However, if you’ve read the previous posts in this series, you should know that assuming the AdWords and adCenter operate pretty much a like is to your detriment.

Though things on the outside may appear almost identical, things under the hood are constructed very differently. Keyword match types on adCenter do function very much the same as those on Google AdWords, at least with respect to the phrase and exact match types. If you’re not familiar with PPC keyword match types there a very good tutorials on this subject both on the AdWords and adCenter help pages.

Where I feel that the use and behavior of match types diverges is with respect to the Broad match type.

Let’s take a look at the use of the Broad match type on the adCenter Search Network first. In the first two installments of this series I focused on the difficulties of getting any kind of significant search volume from this network and discussed the need to use both long tail and broader keyword phrases based on the adCenter Keyword Tool results. This same strategy follows into my use of Broad match keywords – at least when initially building Search N/W campaigns.

This is where the controversy often creeps into the debate regarding using Broad match, at least on Google AdWords. The argument contends that you’re just wasting your ad spend bidding on what are essentially untargeted and some times even completely irrelevant keyword searches. As a result, many advertisers start out with only Phrase and Exact match keywords when launching Search N/W campaigns.

I can certainly understand the rationale for this approach, but I then need to counter with: “yeah but, what about keyword level tracking?” Now it does come down to how willing you are to babysit newly launched PPC campaigns and watching out for among many other things, what keywords you’re campaigns are getting clicks for. I know this is something I certainly do and I think it comes with the territory.

The reason I’m more inclined to start with all three match types in my adCenter campaigns is because I want to get as many impressions as I can. Heaven knows, that there are so few to begin with on this network. Now this certainly doesn’t mean that I’m willing to burn up cash without any regard to ROI. Nothing could be further from the truth. What I’m looking for at this stage of a campaign is which keywords are generating the bulk of the click volume and candidates for negative keywords.

The Broad match keyword searches produce both a nice list of negative keywords that I can add at either the campaign or adgroup level in adCenter as well as suggestions for additional keywords to add in as Phrase and Exact match types into my adgroups. There’s no need to create any further Broad match keywords from these variations.

With regards to the behavior of the Broad match type on adCenter, I’ve found it to be much more wide open than the corresponding match type on AdWords. Beyond getting your ads displayed for searches that simply have the base keyword(s) in them, you will also get some completely off the wall searches that are very unrelated to the base keyword phrase. Again, this is where a good tracking system comes into play.

From the adCenter Help Page:

Broad match can expand to include words that are closely related to your keywords. For example, a search query for red carnation might result in your ad being displayed, because adCenter automatically identifies carnation as a type of flower. Use broad match to expose your ads to a wider audience.

If you start getting too many untargeted searches for you Broad keywords and it’s not practical to filter them out using negative keywords, then it’s time to disable the Broad match type for these keywords. The way adCenter handles “pausing” match types is vastly different than AdWords and can bite you in the rear if you’re not careful. Make certain that you understand how this works in adCenter by reviewing their help pages on this topic.

My goal with any PPC campaign regardless of the network is to start out inefficiently and then get to a break even point as quickly as possible using my tracking stats. Ultimately, I strive to pare down the number of keywords in my ad groups to a mere handful of converting keywords with most consisting of Exact match with perhaps a few Phrase matches in the mix. I find sometimes that the Phrase match keywords will have a lower CPC on adCenter while still being triggers for Exact match searches hence yielding a better bang for my ad buck.

In future posts in this series I’ll discuss topics that were only touched on in this one such as tracking platforms, negative keywords, ROI tracking, and campaign optimization.

I recall being on a Webinar a few years ago where the guest was an AdWords employee. All I really remember from that Webinar now is how the AdWords gal kept repeating over and over how important it was to have a “well-structured account”. From what I could tell this encompassed everything from the account level on down through campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and ads. We’ve had the thing about relevancy also pounded into our skulls by Google that many advertisers adopted the one keyword per ad group method. This always struck my as sort of backwards. It seemed more logical to start out with a tight group of keywords and then prune it down until you approached a single keyword ad group. But this is all rather moot now as most advertisers I know have been kicked out of the AdWords program for all eternity.

So fuck Google. We’re talking about MSN adCenter here. Unfortunately, the tendency is to take all that hard-won knowledge and experience from AdWords and attempt to apply it to MSN adCenter. On the surface they may appear to be very much the same, but in reality, they are quite different in many respects.

Whereas, with AdWords, the account structuring is done pretty much just to appease Google, with adCenter, you should do it to protect and benefit your own interests.

