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 18, 2009 by Eric
Given that I wrote a post about how adsense has ruined the internet, I thought it would be nice and hypocritical to try and make some money using adsense. My current balance is below their minimum payout of $100. And so my goal is to hit their payout mark by the end of January 2010.
I’ll be sharing my progress so that anyone out there who currently has 50 or 60 bucks sitting in their account can follow along, and hopefully finally get paid by the ubiquitous giant G.
The first step is to revamp all of my old sites that got me to where I am with adsense. Most of these sites made some money at the beginning, but have steadily faded away due to lack of updates.
I have about 5 sites at the moment that were setup, and I have moved them all over to new hosting, and onto wordpress. They all have the basic wordpress theme, and I don’t intend on changing it unless I can find a wordpress theme that converts adsense clicks better than the default theme.
My next step is to go through all of my domains that are being unused and find some that I can build out. I have a number of domains that I have purchased over the years that are just being parked and get zero traffic. Most of these domains are long tail keywords that have little competition and decent search traffic. I will build these out in the same way as the original 5 sites and try to get a steady stream of traffic.
Goals:
My goal is to make the remaining 40 bucks or so of adsense revenue I need to get paid by Google. Given the historical data in my adsense account I will need about 5000 – 6000 impressions in order to hit this goal. Breaking that number down by day I will need ~140 impressions a day for the remaining 44 days.
Currently I am getting ~25 daily impressions to the adsense sites I have setup so I have a shit load of work to do… in fact, I’m going to start on it now.
Posted on December 16, 2009 by Eric
On December 2nd when my Google account was disabled I sent out an email asking them to explain why the service was disabled, and I gave an explanation about the campaigns that I thought were the issue.
I didn’t exactly have high hopes for my account, but in their initial email Google had said you can dispute the account detonation by emailing them.
Here was their response:
Hello Eric,
As mentioned in our previous email, your Google AdWords account has been
suspended. We are unable to revoke your account suspension, and we will
not accept advertisements from you in the future.
Please note that our support team is unable to help you with this issue,
and we ask that you do not contact them about this matter.
As noted in our Terms and Conditions, Google reserves the right to
terminate advertisements for any reason. To view our Terms and Conditions,
please visit https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder .
We appreciate your cooperation.
My cooperation? I didn’t exactly have much choice in the matter did I? It seems to me that even a bad campaign that was setup over 8 months ago can get you in bad with Google… and they don’t forget a thing.
Google I love you… you make awesome software… Google Android rules… I love your search engine… your email rocks… you have a ton of traffic and it’s fairly decent as far as conversions go… but god damn is your customer support bad. I don’t know of any other company that would just stop giving you service without explaining themselves.
That brings me to a new point. There are a TON of other traffic sources out there for promoting affiliate offers. Over the next couple of weeks I am going to go over my initial experience with some of these other traffic sources and let you know how the traffic they have converts.
Posted on December 7, 2009 by Eric
About three months ago I joined up with Peerfly, but I didn’t start promoting offers through them until just before Black Friday… And if you didn’t take advantage of Black Friday, then you really missed out.
Peerfly is a CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) affiliate ad network that is really starting to take off in popularity. There are a ton of CPA networks out there, and I’m a member of a good number of them. But Peerfly struck me right away as being different.
Why? Well, first it was their software. They are setup on a site that is really easy to use, and looks way more professional than a lot of CPA networks out there… plus they have a mobile subdomain that allows you to check your stats from your phone… and not just your iPhone (I’m looking at you Neverblue… I have an HTC Hero).
What I like about Peerfly
They toss your account balance in any emails that they send out to you.
They have a mobile page to check stats.
New software is slick and easy to use.
AM was easy to get ahold of, and quick to answer instant messages.
Almost 300 offers and a ton more being added all the time.
It’s super easy to add your own tracking pixel to any offer you are promoting.
Easy sign up process.
Multiple tracking domains to choose from.
What I don’t like about Peerfly
My AM was almost non existent when I first signed up… keeping this in mind, when I took the initiative to contact him he was very helpful so all in all my experience has been awesome.
I would like to have a global tracking pixel placement.
You can’t run quick reports by subid.
All in all my experience with Peerfly has been above average and I recommend getting an account if you’re looking to expand your reach with CPA offers, or even if you’re just starting out.
Also, though I’m not a big affiliate by any means, I was able to get about %40 ROI over the Black Friday weekend with a number of zip/email submits on Peerfly.
Click here to check out Peerfly and to apply.
Do you have any experience with Peerfly? Let me know in the comments.
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