Okay, sorry it has been a week or so since writing about the iframer. I’ve been pretty busy with my personal marketing, and I now have a house full of Italians. My wife’s sisters are visiting for a month so this should be interesting.

I have uploaded a new version of the iframer/rotator thanks to Yebot. He has included a section to add for your tracking and a section for dynamic keywords. So you can either jump over to the Free Ruck Reports or you can click here to download the new iframer/rotator.

The tracking feature is pretty easy to use. Around line 65 you will find a comment about inserting your tracking script. Just place it between the two comments and you will be good to go.

The dynamic keyword tracking will be a little different. The script can now pass a keyword to your CPA network via the URL. In order for this to work your URLs will need to look like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php?kw=yourkeyword
If you are adding the script to a folder then your URL will look like this http://www.yourdomain.com/folder/index.php?kw=yourkeyword
It is not necessary to use the keyword passing function, but if you wanted to, it is there for the taking.

The tricky part of this will be gathering the correct URL from the CPA network. Because this is PPC, you will want to use the Search Creative URL that they give you. However sometimes they don’t always give you this URL yet they say it is for search. For example on Convert2Media I have chosen the “Debt Avenger – Lead Gen (46)”. It says that it is promotable by Search, however, no search creative can be found. So I will be using the text ad creative at the bottom.

So a few comments and emails have been made in regards to the iframe/rotator script and quality score. To be honest with you, you don’t get a good quality score for an iframe. The reason for this is because the site inside of the frame is not actually on your page. It displays on your page, but it isn’t your page. Your QS comes from the information that is contained in your source code.

Enter URL to Spider

If you don’t believe me, give it a shot. Just enter the URL you want to test. If you enter a page that is just an iframe no data will appear. If you enter an actual webpage, you will see plenty of information.So, how do you combat this little problem? Add the meta tags. In the script you will see the following:

// CONFIG OPTIONS
// TITLE TAG <title>...</title>
$pgtitle = "";
// META KEYWORDS (comma-separated) - optional
$metakeywords = "";
// META DESCRIPTION - optional
$metadescription = "";

Where you see $pgtitle =” “ you need to insert the title of the page. What I like to do is find the title of one of the CPA offers that I am running that will work with all three sites. Sometimes an adjustment to the name of the title needs to be made. This isn’t a problem. I also like to include the domain name. For example: YourDomain.com – Top quality car insurance at an affordable price.

My title tag would then look like this: $pgtitle =” YourDomain.com – Top quality car insurance at an affordable price”

You’ll then want to do the same thing with the meta keywords and meta description tags.

Okay sorry about the delay. I’ve been a little busy on the home front. Also, jump back into the free ruck reports as there is a new cleaned up version of the CashTactics URL rotator <—- Or just click that. We will be using and talking about that version from here on out. Thank you Yebot from Yebot.com for getting us a better rotator and iframer.

Before we start using this URL rotator let me explain some things. It is important to test multiple offers. Split testing is VERY important in this business. One bad CPA offer can kill your budget. At the same time one good CPA offer can buy you a car! When I use the iframer I like to test out 3 offers at a time.

The offers are place in the $offerstr. Remember to separate your affiliate urls with a comma ( , ). Also, in order to activate that function you will need to delete the backslashes ( // ). You should find two of them there so make sure you delete both of them next to the $offerstr function. If you have a line counter on your html editor it’s on line 31. Or you can do it the old fashion way and just count down 31 lines.

Make sure that the offers you’re rotating are in the same niche. Don’t run a dating offer with an insurance offer through the rotator. Also, I like to rotate an email/zip submit, and two short forms to begin. This is just for testing purposes.

Okay enough about setting the URLs to rotate. If you have questions post in the members forum.

Now, what I like to do is purchase a domain for the specific niche. For example, if I want to run these bingo offers from Conver2Media I’ll go purchase a domain name like “PlayBingo.com” or “BingoTonight.net”, something bingo related.

Okay, so this CPA Poll monster is pretty much beat to pieces. I have one last thing I want to share with all of you before I move onto other subjects.

Framing an offer is more powerful than giving them a poll. However, there are certain items that work better with a poll than they do with a frame. Zip and Email submits that are “chances to win” something should be kept on a poll. What about those other offers that the CPA companies have that are about insurance, or dating? You can’t really run them off of a poll. They just wont convert that well. But you can drive traffic to them directly. In an indirect way. Let me explain that better…

Now Googles actual policy states this:

“…we monitor and don’t allow the following:

• Redirect URLs: Ads that contain URLs that automatically redirect to the parent company.
• Bridge Pages: Ads for web pages that act as an intermediary, whose sole purpose is to link or redirect traffic to the parent company.
• Framing: Ads for web pages that replicate the look and feel of a parent site. Your site should not mirror (be similar or nearly identical in appearance to) your parent company’s or any other advertiser’s site.”

You can read Googles full Affiliate URL policy by going into Adwords help and performing a search.

Okay now. I know what Googles policy is. However, by building a Poll we are already violating it. A Poll is a “bridge page. It’s a intermediary page whose sole purpose is to link and redirect traffic to the “parent company”.

