I was recently asked by a student in Internet University, “when do I need to use an ad server?” Before I answered I thought long about my history media buying and pondered when I made the decision to use one. For those of you unfamiliar with technology, an ad server is basically a piece of software that allows you to upload your creatives and destination URLs for the purpose of optimization and tracking. You have the option of installing the software on your own web server or using a third party solution.

The majority of people in the affiliate marketing industry utilize the third party solutions. First (and most important), many advertising networks and websites have a certain ‘list’ of ad servers that they’re willing to accept. If the server you’re using isn’t on their list, then you can’t use it on that source. The third party solutions also handle the server hardware setup and provide redundant backups (to secure speed and uptime). Installing your own ad server and managing it on your web server can be tedious especially if you’re not experienced at server administration.

So when is the time to begin using an ad server? Third party solutions are fairly expensive and some even require a long-term contract. So what’s wrong with just giving your ad network/website a few creatives, your destination URLs, and letting them run? I for one, like to know the EXACT amount of impressions/clicks I’m getting. I also want to make sure that if I paid for United States traffic, I’m getting US traffic. By allowing an ad network or a website to run your ad without a server, you’re putting a lot of faith in that webmaster. What’s going to stop them from billing you from a few ‘extra’ impressions? With an ad server you are constantly informed which creative is garnering impressions and converting.

Speaking of creatives, when you give the traffic source your creatives to test, how do you eliminate the ones that aren’t working? Chances are you have to contact your rep and let them know to pause the un-performing ad. This is all good unless your rep is out of the office or at lunch while you’re spending hard earned money on a creative that you KNOW is tanking.

I decided to look at some of my own data before I started using an ad server just to see if there were some things I missed. The results were stunning. While I monitored creative CTRs by the day I never looked at them on a ‘monthly’ basis. When I ran a ‘monthly’ report I realized that if I would have paused two of the ads during the duration of this one campaign, I would have made an additional $30,000 net profit that month (give the conversion rate stayed the same). That’s seriously money we missed out on!

I could continue to go on and on about the benefits of having an ad server, but after my $30K figure I’m sure you get the picture. For those of you that can’t afford an ad server, I suggest working with the self-serve advertising networks before moving to a media buy. Get things profitable, learn the ropes, and then move into the ‘big leagues’ with your own ad server. Several months ago John posted a review on the Zedo Ad Server Review which you may want to check out again at this link.

Saturday, August 28th I’ll be heading out to California to speak at the Orange County Meetup202 hosted by Habitat Agency. I’ll be discussing in detail Media Buying providing insights as to how the industry has evolved since the 90s and where I see the future going. From the types of offers that can be promoted via a media, to planning your media buy, International media buying, I’ll be covering it all! I’ll also be accepting questions at the end of my presentation.

I invite you all in the area to come out and hear what I have to say as I’m sure I can help both beginners and experts. The Orange County Meetup202 is one of the larger ones in the United States so I encourage you go ahead and reserve your spot as soon as possible. There is only 100 spots total. I’m very excited and honored to be asked by Habitat Agency to come out and host a presentation. It should be not only a very informative meeting, but a lot of fun for us all!

You can read more details on the official Meetup202 website at this link.

Since tomorrow I’m doing a video interview with Clickbooth I decided to test out my webcam by doing a video blog! Enjoy!

Tomorrow I’m going to be doing a video interview with Eric of Clickbooth discussing media buying!  If you have a question you want to ask me feel free to email them to Eric@clickbooth.com.

Considering I’ve never done a video interview before, I’m really looking forward to this!  I’ll be sure and post the video once it’s available!

This post is a bit late but it took a little longer to contact and hear back from everyone! Anyways, I’m proud to announce that two members of our Internet University as well as one subscriber to our Media Buying 101 list will be attending this year’s Affiliate Summit East conference at the Hilton in New York City later this month for free! Without further ado, here are the winners:

Winners Of The Two Complimentary GOLD Passes:
A gold pass includes: Admission to Affiliate Meet Market, Exhibit Hall, Keynotes, Sunday educational sessions; access to all recorded session videos; PowerPoint presentations; and Affiliate Summit Social Network. Retail Value: $549

Mike Chiasson
In January, 26 year old Mike Chiasson made his New Year’s Resolution to earn $100,000 this year. Apart from his regular day job, he is largely attempting to complete that goal by leveraging affiliate marketing revenues. Mike started his blog MikeChiasson.com to talk about his various attempts at making money (online and offline) and hopes that his experiences can help inspire others and give them the edge they need to be successful.