Budget and Ad Delivery Settings

Budget settings can be a double-edged sword: you want to protect yourself in the event that a single keyword or ad group suddenly catches fire and leaves you with a 4-digit ad spend the day your campaign goes live, but you also don’t want to be running with the brakes on and limit the number of potential impressions for a campaign. Since the traffic volume on adCenter is perceived to be extremely low, the tendency is to set a very high budget – either on a daily or monthly basis and set the delivery to “spend until depleted”.

I think it really comes down to how much time you’re willing to devote to babysitting a newly launched campaign. I know that I spend too much time watching my tracking stats waiting for the clicks to start registering. Perhaps the best approach is to initially set your budget so that your daily maximum spend works out to something you can tolerate. And by that, I mean the most you’re willing to completely lose in a single day (no conversions). I usually start with a daily budget setting for this.

Then once your campaign has run long enough for you to gauge the general traffic volume and CR for whatever it is you’re promoting, then you can be a little bolder and switch over to a high monthly budget set to be spent until depleted. I realize that this sounds scary, but you’ll be going in with a solid idea of what your average daily spend is and again, remember, we’re just talking about the adCenter Search Network here. The Content Network is much trickier and hence much more dangerous with regards to several things.

Targeted Devices

I always set my campaigns to target just PCs and laptops. I don’t want my ads displayed on mobile devices and tablets, though getting mobile traffic from adCenter Search is about next to impossible, so this setting probably doesn’t matter all that much in the grand scheme of things.

Geo-Targeting

This should be fairly obvious, but I’m still amazed at advertisers who leave the default setting for this which is the entire freakin’ world. What’s even more screwed up about MSN’s global delivery, is that outside of the US and Canada, there doesn’t seem to be much search volume save for perhaps Asia, The Middle East, and India and Pakistan. Now imagine the click volume and quality of those clicks if you left your campaign at the default setting. I’ve seen more than one advertiser lament that he was out hundreds of dollars with zippo conversions when having done this. Hopefully, you’re not that dumb.

Keyword Segmentation and Ad Groups

For MSN adCenter Search campaigns, I’m not all that fussy about getting overly relevant with my keyword segmentation. No where near as fussy as on Google AdWords. I also don’t use all that many keywords either so that limits the number of ad groups. I use the keyword building techniques that I discussed in parts 1 and 2 of this series and leave it at that.

These are the basic settings when first creating an adCenter Search Network campaign. Other components such as ads and tracking will be left for other posts.

I hope that by hosting my scripts here, that I can not only get feedback and suggestions for improving them, but also help other affiliates with their own campaign efforts.

First up is is my ePN Research and Keyword Tool. I’ve used this script for several years now to scrape long-tail keywords from eBay listing titles to help build PPC keyword lists for my Niche Blasting campaigns. I’ve also expanded it to serve as a niche research tool, or “Hot Item Finder” to evaluate product niches on eBay. You can check out this tool and others as they become available from the Online Tools Page.

Comments, suggestions and gentle flames are welcome.

As an example, many times I’ll research a product niche and find that it’s doing briskly on eBay.com. It meets the criteria of having a lot of listings and the median final price is above $20. Some people like much higher priced items, but I don’t want to ignore items between $20 and $100 as they have done well commission-wise on ePN. A prime example of such an item is “American Flyer Trains”. Taking a look at the completed listings (need to be logged into your eBay account to view), it shows a healthy number of successfully completed auctions/BIN events.

This is clearly a popular item and like most hobby and collectible categories, enthusiasts are fairly passionate. In many cases, to paraphrase the Lay’s Potato Chip tag line: they can’t buy just one item. I know from experience that they’ll bid on and purchase not only various train cars, but also track and other accessories. This is clearly a hot eBay niche.

The downside is that the MSN adCenter search traffic is extremely low for the targeted keywords to do with “American Flyer” as the estimated search results indicate in the screenshot below:

Actually, “lionel trains” has a much higher search volume. This is where I need to bring up the gambit of going broad on MSN adCenter Search. Actually, much broader than you would consider going on other PPC search engines such as Google AdWords. Before I explain my reasoning for this strategy, let’s go broader still in our keyword search by plugging in “model trains” into the MSN Keyword Research Tool and see what pops up:

We see that search terms such as “model trains” also have a lot more search volume than the longer tail “american flyer trains”. No big surprise there, but let’s go even broader. We also have “model train layouts” and “ho model trains”.  I might even include “electric trains”, but this is getting into dangerous territory as there are a lot of very unrelated keyword searches in this group. The same goes for “toy trains”. I really don’t want searchers for “thomas the train” and “fisher price trains”.