By now, we should all know how to run a poll based on recent news. These polls can be profitable. However, they are unfortunately short lived due to new news popping up everyday. I had someone ask me last night on messenger “Why won’t my poll get any hits?” So I jumped in, looked at the guys landing page, and saw that it was about a news event that happened 8 months ago.

Now, setting up a news poll before the topic becomes main stream, and while the topic is main stream is great! However, once the news item goes to the back shelf you’re out of luck. Clicks will die down, and eventually impressions. You’re more than welcome to keep these polls running… However, I promise you conversions will go down as well. It’s just the nature of the beast.

The best way to set up a poll is to… are you ready… this next bit of info is top notch… COMPARE TWO ITEMS… There are 100s of CPA offers for different items. You can compare brands of shoes, brands of lip gloss, types of candies. You can even compare stores. I know for a fact there is a Target gift card and a Wal-Mart gift card floating around there. Compare Wal-Mart vs. Target. When they vote for their specific brand send them to that offer! Your conversion rate will sky rocket.

“Where would you rather shop?”
“What kind of lip gloss do you like”
“Which Candy is Sweeter?”

When people are taken to the “item” that they vote for then they are naturally going to be inclined to opt-in. How cool would it be to get a chance for some Nike shoes after you just said that they were better than Adidas. Or vice versa…

Now this can be a hard thing to judge. In fact, I don’t really measure my clicks vs conversions as a standard. Instead, I measure my cost spent vs. my cost earned. The key is to set a goal and to stick to it.

When I test a campaign I try and set my goal to 100 clicks. If, in 100 clicks I get no conversions I will try switching out the offer. (Ideally the offer would be rotating from the beginning). Sometimes polls will run that are complete duds from the beginning, and sometimes a poll will struggle to get 100 clicks let alone 100 impressions!

If you’re having a hard time getting impressions, check out your ad-groups. Are they tightly grouped? What about the keywords your using… Are they outdated? Many times when we run those popular “recent news” polls the topic gets blown through really fast, therefore, yesterday we might have had great keywords and today… yeah they can suck. There is always new “hot” news everyday.

Now, if you’re getting the getting the impressions but not the clicks… yeah that’s an ad copy problem. We’ll go over ad copy later.

Okay back to the topic at hand.

If I’m getting clicks and one or two conversions then things are still going good for us. We may meet our goal of 100 clicks, spend around $15, and make about $4, then that is okay. This is something that we can work with.

We need to make sure we are getting people from our page to our offer. The first thing you want to do to check this out is to load the report from your CPA network and see if they show any clicks to the offer. Remember… Not all networks have real time tracking. AND some offers have to be uploaded by the advertiser.

Picking a landing page is very important. If you pick something that is cluttered chances of a lead being generated is pretty slim. On the other hand… When the site looks nice and is easy to navigate, then a lead can be pretty easy to gather.

Chad at CDF Networks wrote a quick post about “Good and Bad Landing Pages”. Here are some tips you want to look for when you’re choosing an offer.

Tip #1 – Is the page cluttered?
You need to make sure the page doesn’t have a lot of “fancy smancy” images or patter (words). Take a look at the page and make sure that the user will be able to EASILY see all of the text fields that they will need to fill out.

Tip#2 – Make sure there are no other links.
That’s it… Just browse the page and make sure you can see clearly that there are no links that will take the user away from making you money. The “Bad Landing Page” example clearly has a line of links at the top of the page. All of these links can take the user away from where you want them, which is that little section of text boxes on the lower right… Remember, the least amount of distraction for the user the better.

Tip#3 – The least amount of actions possible
While Short Forms pay out higher then Zip/Email submits, they are also a little harder to convert. ESPECIALLY if your trying to run them as a backend offer to a poll. So, that being said, try and stick with the least amount of fields possible. The least amount of work possible for your users the better! The “Bad Landing Page” has 9 fields (one is lower on the page) and the “Good Landing Page” has only 1. This can help your conversions skyrocket. Often times because of the ease for the user you will get more conversions!

This morning I was thinking about you guys and gals and I thought to myself.  I should give them an example of something they can use.   So this is what I did.  I jumped over to some of those sources I mentioned to you.  Eventually I found this headline… “Birthdays: Can Mr. T still pity the fool at 56?“. Now… I only found this on one site… BUT, I’m foreseeing the future.

You have to think of news articles in terms of a rollercoaster.  Often times you will see a headline in one place BUT in a week or so many places will be sproating similar headlines.  I imagine that in the next couple of days Google Trends will have something related to Mr. T on it.  Now I could  be wrong.  But playing the guessing game is sometimes part of the job. 

Creating a poll around this headline wouldn’t be too difficult to accomplish.  You can even pose the question “Is Mr. “T” Retired?” Do you know the answer?  Ask questions that get people thinking. “Mr. “T” is 56, do YOU pity the fool?” Weird questions can often be thought provoking as well.

Throw out some ideas in a post comment to the headline  “Birthdays: Can Mr. T still pity the fool at 56?“.

What do you think a good backend offer would be?
What do you think a good Poll question would be?