Archive for the Rant Category
Posted on December 30, 2009 by Eric
I want to write about my first experiences with Adknowledge. Adknowledge is a “performance based advertising network” that I came across through a friend, and in late November I decided to give them a try.
Because of this recommendation I thought that the system would be smooth sailing, and I’d be able to get some quality traffic to my offers for a good price. I learned two things quickly… never assume a damn thing about any 2nd tier PPC company.
When I first signed up I was confronted with a terrible user layout that is completely built in flash called bidsystem. Not only is it incredibly clunky to use, but it doesn’t always save your changes. For example, if you pause a campaign that campaign will disappear from your dashboard. Where does it go? I’ll be damned if I know. As far as I can tell the only way to get to your paused campaigns is to log out and log back in and pray that you can see them on the first page of your dashboard.
Anyways, I had worked with a number of bad UI’s before and figured I could get by this if the traffic was good.
So I setup a few campaigns and I waited… and waited… and waited. And then I saw this thing on my dashboard that said my account status was pending… huh… I wasn’t told that my account needed approval, but I figured I’d wait over the weekend and at the very least it would be approved after 4 business days…
I was wrong. So I sent them an email. And two business days I got a message back saying that I was approved and my ads were accepted… thanks Adknowledge!
In these first campaigns the traffic wasn’t bad, and it’s about half the price of a Google click. However, you can only bid on categories and not keywords, so I was basically fucked for getting my campaigns to profit margins.
For a credit report campaign I was only approved on 2 categories. 2! Now, I can understand that they want to keep their traffic score up, but how am I supposed to optimize a campaign when I have two choices?
My initial campaigns weren’t going too well so I decided to pause them (that’s when I realized that, once paused, the campaigns went to adknowledge heaven). I decided to setup a few new campaigns. That was December 10th. It is now December 30th, and I just received notice that my ads were approved. It took 20 full days to have my ads approved from adknowledge.
Did I try contacting them during this time? Hell yes I did! And I got no response. In my adknowledge dashboard I had a big fat blank under “account manager” too so I didn’t even have a direct contact.
So now that I have ads running on adknowledge that are about the holidays… approved after the holidays… I should start getting traffic, no? That’s what any sane person would imagine, but it’s not the case… All of my categories for my campaign were rejected! Apparently my payday loan application CPA offer doesn’t fit into these categories:
Cash advance
Cash Loan
Online Loan
Payday Loan
I like how the first one got rejected even though cash advance is in the domain name and header of the offer. Of course you’re probably thinking, “Eric, why don’t you check their notes to see why it was rejected?”. I would if I could, but there is no notification when these categories get rejected, and I have no way of knowing why someone would have rejected them.
This post is getting long now so I’m going to end it, but if you come across adknowledge in your quest for good PPC traffic, my recommendation is to be very careful. If you’re going to try them out, start with a tiny budget first. As for me, I want to get away from their terrible service and terrible software as quickly as I can.
If you want to check out Adknowledge you can do so here.
Has anyone else had any experience with these guys? If so, let me know. I’d love to know what other people experienced with them.
Posted on December 23, 2009 by Eric
I have a lot of things on the go. Sometimes I find myself at my wits-end when I’m trying to catch up with friends I haven’t seen in months, family who I’m falling out of touch with and personal projects that I see losing their potential because I’m not on top of them.
At the end of the day I love what I do, I love how flexible it is, and I love that I’ve put myself in a position where I can mostly choose my lifestyle. However it does get stressful sometimes, and sometimes I jump at the idea of having a few days off over the holidays to hammer out some personal projects (ie. websites that aren’t going to make money but would be totally freaking rad).
That’s a huge problem.
With all of the things I have on the go – and I’m sure all of you do as well – it’s really important to just relax a little. I haven’t seen a lot of my family for most of the year, and I’m going to enjoy it. I’m not going to start any new campaigns over the holidays, and I’m just going to RELAX. I already missed the boat on some store type sites for Christmas, but in the new year I will be fresh and ready to hit the ground running on some Valentine’s Day offers.
How am I going to relax?
Well if you’re anything like me then being next to a computer is a huge problem over the holidays. I love to check out how my sites are doing, and how any campaigns I have running are humming along.
Because of this, I need to remove myself from the ability to check stats and confirm everything is running ok. I do have one campaign that I’m not very sure of, and that one is going to be paused over this weekend so I can just forget about it. Sure I might miss out on a bit of money, but the amount of relaxation I will get from not thinking about work will allow me to work 5x as hard the following week.
Living without a computer.
Yes, it’s only going to be 4 days that I’m away from my home office, but it would feel like an eternity if I didn’t have email. That is why even though I won’t be bringing my computer with me to hang with my family, I will always have my cell phone. That way, even if everything goes to shit and something blows up, at least I will get an email about it (“no funds”) or I will notice that my daily income has gone to a big whopping zero (thanks Peerfly Mobile!).