The goal with going broader on MSN Search is to get impressions – any impressions at all. This may seem like a desperate act, and in reality, it is. But when dealing with adCenter, it’s either taking a chance on getting a lot of untargeted clicks or going with the certainty of getting virtually no clicks at all. With a good keyword-level tracking system in place, I’ll take my chances with broader keywords on MSN.

I’ll also include a bunch a really long-tail keywords as well that I scrape from the eBay search results, but I also add in some of the broader keywords like the ones identified above. Then I’ll keep an eye on my traffic stats and begin pausing and /or adding negative keywords to my campaigns and ad groups as needed.

In the next round of posts in this series I’ll discuss the match types that I use as well as how I structure my campaigns and configure their settings.

There really wasn’t any limit to what you could drive these clicks to: CPA offers, ClickBank eBooks, eBay and Amazon product links, CJ, and just about anything else you wanted. My poison was parked pages with a bunch of ads plastered on them. Yes, times were good, but it all eventually came to an end like most easy money opportunities do. The lifetime AdWords bans were handed down and a lot of us went onto to exploring other PPC traffic sources on a deeper level.

The Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) PPC ad network had some traffic volume for a reasonable CPC and they weren’t nearly as restrictive as AdWords. There was always MSN adCenter, but getting traffic out of them was like trying to get blood out of the proverbial stone. It hardly seemed worth the time and trouble. Then when it was announced that YSM was going to be rolled into adCenter we all groaned and hoped for the best.

To put it bluntly, the adCenter interface has always sucked – both the Web dashboard and the adCenter Desktop Tool, which for some reason has perpetually been in Beta mode. Constant page load timeouts and other errors made doing even the simplest things in adCenter an extremely frustrating experience. Trying to get around things by using the adCenter Desktop Tool was even more frustrating. Even after I purchased a new computer to replace my ancient Windows XP machine from 2002things  didn’t improve in the least. Fortunately, someone must be working behind the scenes at Microsoft as the performance of the user interfaces have become noticeably better.

The MSN adCenter paid search network consists of their Search Network and Content Network. This is the same way that Google AdWords segments their networks, but there are some stark differences in the types of search partners and contextual publishers between MSN and Google. I’ll cover this in more detail in a future post, but for now, let’s take a closer look at methods for generating keywords for MSN adCenter Search Network campaigns.

Perhaps the biggest mistake that adCenter advertisers make is using the Google External Keyword Tool to generate keywords for their ad groups. This is certainly understandable as most PPC search marketers have been so thoroughly conditioned to use the Google Keyword Tool for just about anything involving keywords and market demand. In some cases, the keywords produced by the Google Keyword Tool can yield enough impressions and clicks to work with for adCenter, but in many other cases, the click volume is often non-existent.

I’ve simply found that using the Keyword Research Tool from within my adCenter online account, produces keywords that have a much better chance of scaring up impressions than any other available keyword tool. This stands to reason since the adCenter Keyword Research Tool is drawing its data from the indexes maintained by Bing.com and Yahoo.com – at least one would assume.

The adCenter tool returns along with the keywords, the estimated CTR, estimated monthly searches, and the estimated CPC. I haven’t yet found much use for the estimated CTR, though it’s probably taken from historical keyword data. On the surface it would appear quite helpful, but I like to go in with a blank slate and hope I can achieve a high CTR for all my keywords.

The search count and estimated CPC are where I believe the gold is. Sometimes I’ll punch in a keyword for a niche I’m thinking about promoting on adCenter and I’ll give it a pass if I don’t see at least several keywords that have a minimum estimated search count of 1000. I may still take a chance on a niche if the CPC is over $1.00 for the top searched keywords, but at least I know it’s going to be competitive going in and will adjust my max bids accordingly.

As a comparison I punched “auto loans” into both the Google External Keyword Tool and the adCenter Keyword Research Tool. It’s a fairly competitive keyword and I was curious what would turn up.

The Google Keyword Tool returned a pretty generic set of keywords and not too many surprises as to the top searched terms:

The adCenter Keyword Research Tool returned many of the same top searched keywords as the Google Tool did:

However, there is a significant difference in some of the keywords returned. Have a look at the keywords in the screenshot above outlined in red. Notice anything different? The adCenter keyword tool returned several branded keywords that are no where to be found in the Google Tool. Also pay attention to the CPC for the branded terms. Most look to be significantly lower than the generic terms for “auto loans”.

With adCenter’s relaxed rules on TM and brand keyword bidding, you can most likely bid on these keywords and get them approved – at least for a while. You may find that if your landing page isn’t significantly about these terms, then you’ll probably get the keywords disabled in your ad group, but not always. Of course, you’ll need to have good keyword-level tracking in place for all your campaigns and keep a close eye on conversions and ad spend. It’s a double-edged sword, where broader keywords may get you cheaper clicks, but they may also cost you more in the long term with a lower conversion rate.

