’s kind of an easy one, but luckily you can place high with the first tip so you don’t have to just spend money to be first.
3. Being first is not always best. You might end up getting a lot of clicks from users that are just browsing and don’t have much intent to buy your product or service. Sometimes letting someone else spend a premium to be first is a better strategy.
4. Don’t link to your home page. Unless your home page is a rock solid conversion page then make a special page for your ad. If you are running several ads then make pages that are specific to that ad. Make sure the ad landing page is clear, concise and contains an easy way for your prospective customer to contact you or immediately purchase your product or service.
5. Track your pages. If you don’t have data about your site visitors you are walking around blind. Use Google Analytics.

There are a lot more tips available, but I think those are the most important basic fundamentals to ranking well in AdWords.

I’ve seen a lot of blog posts and news articles lately about the new DiggBar. First, if you are luck (or shall I say talented) enough to get an articles with a lot of Diggs, you will be getting a lot of free traffic. However the new DiggBar seems to be interfering with PageRanks.

Pros: First the new tool bar adds some features. Users can easily Digg, Tweet, Facebook or eMail a news article or post without having to go back to Digg. Assumed result: More Diggs. Second the DiggBar shows how many users have viewed the page. Third, its a short URL service. There’s a lot of short URL services but this one will allow you to also get Diggs (example my short URL is: http://digg.com/u1lie). Which I automatically generated by typing in http://digg.com/www.rhinowebservices.com into my browser address box.

Cons: On downside, DiggBar is framing you in. The DiggBar generates an iFrame that renders your page. Services like Comscore might not give you credit for the page view. Second, while the bar is not that big, Digg could include advertising on the DiggBar. Perhaps cool if you could somehow get a percentage of that revenue, not so great if you can’t. Third, the DiggBar does not appear to do a 301 redirect according to some (3DoggMedia, Search Engine Land, etc.). Which means Digg keeps the SEO credit for your page. However, Digg’s John Quinn says:

We took several steps to ensure that search engines continue to count the original source, versus registering the DiggBar as new content. We include only links to the source URLs on Digg pages to allow spiders to see the unmodified links to source sites. These links are overwritten to short URLs in JavaScript for users who have this preference.

John Gruber of the Daring Fireball has written a short PHP script to redirect the Diggbar that generates a message to the Digg user.

As well you can use Framekiller JavaScript like we did years ago when Frames were in fashion. So I guess the DiggBar is a Retro Web 1.0 traffic and unique users grabbing scheme to boost to Digg’s own metrics (and to be fair they claim it is boosting Digg featured sites as well:

The preliminary results have been exciting, and we continue to learn and make real-time updates to the DiggBar. We’ve seen a 20% lift in unique visitors and many content providers have experienced similar traffic bumps this past week. Digg continues to have a symbiotic relationship with content publishers, and we anticipate these ongoing improvements will only enhance publisher traffic as more people discover and share content on Digg.

Personally I turned it off, as I didn’t want to use it. I am not sure I would implement a protest counter measure to block the bar from my site though other than just a normal JavaScript framebuster.

<script language=”JavaScript” type=”text/javascript”>
if (top.location != self.location) top.location.replace(self.location);
</script>

Twitter Ads

If you have a lot of followers on Twitter, you might be tempted to use a service like Magpie to monetize your tweets. If the ad is useful its good content. However, if its not the user will consider it spam and they might stop following you. Magpie to me seems just like when people started putting in Google and other text ads into their blog or podcast RSS feeds. It was really annoying and led me to unsubscribe to those feeds.

IMO Twitter and other social media sites like Facebook should be used to promote your main site rather than be a monetization engine themselves. Perhaps there are some folks out there that only use FB or Twitter and don’t have a web site and these kinds of solutions might be useful to them.

Local Twitter Users

Ever wonder if someone was tweeting near you? Use Twitter’s advanced search or construct a search like: near:Charlotte within:25mi and they show up!