All in all I think if everyone took some well needed time off occasionally they would be able to work much harder and be much more focused. I’m starting to ramble a bit now, but I just want to say happy holidays, relax a little, and then make some f’ing dollars next week!
Posted on December 4, 2009 by Eric
Ok, this is a bit of a rant as well…
Adsense and Wordpress are ruining the internet. Yeah I said it… and I suppose it’s a bit ironic that I’m typing this into a wordpress site, but my statement still stands.
Adsense has given everyone this stupid dream that they can make huge cash on the internet just by starting a site and slapping some stupid content onto it. The result? Thousands of blogs with adsense ads all over them that have no value at all. The internet is riddled with them!
And of course none of this would be possible without the help of Google’s partner in crime Wordpress. Wordpress makes it so damn easy to start a site that you’ve got even more potential for crap on the internet. It makes it easy to optimize any pages for none other than Google… and in doing so pushes some piss poor site with no real content to the top of the search results.
I don’t want to read your poorly written article on the Motorola Droid. I want real content.
It’s too bad it’s only going to get worse.
Also, as a side note… has anyone ever wondered where all the adsense revenue from all of these crap sites goes? I mean, they can’t be making the minimum payout for G can they? Where are all of thousands of $56 account balances going to go? hmmm…
Posted on December 3, 2009 by Eric
There’s a lot of buzz this morning about Google and their mass banning of thousands of Google Adwords accounts. Essentially, it looks like Google has “disabled” the accounts of anyone who has EVER run any questionable campaigns… even if it was years ago.
Here’s the deal. They send you this email:
We are writing to let you know that your Google AdWords account has been disabled due to one or more serious violations of our advertising policies related to Landing Page and Site Quality. As a result, your ads will no longer run through the Google AdWords system and we are unable to accept advertising from you in the future. Please note that future accounts you open will also be disabled.
As part of our commitment to making the AdWords experience safe and effective for our users and our advertisers, we routinely review the landing pages that our advertisers promote through our search and content networks. If we find that an advertiser has submitted a landing page that egregiously violates our policies, we reserve the right to take immediate account-level action.
Landing pages advertised via AdWords must have relevant, original content, and must be transparent about the nature of the business being promoted. Further, advertising certain types of sites will lead to immediate account disabling. These types of sites include, but are not limited to:
* Sites that charge users or collect personal information in exchange for a product that is never delivered
* Sites that charge for “free” software
* Sites that trick users into paying for fake or poor-quality content
* Sites that charge users for information that makes unrealistic promises of financial or personal gain
* Sites that install malware software on a visitor’s computer
Please note that this action is related to sites that have recently been advertised through your account. In a review of your account history, we found that your account had submitted a least one site that egregiously violated our advertising policies. Although you may have removed these sites since our latest review, advertisers that have a history of promoting these types of sites are still subject to account-level disabling.
And that’s it. If you respond to them, they seem to ignore you (so far at least). You can still access your account (I logged in this morning to get a refund of prepayment) for old data etc. etc…. but you won’t get any impressions, and you won’t get any clicks.
If you open a new account, this will be disabled too. Lots of people have tried over the years to get around it, but it seems the big G is pretty strict when it comes to being unreasonable.
Was I a victim? Yes I was… and the only campaign that I can come up with that would have gotten me banned was run about 8 months ago for about 2 hours and had 35 clicks. Everything else I have ever run on G has been pages with privacy policies, about and contact pages, and have not been selling rebills or free trials.
But do I care? Only for one reason: Other traffic sources are going to get more expensive.
That’s what really sucks about this. People who are running affiliate offers are going to run them anyways. So they are going to find new traffic sources. Traffic sources that I’ve been using for the past few months because A) they’re cheap and B) they’re not assholes.
This mass ban does have some good points to it though. I will be able to get through an internet marketing forum without seeing 10 people crying about being G slapped.
Posted on December 2, 2009 by Eric
First thing’s first. Yes, I’m a web designer. Yes I download wordpress themes. Why? Because I’m far too lazy to not take advantage of the 1000s of free themes that are out there for the taking and then modify them.
At the same time though, I want to say how many crappy themes are out there. For every 100 themes I looked at when finding one for this site I looked at 98 ones that weren’t worth anything.
So many of them have too many gradients, too many flashy drop shadows and too many god damn rounded corners! Has anyone ever heard of subtlety???
That got me thinking… how many times have you seen landing pages that are over the top? Do you have any?
Landing/Sales pages should be simple. A good rule of thumb is to keep taking things away from them until you can’t remove anything else without removing functionality. Is that drop shadow really going to help your sales? Is having that logo 12px larger really going to improve your CTR?
Maybe… but probably not… and if you’re really into superfluous design work, you can always test that extra plastic molding on your site against a nice clean and subtle page. Chances are, the subtle page will win.
Oh, and welcome to the new blog. This being my first post I wanted to make it a bit of a rant.
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