IMMania.com

One of my goals for 2007 was to get off the stick when it comes to tracking. Any kind of tracking really, since I wasn’t doing much if any prior to last year. The tracking that I did do consisted mainly of looking at my site stats in Webalizer. It was a start and I at least got a feel for my traffic numbers, referrers, search terms, and countries where my visitors originated from, but I was doing next to nothing when it came to tracking conversions.

And that’s a key piece of business data needed by anyone doing business online.

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So, I’ve got a few campaigns currently running on Adwords for merchants that I had some success with this same time last year. These are campaigns in relatively competitive consumer product niches. Not hyper-competitive like the financial niches, but last year I could get on the first page of Google results for a bid price of between .15 to .20.

This time around I was disappointed to find that I was getting virtually no impressions several hours after putting up my Adwords campaigns for these products. Google’s diagnostics were telling me that my ad was not being shown on the first page of results for all of my keywords even though most of them had a “Great” quality score with a minimum bid price of .04.

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OK, I was caught unprepared for several of my holiday affiliate marketing campaigns this year. I posted previously about how I was going to shortcut the process, at least the landing page building step, by knocking out an eBay “Mini Money Site” and hang some PPC landing pages off of it.

So how did I do?

Despite my best efforts at procrastinating by watching the Washington Redskins blow another winnable game this past Sunday and two consecutive nights of Wizards games, I did manage to build a new site from scratch as well as 2 Adwords landing pages by early Cyber Monday morning.

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This morning as I post this it’s “Black Friday” here in the US. It’s supposedly the biggest holiday shopping day of the season when everyone lines up early to be some of the lucky ones to snap those “Dog Buster” specials at Wal-Mart for big screen TVs and the season’s hottest toys. This year, some stores are opening at midnight to get a jump on the start of the holiday shopping season.

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In a previous post I went off on a semi-rank about the frustrations I was having building a relationship with the affiliate manager(s) at one of my most profitable merchants. They seemed to have a revolving door leading in (and out) of their affiliate manager’s office. I recently emailed a VP there who has been very cooperative in the past and was able to get some useful updates directly from him.

He also told me that the previous affiliate manager was no longer the affiliate manager. Big shocker.

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