The main point here, is to mix things up a little. If you’ve been using the Google External Keyword Tool for your adCenter PPC campaigns, then it’s certainly worth a try to mix in some keywords from the adCenter Research Tool and see what kind of results you get.

There was also a delay in stats reporting at the end of last month. This happens occasionally and can easily be forgiven, but what made matters worse, was the message in everyone’s dashboard that read stats would be fully updated by “June 31″. Even a leap year wouldn’t help in this case and the message remained in place for several days. It seemed like no one really cared enough to correct it.

ePN partners have become so used to this thing happening that any drop off in their reported earnings throws them into full on panic and paranoia mode.

In fact, just last month, there was another reporting glitch where bunches of clicks went missing. ePN was fairly prompt in acknowledging this hiccup and promised a rather generous “Make Good” in the next payment to affiliates. Of course, this was then followed by another reporting hiccup early this month. It’s almost becoming like an abusive relationship at this point with some affiliates even yanking their ePN links in favor of AdSense.

The unpredictability with the program (mainly the tracking) is what causes affiliates to suspect that every dip in their program stats is the result of a screw up on eBay’s part. What’s even more troubling, is that things seem to be getting worse. Not only do the glitches seem to be more frequent, but the silence in response to them from ePN staff has grown almost deafening.

But this is where I would like to stop in my criticism of ePN.

It is what it is: a great affiliate program that has been battered and bruised over the years by more than a few reckless and greedy affiliates. Hence, the transition of management of the affiliate program to the in-house ePN program followed by the conversion of affiliate compensation to the “Quality Click Pricing” (QCP) model. A model that to this day confounds most partners as to how it actually works.

So then what’s so great about ePN that a ton of affiliates still promote it including yours truly?

Just a few of the highlights:

• An almost endless supply of product categories and products to promote.
• Easy to place product data feeds on your sites using either the RSS Widget or the eBay API. Compare to other physical product affiliate programs that use the difficult to implement
  XML file data feed method.
• Though the tracking screws up from time to time, there is usually an effort made to compensate affiliates. It may fall short of full compensation, but it’s the thought that counts.
• Unlike a lot of the CPA networks, there are no caps and you always get paid if your traffic meets the quality threshold for compensation.
• Their shit converts. It’s probably the easiest affiliate program to get at least a few conversions almost every single day (using it as the basis of sustainable income model is another story (post) all together).

I like to use ePN as the foundation of my Niche Blaster Method to uncover hidden product niches that are proven to be in demand and that prove to convert by sending paid traffic to eBay listings. Sure there’s also Amazon and a few other physical product affiliate programs, but so far I’ve found ePN to be the easiest to work with and the most appealing to the traffic I drive to it.

I’ve debated for a while now whether it’s worth the time and effort to build another blog around my online marketing experiences. The last thing I really want to do is start another blog and then let it drift away into oblivion. And the last thing the online community needs is yet another blog about how its creator makes money online.

In the majority of the cases, these blogs provide very little in the way of substantive information on the “how to” and really exist to promote IM products through the author’s affiliate links. I’m certainly not above doing that and plan to do the same here. So how will this blog be any different? Well, it’s quite possible that it won’t be, but my intended goal is to set forth a system that is currently working for me and then fill in the details around how to best implement that system. The system in question is what I’ve termed “The Niche Blaster Method”. It certainly won’t appeal to everyone and it does require wearing two pretty different hats: one for PPC and another for SEO.

A major part of successfully implementing any system is finding ways to automate it. Creating the system is difficult enough, but it’s really just the beginning steps towards establishing a successful business. Hopefully, for those in resonance with The Nice Blaster Method can get a leg up and focus on the nitty gritty of putting the method into action. It’s a system that I’m still in the process of developing and so, like a PPC campaign, will require testing, tracking, and optimization.

In addition to information about how I use this method, I’ll also be sharing several tools that I use for implementing it here. Hopefully, enough people will begin kicking the tires and providing me with useful feedback for making them better.

I really can’t say that this time around with blogging will be different with any degree of confidence, but I will say that for as long as it lasts, this blog will be my home base of operations for everything I do in my business going forward using this particular business model. Business and online business in particular, require their adherents to constantly adapt to a changing landscape. The past several years have seen that landscape to appear scorched and cratered due to the changes in the online marketing world. The casualties are legion. I know it’s time for me to stop screwing around and begin the backbreaking work of building a business that can withstand the onslaught. Having a few traveling partners along for the ride will it a smoother and more enjoyable adventure.