Cutting-Edge Internet Marketing: SEO, PPC, & Web Analytics

Ad Hijacking: Are Companies Being Scammed? You decide.

Take a look at this list  of great companies. What do they all have in common? I believe each of these companies (and yours too) is being swindled- and I’ll show you how. A lot of people don’t think there is anything wrong with the practice I will show you. That is, they don’t think it is a scam. You decide.

companies with ad problems

Here’s the downloadable list

..There are many more companies, but I have to stop somewhere. What these companies all have in common is that they do business over the internet, use ppc advertising, and are part of at least one affiliate network.

Though, perhaps that describes most companies.

Intro
The scam involves the display URL in your pay per click ads. I am arguing that this ad should direct traffic to Amazon.com.

Regular ppc ad. When you click it, what site do you expect to go to?

It doesn’t necessarily.

I can publish an ad right now that replaces it and sends the traffic to my site. I can “highjack”  Amazon’s traffic and send it to my site. That is happening to all of these companies, or at least it has happened to them in the past–I have proof, though I won’t publish it here.  I doubt all of these companies know about ad hijacking.

The Background
Every one of those companies is involved in e-commerce: they are companies that do business over the internet. These types of companies usually participate in affiliate marketing. It just so happens, each of these 170+ companies do.* Affiliates usually get paid a percentage of the total sale for each customer you refer to a site. For example, if I was an Amazon affiliate, you could click on this Amazon link, then go purchase something, and then I get 10% of the total.

So far no problems.
Most internet companies also use pay-per-click advertising to advertise their product. Google, Yahoo and Bing are the big ones. Every-time you search for a “blue t-shirt”, or “mobile phone”, etc, I can pay a couple bucks per click to show my ad in the search results for any keyword search. You can clearly see the company that is advertising…that is called the display URL. You can’t see is the destination URL- the page on the site that the ad is going to.

Everyone should recognize ads like this. You probably don’t know the vocabulary. Depending on your job title you probably don’t need to. However, to understand the scam you will.

The Scam- Ad High-jacking
In the ad above you expect to visit Amazon.com after you click the ad, right? Of course. The problem is, there is no certainty that this is an Amazon ad. Watch, I’ll “steal” Amazon’s traffic right now. Here is the Google Ad Editor interface:

Pic of Google Editor: Note different Diplay and Destination URL

Pretty easy, right? Mysite.com will now get Amazon.com traffic for whatever keyword I bid on. I just have to press “upload”. Note that my display URL is Amazon.com and the destination URL is Mysite.com. In other words, I am writing an ad saying that I am Amazon, but sending you to my site. The display URL amazon.com can only appear in the search results once, so there is a 50% chance that my ad will show- thus sending traffic to mysite.com, and a 50% chance that Amazon’s ad will show sending traffic to Amazon.com.*

In other words, anyone can write an ad in the search engines saying that they are your company.

It troubles me that I can do this. Only Amazon should be able to decide who writes an ad for them. I am the type of person that likes to control what my ads say. That is why I hire someone qualified to write ads rather than allowing my 13-year-old neighbor to write ads for my company. That alone, should allow me to have control over my company’s display URL.

Google does not agree with me. I have talked to them about it. They consider this a feature! Their argument is that they are protecting the affiliates. Something about the searcher’s experience. (Which I think is made worse.) In any case, Google has known about this hack for years and has no intention of changing it. If you feel it things should change, call your account exec. I’ll discuss what specifically should change in the conclusion. (Interestingly, it is hurting Google’s bottom line—which might not be apparent to them– so it is even a more bizarre policy.)*

I encourage the reader to stop here if you can foresee the implications of having your traffic diverted to another site—even an affiliate. Traffic can be diverted from your site, and it can be monetized, and you will make less money. But there is a lot of minutiae involved.
And I am very thorough!

How To Monetize Ad High-jacking
Thus far in the scam, I am just diverting traffic. I suppose I have to prove to you that it is possible for me to monetize this traffic to the detriment of Amazon’s bottom line.
Right now I am paying for Amazon’s traffic. They have a bigger wallet then me. Good thing I signed up Mysite.com to be an Amazon.com affiliate! Now on Mysite.com, I’ll put a link to Amazon. When people click-through to shop on Amazon, I get 10% of their sales. Now I will make money. If I bid on the right keywords, I’ll make more than I spend.

