Google Adwords – WTF, Over
Published September 10, 2009I do affiliate marketing. I build websites dedicated to the products I promote and I run Google Adwords to get buyers to those sites. Vendors love affiliates like me. I do get some sales from organic search, but mostly sales come Adwords. I’ve been good at running profitable campaigns so there was no reason to change what was working for me.
On a side note , I will say it has always bothered me to rely so heavily on Adwords. If Google has some new come to Jesus meeting, I could lose my income. It’s a damn scary thought. So, I have been branching out more and I am noticing an increase in non-Adwords sales. Ok, back to the story.
Case in point: I have a pretty successful site in the fitness category. I’ve been running it for about a year now and it has always been very profitable. The fitness niche that I’m in is fairly competitive and my keywords are very competitive, yet I have managed to do very well with Adwords. I have ranked in the top 1-3 positions for my keywords ever since I unleashed my ads. I pay pennies for my clicks. No, I’m not going to tell you what they are, dumbass.
About a week ago I sparked up a new ad group with a rather popular keyword in the same fitness campaign. Not a very competitive keyword, but a popular one. I had a lot of impressions, but my CTR was low and no one seemed to be buying my the shit like they do with the other ads. Too broad of keywords was my guess. I was getting lookers, but not buyers. However, my quality score on that keyword was 10/10. DAMN! That’s outstanding for a brand new ad.
My ad was very specific. In fact, it was an exact replicate of my other successful ad. And now that I’m saying it out loud, I’m beginning to think most of the clicks were prolly from competitors. Anyone who plays Adwords roulette knows what I’m talking about.
My quality score on all the other keywords in all the other ad groups in that fitness campaign were 7/10′s, but mostly 10/10′s. Make a note of that because it’s going to come back into play here in a minute.
Now, here’s where I fucked up. I decided to built a new landing page to give people what I thought they wanted. Instead of split testing and creating a new ad with the new destination URL (I got cocky), I changed the destination URL of the existing ad. All I can say is son-of-a-bitch! I will never, ever, fucking EVER (I stole that phrase from Frank Kern) do that again. It was an expensive mistake.
The quality score of the keyword went from 10/10 all the way down into the bowels of hell to 1/10 and it stayed there. So about a day later I put the destination URL back the way it was hoping to reclaim my 10/10 quality score. Well, guess what? It only went to a 3/10. The same exact ad, the same exact destination URL, the same content on the page. Nothing changed.
I don’t get it. I created that brand spanking new ad last week and right out of the box I get a 10/10 with no impression or CTR history on it? Then I broke it and it went to a 1/10. Then when I fixed it instead of going back to 10/10, it goes to 3/10.
But wait, this gets even better. This morning I noticed that NONE of the ads in my fitness category where getting clicks. That’s unheard of with the history that I have for them. That’s when I noticed there were only a handful of impressions, too. WTF, Chuck?
So I started drilling down into the ads looking at the keywords. Every damn one of those 7/10 and 10/10 keywords were bottomed out at 1/10. PLUS, due to that low 1/10 quality score, I got a message I had never seen before on those ads: “Below first page bid due to low quality score”. I got fucking Google slapped and now my ads aren’t displaying.
Ok, Sam I am. All you Adwords experts out there, explain to me why one tiny stupid mistake on my part blew up not just that one ad group, but hosed my entire profitable campaign that I have been running for the last year? And don’t try to sell me your ClickBank ebook. Leave a comment.
Cash For Clunkers aka The New Buyers Remorse
Published September 7, 2009The government set the stage with the Cash for Clunkers program and in a few months the banks will begin acting out Part Deux of the hit play, “What’s Mine is Mine and What’s Yours is Mine.” Read what the Mogambo Guru has to say about it.
All you dumbasses who bought into the hype of those ARMs or interest only mortgages, you got what you deserved. Beats me WTF made you think you could make those payments. Well, it’s about to be played out again when you find out you can’t make your Cash for Clunkers car payments. R E P O S S E S S I O N! I like the way that rolls off the tongue. Just like M I S S I S S I P P I. LMAO
Not only can’t you make your car payments, but you can’t pay the insurance on the damn thing. Bet you kinda overlooked that part when you drove off the lot, huh.
But there is a silver lining to this gray cloud. Sorta like Dog the Bounty Hunter, you will witness the birth of a whole new kind of entrepreneur – The Repo Man, not to mention all the new country western songs written about them. If I were you I’d sell that new car and buy a tow truck and go into business for yourself.
Just like a bounty hunter, the repo man gets paid a reward for bringing it those cars. It’s going to get cutthroat out on the streets. They will stalk you. They’ll hire stakeout artists, or whatever the fuck they’re called, the people who sit in their cars down the street from yours and wait for you to turn out the lights when you go to bed. Then they’ll text message the repo man that the coast is clear. Stakeout person gets a few bills and the repo man collects his reward.
Here are some tips for keeping your new car when you can’t make the payments.
- Do not park your car outside at night. They WILL repossess it. True story…years ago a co-worker called into work one morning and said his car was stolen the night before. Usually he parked it in the garage. I know, because I’ve been to his house. Truth be told, the dumbass fell asleep on the couch after mass quantities of beer and tequila and failed to pull the truck into the garage. Months later he told me the truth of what really happened. No one stole the damn thing, it got repossessed because the fucker was too busy blowing his green on alcohol and wasn’t making his car payments.
- Do not drive your car to work. They know where you work. They WILL repossess it.
- Do not drive your car to the grocery store. They will follow you. They WILL repossess it.
- Leave it parked in your garage at all times. If they try to steal if from in there it will be breaking and entering. Don’t know if they can get the cops with a search warrant and I ain’t about to research it for you, dumbass.
- If you don’t have a garage, rent a storage unit and hide the fucker.
- But if there is no hope, leave you car parked outside at night with the doors unlocked and let the bums sleep in it. That way when they tow it away you kill two birds with one stone – the car and the bums will be gone in the morning.
- Make your car payments.
And even if they do take your car, your misery isn’t over because you still owe the money! ROTFLMMFAO Dude, get a bike.
Green, green grass of home
Published September 3, 2009
A few weeks ago I noticed that my automatic sprinkler system wasn’t coming on anymore. Long story short, GS1 was pushing buttons on it one Saturday afternoon while I was in the house and he was in the garage. He came in the house, “The sprinklers came on.” Yea, right, all by themselves. I can barely operate the damn thing without the book and he managed to turn them on.
That’s when it occurred to me that he must have also reset the time. I took a look at the starting time and sure as shit. It was supposed to be 7:30 am and it said 2:30 pm. I didn’t feel like screwing around with it so I left it. Now here it is all that time later and my grass is HELLA green!!
Every summer I get dead spots in the lawn because the sprinklers don’t overlap as well as they should. I water those dead spots like a mad man and they still don’t green up. I was getting ready to dump on some fertilizer. I feel guilty as hell about it, too. CA drought and all. I blame it on Los Angeles for stealing all our NorCal water. fuckers
Now I’ve heard that you shouldn’t water the grass at night because it could cause disease by molding or some damn thing. We aren’t that humid here and even if we were, wouldn’t the humidity do the same thing?
Anyhoo, my grass is soooo green right now and the dead spots are completely gone. And no, I didn’t fertilize like I was going to. So I’m guessing that the water pressure is so high in the middle of the night that the sprinklers are finally overlapping and hitting every inch of the yard.
Now I’m using LESS water because I’m not out there all the ding dong day watering the brown spots by hand. What goes around comes around…for something good for a change. Ain’t that some shit.
So if you’ve got the same problem, try watering in the middle of the night if your city allows it.