Mike had the following to say about Internet University: “In January of this year I started my work in Affiliate Marketing. Needless to say it has started off slow and definitely isn’t the get rich quick scheme people would have you to believe. With the help of Internet University I have already been able to stabilize some of my campaigns and begin moving into niches and methods that I would’ve never even known about. I have no doubt that IU is the place for me to continue to grow and help me reach super affiliate status.”

Cody Low

Winner Of The Complimentary SILVER Pass:
A silver pass includes: Admission to Affiliate Meet Market and Exhibit Hall, Keynotes; and access to the Affiliate Summit Social Network. Retail Value: $249

Nuno Blanc

Nuno had the following to say about SuperAffiliateTwins.com: SuperAffiliateTwins.com is one of the few blogs I follow on a daily basis because the information they provide is gold. Not only they give tips and advices on all types of Internet Marketing – like SEO, PPC, PPV and Media Buying – but also post about their journeys, problems and how they actually solve them.

Congratulations to all of the winners, I look forward to meeting you all in just a few weeks! If you haven’t joined Internet University our competition officially kicks off tomorrow at 1:00 p.m. ET so it’s not too late to get in! This month we’re going to see who can generate the most net profit promoting email & zip submit offers with pay-per-view traffic.

Stay tuned to SuperAffiliateTwins.com as this is just one of many more contests to come!

Reflecting back on the last year I’ve noticed I’m spending a good amount of time optimizing my campaigns. Recently I’ve been asking myself ‘how much is too much?’ 99.9% of campaigns must be optimized before they can become profitable. But once they’re optimized and you’re seeing a nice return (100%+ ROI) how much more should you optimize?

During my reflection (while relaxed on vacation) I noticed I’ve sometimes spent upwards of three weeks focusing on one campaign just to squeeze a couple hundred more dollars a day. More landing pages, different calls to action, new creatives, multiple offers, etc, etc, etc (the list goes on and on). To add to my frustration, once an offer gets pulled or a traffic source limits the offers they’re willing to accept, it’s back to square one with optimization. Annoying!

Therefore I’ve decided to take a new approach on all of my campaigns. Once I begin seeing profit I’m going to set a goal to get to 100% ROI. So for every dollar spent I make a dollar in return. Once I reach this point I’m going to focus my time and effort on making another campaign have the same ROI. While essentially I may limit some campaigns I’ll end up with more campaigns.

How much do you optimize? Do you set a ROI goal?

For those of you generating your affiliate marketing traffic via pay-per-view (or cost-per-view) I want you to look at your stats right now and notice where the majority of your ROI (return on investment) is coming from. Nine out of ten chances your conversions are coming from keyword/URL targets that have very low clicks but high conversion rates. Since starting Internet University I’ve noticed a lot of people fail with pay-per-view traffic because they all want to bid on the same targets/keywords as everyone else.

A bidding war can be one of the worst things for you campaigns and even if you win the ‘war’ chances are another affiliate is eventually going to challenge you again. There are literally hundreds of millions of websites on the Internet. To be successful driving traffic via pay-per-view you need to take the time to go out and find where there is NO competition. Notice the below screenshot:

(I apologize I accidentally ran the report with another campaign that’s why the first two rows are black)

I took this from one of my Prosper installations yesterday. I setup a campaign just for this blog post to prove my point correct. Notice the target with 1,041 clicks. It has 1 conversion (0.10%). This traffic was around $0.01 per view. The offer I was using pays $1.50 so I lost $8.91 on this particular target. Notice the target with 8 clicks (views). Paying just $0.08 for these views I generated $3! 3650% ROI! This is what I like to call the ‘hidden gems’ of pay-per-view. This is where profitable campaigns come from.

The pain with this, is it takes many hours to find targets that everyone isn’t bidding on. This is one of the main reasons you’re not going to get rich over night. Campaigns take days, weeks, sometimes even months to build. The harder and more creative you work to find these targets, the more generous you’re going to be paid. So next time you’re setting up a pay-per-view campaign or when you’re looking at scaling your current campaigns keep this post in mind!

On a side note, I announced yesterday in Internet University that soon we’re going to be holding ‘competitions’. This is where everyone will work on a particular campaign together and we’ll all share ideas/landing pages/etc. We won’t share sensitive information such as particular keywords/traffic sources, but rather our ROI and campaign status. In my opinion this is going to create a new ‘hands on’ way to learn how to make money online. If you’re not signed up you may want to get in before the first competition begins (most likely the first week of August). You can do so at this link.

While on vacation I received a quite alarming email from Google. It read the following:

Subject: Final Warning: Your Google AdWords account has multiple violations

Dear advertiser,

We are writing to let you know that your Google AdWords account is at risk of being suspended due to multiple violations related to our Advertising Policies, including the Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines. Below is a list of example display URLs of the sites in violation of these policies. Please check the existing ads in your account to ensure that they comply with these policies. Please be aware that this is your final warning, and any additional violations of our Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines will lead to immediate account suspension.