FAQ
Surely, customers will feel something is fishy when they don’t go to Amazon right?
I think so, but enough people will purchase to make this scam worthwhile. There are even ways around this. I will redirect customers instantly from Google.com to Mysite.com to Amazon.com…the customers won’t even see that they were ever on my site.  It will take a millisecond longer for the customer to go from Google to Amazon.com, and I get 10% of all sales for 30 days. Regardless, once someone is on my site, I can put an affiliate cookie on their computer.
Why don’t I just look at the affiliate ID, and just kick those affiliates out of the program?
You should. But it is a hassle to monitor.  My company has thousands of affiliates. Also, there are ways for the affiliates to hide their IDs.

How can I tell if I am being scammed?
First, if you don’t participate in an affiliate program, there is nothing to look for. Secondly, do a search for your company name in Google and see if you recognize the ad. Click the ad, and see if there is a redirect*.  Make sure you recognize all your referrel traffic in your analytic package!
What keywords do the affiliates bid on?
Always your company name. E.g, I would do “Amazon”, “Amazon.com”, “Amazon coupons”, “Amazns jewelry”, etc. Never “buy books”. Too expensive.

I don’t see any fake ads. You’re wrong. It didn’t happen to me.
Just because you don’t see an ad doesn’t mean you are safe. In order to hide my scam from Amazon, I just need to make sure no one at corporate sees these shenanigans. So, I will not put up my suspicious ads in Washington…that is where Amazon corporate is. To be super safe, I could always just run my ads only at night, or only on mobile devices.

Aren’t I just attributing traffic/revenue to the affiliate channel rather than the ppc channel? Does that really matter? I am still making a sale.
Yes, it really matters. The primary reason this is a “scam” and not an “inconvenience” is that you end up paying your affiliates a greater commission than you normally pay for PPC costs. If the amount you are paying to your affiliates from these ads is greater than the amount you spend on clicks from that traffic, you are losing money. And of course it is! If it wasn’t, the affiliates would not have the money to do it. There are other financial implications I don’t have space for.

How do you know that those specific companies were targeted?
I won’t say that here. Obviously, you could just do a search for their company name and see if there are redirects and phony ads.

You’re making a big deal out of this. This isn’t a big deal.
Perhaps.

So you’re admitting you’re stealing from Amazon? Why is it okay for you to do it?
It was a literary device to try to simply the explanation. I am not stealing from Amazon. Perhaps I should have made it simpler.

Is there anything that can distinguish a real ad from a fake ad?
As far as I can tell, there are a couple things. In Google, you might see a map, or product pics or product rankings. I don’t think those can be faked. The problem is that not everyone has those or is able to implement those. Anyways, these legit ads can still be over-ridden with a bogus ad.

In Yahoo/MSN there is a special “Official Site” designation sometimes.

So this happens in Yahoo/MSN too?
Yes.

You just caused us a lot more work! You’re making this scam public! You’re costing us money!
A)The affiliates already know about this, you should too. B) Is that what you tell your IT guys when they find a hole in your security? C) This is fixable.

Obviously Amazon wouldn’t have this problem. They’d just call Google and Google would fix it for them, right?
I don’t know. Sears, Kohl’s, Kmart, Mattel etc are having this problem. They are pretty big companies.

Are all redirects between google and the destination site a sign that something is fishy?
No, your ppc company might be using some sort of tracking mechanism that uses redirects. Most are fishy.

Are you saying all affiliates are evil?
No. Many are affiliates are great. All scammer-affiliates are evil.

What can I do?

I want to emphasize the purpose of this post. I want this problem fixed. It can cause a lot of lost man- hours and financial loss. The search engine companies are aware of this problem, though they consider it a feature not a bug… Perhaps if other companies see what is happening they will complain and the search engines will change.

Google, Bing, Yahoo could fix this in an hour. There are a couple ways. The best solution is to only allow one PPC account to use one display URL.* A company should be able to have an official adwords account. Google requires you to verify your Google Plus account, your webmaster account, your analytics account, your google places account… but for some reason not your Adwords account? That’s the only one that really matters.

Perhaps there is an even more elegant solution. We need to recognize that it is a problem first. Write your google account rep if this concerns you.
In the meantime you could monitor your affiliates, and kick them out when they violate this policy. Also, there is a company that can check all of this stuff for you, so you don’t have to hunt down the scammers. It is BrandVerity.com. They are expensive, but they work. (no-I am not an affiliate). The search engines should offer this service for free though, for all the billions they make.

I still have questions.
Write me.
Eric(dot)zwickler(at)gmail(dot)com

This is really long.
That’s not a question.

Footnotes

*I was going to say “stolen from”, “scammed”, but I’ll let you decide what word is most appropriate. Maybe neither.
*maybe I got one wrong, probably not.
*Okay, technically not 50/50, but I am trying to write this for executives, so work with me.
*If anyone at Google wants to talk about how this hurts your bottom line, I am here.
*linked accounts count as one.

