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Google Adwords Mistake

Geoff — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:14:37 +0000

I tried to run an adwords campaign for an affiliate program that I’m promoting. I wanted to have the person viewing the ad click on it and take them directly to the landing page of the product I was promoting. That’s where the trouble began!

For those of you who don’t know, Google AdWords has two URL fields that you need to fill out when creating an adwords ad – the Display URL and the Destination URL. I built an example of an ad below:

What I wanted to happen is to have my website address in the Display URL and my affiliate link as the Destination URL. This created a problem as every ad I created was rejected by Google. Bastards. I thought that this was what CPC marketing was all about! LOL. I checked their policy and it states:

Display URL

“This is the URL displayed on your ad to identify your site to users. This URL displayed is limited to 35 characters; it need not be the same as the URL your ad links to, but it should be an actual URL that is part of your site”.

Ok, that made sense to me? So what Google is saying is that the Display URL can be different than the URL your ad links to. But I still got rejected. I searched (using Bing) for some guidance on this. I found that it was all over the map – some people had the same problem while others could have their affiliate link in the Destination URL.

Totally confused I did some more digging around the Google AdWords site and found this:

So as not to mislead users, the display URL should give users a clear idea of the website or landing page to which they will be taken when they click on an ad. Display URLs must:

Indicate who owns the destination URL, but does not need to match the actual destination URL of the landing page exactly.

Appear to be a viable website address. It must include the appropriate extension such as ‘.com,’ ‘.net,’ and ‘co.uk,’ but ‘www’ and ‘http://’ are not required.

Represent a website. The display URL also cannot be an email address. For example, ‘flowers@flowers.com’ would not be allowed.

Comply with editorial policy, which will be discussed in later topics.

Here is an example of a correct and an incorrect display URL:

Correct:
Destination URL: bigbookstore.com/new/a-c.htm
Display URL: bigbookstore.com

Clicking on the ad takes users to a page within the bigbookstore.com website. Even though the display URL is different from the destination URL, it accurately represents where the user will be taken when he or she clicks on the ad.

Incorrect:
Destination URL: http://www.amazon.com/home.html/104-7002842-259
Display URL: bigbookstore.com

The display URL bigbookstore.com does not accurately represent the site to which the user will be taken, which is a page within the amazon.com domain. This is improper use of the display URL. An ad with this display URL would not be approved.

Nice! In one place, Google is telling us we can use different URLs and in the other they say that it isn’t allowed. In the end, I created a landing page on my site in order to use Google AdWords. I’ll let you know how it goes!

Until next time…Bing!

Geoff

Promoting Unique Article Wizard

Geoff — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:06:47 +0000

So what did I end up doing with all that traffic from my article directory disaster?

I decided to forward my traffic to a landing page of an article directory submission software company. Through ClickBank I found a program called Unique Article Wizard. The software is amazing – it takes an article that you have wrote and then submits it automatically to a large number of article directories, blogs, etc. The cool thing about Article Wizard is that it also automatically re-writes your article before submitting it to each directory, blog, etc. The program eliminates duplicate content issues.

Basically, I forwarded the domain name to my affiliate link so that if someone clicked on the domain name (and all configurations of it – I believe they call that wildcatting your domain) to the product promotion page of Article Wizard. I thought this was a good idea – same traffic looking to submit their articles manually to my site.

Results

Well, once again, not good! The lesson learned from this: you must presell your traffic before sending them on to the landing page of the product you are promoting.

If you want to check out the Unique Article Wizard site (the software is really good and will save you hours and hours of work) Click Here.

For other Click Bank opportunities Click Here .

On to the next disaster,

Geoff

Building an Article Site – Big Mistake

Geoff — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:52:20 +0000

This one was a big cluster f#$@*. I spent hours building and maintaining an article site and I only made $5 from adsense. I can laugh now, but trust me this was not a fun experience. It put me off trying to make money online for about a year – not joking.

I bought into the whole adsense hype. I bought into the dream of creating a keyword rich article site that millions of online eyeballs would flock to and click on every ad that was put infront of their opportunistic eyeballs. Wow was I wrong! My site even got up to a PR3 in Google yet still no revenue!

The biggest mistake I made was not focusing on building a customer email list. That way I would have a list of web-savvy entrepreneurs that I could market to. Instead I was totally focused on trying to build adword revenue. Damn you Google! I also had banner advertising as well that brought in about half as much as the adwords revenue! I think I’m getting tears in my eyes again…

The one thing I did do that was positive was that I had the foresight to buy an expired domain of an article site (now I know why the previous owner left it to expire! LOL). That gave me instant traffic – traffic that didn’t earn me a friggin dollar mind you! I’m not bitter, really. Incredibly I still get about 1000 uniques a month to the site – all from backlinks that are still out there even though the site is no longer up.

What They Don’t Tell You

So if you’re going to build an article site beware! What they don’t tell you is that you will be spending hours upon hours manually approving articles for inclusion into your directory. They tell you it will be automatic – and some of it is from article submission software, but you’ll have to still manually approve articles. If you don’t and leave it as automatic approval (for manual submissions), you’ll end up with articles about cures for erectile difficulties in the poetry category. All for $5 in adsense revenue. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

Geoff

internet-makemoneyonline.com » What Didn’t Work

Google Adwords Mistake

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Promoting Unique Article Wizard

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Building an Article Site – Big Mistake

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