Customer ID: XXX-XXX-XXXX

superaffiliatetwins.com

As part of our commitment to making the AdWords experience safe and effective for our users and our advertisers, we routinely review the landing pages that our advertisers promote through our search and content networks.  If we find that an advertiser has submitted poor quality landing pages that do not comply with our Advertising Policies, including the Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines, we reserve the right to take account-level action.

Landing pages advertised via AdWords must have relevant, original content, and must be transparent about the nature of the business being promoted.  Further, advertisers are prohibited from promoting certain types of sites, which include, but are not limited to:
*  Data collection sites that imply delivery of free items, etc., in order to collect private information
*  Arbitrage sites without relevant and original content that are designed for the purpose of showing ads
*  Affiliate sites without relevant and original content that are designed to drive traffic to another site with a different domain
*  ”Get-rich quick” sites that make unrealistic promises
*  Sites that are deceptive
*  Sites that distribute malware or spyware
*  Extremely misleading/unverifiable or inaccurate claims

Please note that this action is related to sites that have recently been advertised through your account. In a review of your account history, we found that your account had submitted multiple sites that merited poor landing page quality evaluations.  Advertisers that have a history of promoting poor quality landing pages are subject to account-level disabling.

Pausing or deleting an ad or ad group that advertises a site will not affect or improve the site’s landing page quality. The only way to improve poor landing page quality is to correct the site according to our Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines; after you have done this, please contact Google AdWords support by replying to this email so that we can re-evaluate your site’s landing page quality. Once a site’s landing page quality has markedly improved based on these guidelines, ads associated with the site should also see an improvement in Quality Score as it relates to landing page quality.

You can review our Advertising Policies, including our Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines, by visiting: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guidelines.cs and http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=46675.

In addition, our FAQ about Disabled Accounts can be found here: https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164786.

If you have additional questions or concerns not addressed by our policies or help center, you can contact support by replying to this email.

Sincerely,

The Google AdWords team

Are you kidding me? Since we launched our Internet University we’ve been driving traffic with Google Adwords targeting keywords where people are searching about how to make money online.  No funny business, simple ads that promote the service we’re offering.  They also note this as our ‘final’ warning, but this is the first email they’ve sent. I replied to them six days ago but have yet to receive a response. To avoid compromising our Adwords account I went ahead and paused our ads.

I’ve always been VERY careful with Google. I’ve never cloaked anything, I’ve never ran a re-bill or an uncompliant offer on Adwords. I feel that it is essential to keep a good relationship with Google to be able to grow in the future. That is why I’ve been ‘overly’ compliant when submitting campaigns. Now that they don’t like Internet University completely baffles me. We don’t promise a ‘get rich quick’ program. We don’t hide any terms as far as the subscription goes. In my opinion we’re not violating ANY of their advertiser guidelines.

It seems to me as they’re classifying us as a typical ‘flog’ and not even reading our content. Sadly this is what happens when a company becomes so big they lose focus about there entire business model as well as keeping customers happy (I can’t even begin to tell you how many millions I’ve spent with Google). To make things worse it’s been six days and they can’t even write a simple reply with more details as to what they don’t like about our site!

What’s your thoughts on this? Is anyone from Google reading this?

We’ve selected and confirmed the two Internet University students who won the complimentary GOLD passes to Affiliate Summit East.  However, the winner of the SILVER pass hasn’t responded yet.  Everyone please keep checking back as if we don’t hear from the winner by 5:00 p.m. ET today we’ll be selecting another email address at random from our Media Buying 101 list.  Feel free to enter at the last minute!  Good luck!

I hope everyone missed me as I was at the beach all last week for a MUCH needed vacation.  Working online (and for now in a home office) it is very easy to get burned out.  Prior to vacation I was burned out to no end.  I was honestly becoming very slow with my daily duties and it was taking me forever to accomplish even the simplest task.

I now feel refreshed and ready to get back to the grind.  While on vacation I came up with a lot of new ideas for our Internet University that will not only help people learn faster but will surely set us apart from any other training program online.  I also was very pleased to see another IU student has found some success and is now making a solid $150 a day (I feel like the proud father LOL).

Today we’re going to be announcing the winners of our Affiliate Summit East giveaway.  I’m going to shoot for around 5:00 p.m. ET so you have until then to subscribe to our Media Buying 101 list to be eligible for the SILVER pass or to subscribe to Internet University to be eligible for one of the GOLD passes.

Keep check on your email to see if you’re a winner!