Scrub Your Email List For Better Conversion

Instantly Improve Your Email Marketing Performance By Scrubbing Your List
When I started out in internet marketing, I read a lot of advice about “cleaning up your list”. The advice was vague. It is not as though there is a button called “cleanup” in excel. I’ll give you some step-by-step advice that is guaranteed to make you money.

The Fundamentals of Email Newsletters
The primary function of email newsletters is to get customers to buy. Simple, right? Well, there are so many places where things can go wrong, it is a miracle anyone converts. Here is the flow of an email:
1) Send email out (hopefully to the right address).
2) Mail goes through filters and arrives in their Inbox.
3) The customer likes our brand and the subject enough to open the email and check it out.
4) The customer is interested in the product and offer enough to click-through to the website.
5) Once on the website, then they can start shopping.
6) About 1-2% of people who made it to step 5 will buy.
7) Hopefully they will like the product enough not to return it.

Every step of the way, customers will stop shopping. Our goal is to carry as many people from step 1 to 2, and from 2 to 3, etc. Every time a customer advances to the next step, we think of this as a micro-conversion. We can’t make a sale if the customer doesn’t make it to the website.

Email marketing involves optimizing each of these steps. Improvements in any of these areas will lead to improvement in performance. Often we’ll spend a lot of time on step 4, the design of the email. I think this is because it is the most fun. Creating promos, looking at pictures, merchandising, & selecting models is much more interesting than staring at spreadsheets. But somebody has to do it!

A Real-life Example of Optimizing Step One: List Scrubbing
I just went through an email list with about two hundred thousand entries. Seven and a half percent of the addresses were formatted wrong. These are people who want to hear from you, but they typed their email wrong. 7.5% actually doesn’t sound like a lot of loss, right? Wrong. That is 15,000 people per email. Let’s examine how much money we are losing by doing some quick math.

We send a newsletter 2x a month. Open rate is 30%. CTR is 30%. Conversion rate is 1%. Avg Order $100.
{[(15,000) (2) (.3)] (.3) (.01) (100)}= $2700/month lost.

Ugh! That is money we threw away due to people typing their addresses wrong. But there is good news. This is a relatively easy thing to fix. You can buy software to do this, or get a programmer to help you, or fix this yourself in Excel.

Scrub Yourself
First, export all your addresses to Excel. The “trick” is to replace common bad addresses with good addresses. We know that every email address has the same format: name@domain.com. Here are some of the most common errors.
@yahoo.comm
Yahoo.com
@Yaho.com
@Yahoo.con
@yahoo,con

Find and replace (Ctrl-F) each of these variations with “@yahoo.com”. Do the same procedure for gmail, aol, msn, hotmail. Congrats. You just fixed half of the errors. I just made you $1300/month in a half hour.

Kind of.

To recoup the rest of the address, you will have to send the list to an intern and tell them to fix all the unique domain addresses. You’ll probably have people using their school or work addresses, and the replace function will not save you time on these. Also, remember to import your new email addresses to your email provider.

Conclusion
The good news is that there is an easy way to fix this problem going forward. Make your customer type their address twice when they subscribe. This way there will not be any formatting errors in your email list. Making these changes will have a large impact on any email campaign. This is just one step of the email optimization process.

Monetizing Your Digital Magazine

A digital magazine can be downloaded to your Adobe Reader, rather than mailed to your home. Digital magazines simulate the act of “turning pages” by clicking an arrow. It appears as if you are looking at a Xeroxed magazine through one of those old-school newspaper-viewers they had before computers. You know the ones where you turn the dial and you see a microfiche of the next page?

Of course the quality is a lot nicer now.

There are several ways that you can make money using this business model. You need content, SEO, and analytics in order to get advertisers. It is a bit more complex, but these are the basics. The need for good content is a given, so I will concentrate on the other two areas.

Analytics for Digital Magazine & Content Sites

The primary issue is that your readers are consuming content in two completely different areas: the Adobe Reader Magazine and on the web. Some people will prefer one or the other, some both. You will probably have to reconcile this data for your advertisers.

Or just lose the magazine and go with only web content.

Assuming you must keep the magazine, here are the ways to monetize the content:
a) Adsense/ Doubleclick type ads (“non-guaranteed inventory”)
b) Direct advertiser purchases (“guaranteed inventory”)
c) Affiliate links
d) Paid Subscriptions
e) Selling users’ personal information or using it in some way.

A. To make money with this type of content you need good content (obviously), a lot of pages, and visible ads (because we want people to click on advertisers ads). Advertisers care about getting converting traffic to their traffic. If you don’t provide it, they will stop advertising on your domain.
The advantage of adsense is that you can set it and leave it and the inventory will be filled. The disadvantages are that you can’t place adsense on adobe pages and you have little control over your advertisers.

B. There are two types of ad purchases: An ad in the digital magazine and an ad on the site. Getting companies to buy inventory on the site will be relatively easy. Just provide them stats. Getting them to buy space in the digital magazine will be much more difficult. Obviously it may just involve getting a salesman to talk an advertiser into giving you money. More likely it will involve a complex analysis in which you show how many of your website readers subscribe/download the magazine, and what do you know about those users. You can use analytics for this. IF you have everything set up properly it still will take time (to accumulate historical data) and a great analyst to figure out how to “spin” the data into actual business drivers.

C. Affiliate links are relatively easy to set up. You sign up and then embed links in your content. If someone clicks and then goes and makes a purchase you get a percentage. The risk is that you will alienate your readers if you do it poorly or too often, or you will send readers off your site and they will not purchase.

D. If you can get people to pay you directly for your content- that is great. Signing up for an RSS feed is ok too.

E. If you have people’s info, you can sell them stuff. There is a line between re-marketing and creepy that could hurt your brand.

I would assume that most companies use a combination of all of these methods. The problem is that some of these can be labor intensive (C), require incredible talent (A, B, C), and require tough decisions from upper management regarding how to allocate limited resources. In each case, intelligent business decisions will lead to larger advertisers, so analytics plays a huge role in the content business. Also, content sites tend to be the largest.

Acquiring Readers with SEO, Paid search, and Social

You need readers in order to have a business. Good content is important, but it needs to be optimized for SEO so that the engines will pick up your content. Good SEO takes a long time, and gains are incremental. At times SEO can conflict with content and design, so you must have a strong decision-maker at the top who is responsible for SEO/Content/Design conflicts.

There are some cases it may be worthwhile to purchase readers (e.g. advertise) so that visitors to your website buy from your advertisers (hopefully for more than you paid to acquire them). This is called arbitrage; this practice is looked upon unfavorably by some companies, and can get you permanently banned, so be careful how you use it.

Social media is a great way to get a loyal readership going. I would look to involve an intern in this process. It would be a good introduction into the world of internet marketing.

What is Remarketing?

In most cases remarketing campaigns target visitors who did not convert or purchase on your site. If a visitor converts, they become a “customer” and thus no longer need to be “acquired”, they need to be “retained” or upsold.* Thus, once a visitor becomes a customer they are no longer the domain of the acquisition team, they are shipped off to the sales or retention department. (Depending on the size of your company, you may be involved in one or all three teams.) But if a visitor leaves your site without converting, they are still the domain of the acquisition team. “Remarketing” is task of targeting that segment and getting them to convert.

Remarketing is hot in the internet marketing world. It is becoming easier and cheaper to implement, thus lowering the barrier to entry. In the online world, the term “remarketing” is used to discuss efforts to acquire customers who have already visited your site or opened an email. If someone has never visited your site, you cannot “RE-market to them”.

As of today, remarketing is only used on the display network. However, it seems that Google or MSN could use that data to customize your search network ads sometime in the future. With the focus on “personalized search” I would think this is on its way.

Facts about Remarketing
The segment of traffic that comes to our site and leaves without converting will be the target of most remarketing campaigns. Since these visitors have already shown a previous interest in our site we can make three assumptions about them:

1. Remarketing segments will always be a subset of the general population. Thus, the impressions and traffic you receive are likely to be small.

2. Remarketing campaigns will cost less to convert since this segment has already demonstrated interest in your brand. We might think of their prior exposure to our brand as a kind of micro-conversion. If your brand is worth anything, remarketing should cost less than the general segment.

3. Remarketing segments are worth more to us than the general population. Feel free to spend more to insure these visitors see your ads.

Tips and More Details on Remarketing
Two other quick things that you need to know about remarketing. One, this remarketing “magic” is created done by using tagging in your analytics/ ppc/ display tool. Your analytics /ppc /display guy should be able to help you.

Keep it simple. There are many more advanced ways to use remarketing which are beyond the scope of this article. If you are not using remarketing, feel free to use it as I described. Even this is way beyond most companies’ capabilities (because they don’t get enough traffic, or lack the resources to analyze the data).

* There are some exceptions to this case. In ecommerce, often time customers need to be reacquired each time they search for a new product. However, let’s ignore this situation for the sake of simplicity.