Google Cash Detective Day 9—Flaws
March 19th 2009
Having used this product for over a week now, I can already see some flaws in the logic of why you would be successful.
Oversaturation of Products Being Promoted
In the training videos, Chris Carpenter urges us to promote Clickbank products. He says there are over 10,000 out there and enough for everybody.
That may be true. But he also says to only product products with a Gravity Rating > 100, commission >= $25.00, and a GCD Profitability Index > 2,000.
How many of those are there?
I don’t know, but after spending hours looking through the Clickbank products and coming up with a list of 15 that satisfied the first two criteria, only 5 of them had a high PI.
My guess is that there are 100, tops. So now you have thousands of Google Cash Detective members all trying to promote the same 100 products.
Chris Carpenter’s training video showing how easy it is to find a profitable product, clone the ad and keywords, and then log in to your Clickbank account hours later to find you’ve made money is all well and good.
But keep in mind that he made that video BEFORE the release of the Google Cash Detective, which means that he, and maybe some beta testers, were the only ones to have access to this information. Now that you’ve got thousands of people all seeing the same numbers and trying to promote the same 100 products.
Profitability Index doesn’t Consider the Number of Impressions
The PI rating is supposed to indicate how profitable a keyword is. If it has a high PI, that person is making money. It seems to mostly look at the amount of time the ad was up and the cost per click. But it doesn’t seem to take into account the number of impressions.
I found one campaign that had a PI greater than 11,000 for an ad that had been running a few months. That’s really high for this tool! But the number of impressions for the month was only 880.
So does this really mean that this guy was making money on it?
No.
880 impressions a month probably means he only got a few clicks all the time his ad was running. That’s not enough clicks to determine whether it is profitable or not, so he probably just left it running until he got more.
User Interface is Klunky
The user interface is really simple; you can search the database by keyword, ad text, URL, or landing page. But if you want to clone the campaign, you can only copy certain things on certain results pages.
For example, I searched by URL, which showed me all the people who were promoting a certain product.
On the results detail page, I see a list containing the exact ad and keyword. If I select one of the results and click on Add (i.e. clone), it only ads the keyword to my own Google Adwords account.
Hmm, how do I clone the ad text?
To do that, I have to do a search by keyword. So now I have to copy/paste the keyword from the results just to do another search for it so that I can clone the ad.
It would make a lot more sense for the tool to ask you what you’re trying to clone—keywords or ad copy. Also, once you click on Add, your screen goes blank. You can’t get back to your search results and you have to do the search over again. It’s very tedious if you’re trying to clone campaigns from more than one person.
Can’t Enable Tracking on Existing Keywords
I have a campaign I set up before I purchased GCD. So I want to add tracking to all those keywords. But I can’t figure out how to do it.
If I crawl my adwords account so that the keywords are now in my Google Cash Analyzer account and then add tracking, it doesn’t add them to my keywords. It only seems to work if I add the keyword through the GCA tool to start with.
Maybe there is a way to do this that I’m missing, but of course I can’t post the question because the forum is still down.
Oversaturation of Products Being Promoted
In the training videos, Chris Carpenter urges us to promote Clickbank products. He says there are over 10,000 out there and enough for everybody.
How many of those are there?
I don’t know, but after spending hours looking through the Clickbank products and coming up with a list of 15 that satisfied the first two criteria, only 5 of them had a high PI.
My guess is that there are 100, tops. So now you have thousands of Google Cash Detective members all trying to promote the same 100 products.
Chris Carpenter’s training video showing how easy it is to find a profitable product, clone the ad and keywords, and then log in to your Clickbank account hours later to find you’ve made money is all well and good.
But keep in mind that he made that video BEFORE the release of the Google Cash Detective, which means that he, and maybe some beta testers, were the only ones to have access to this information. Now that you’ve got thousands of people all seeing the same numbers and trying to promote the same 100 products.
Profitability Index doesn’t Consider the Number of Impressions
The PI rating is supposed to indicate how profitable a keyword is. If it has a high PI, that person is making money. It seems to mostly look at the amount of time the ad was up and the cost per click. But it doesn’t seem to take into account the number of impressions.
I found one campaign that had a PI greater than 11,000 for an ad that had been running a few months. That’s really high for this tool! But the number of impressions for the month was only 880.
So does this really mean that this guy was making money on it?
No.
880 impressions a month probably means he only got a few clicks all the time his ad was running. That’s not enough clicks to determine whether it is profitable or not, so he probably just left it running until he got more.
User Interface is Klunky
The user interface is really simple; you can search the database by keyword, ad text, URL, or landing page. But if you want to clone the campaign, you can only copy certain things on certain results pages.
For example, I searched by URL, which showed me all the people who were promoting a certain product.
On the results detail page, I see a list containing the exact ad and keyword. If I select one of the results and click on Add (i.e. clone), it only ads the keyword to my own Google Adwords account.
Hmm, how do I clone the ad text?
To do that, I have to do a search by keyword. So now I have to copy/paste the keyword from the results just to do another search for it so that I can clone the ad.
It would make a lot more sense for the tool to ask you what you’re trying to clone—keywords or ad copy. Also, once you click on Add, your screen goes blank. You can’t get back to your search results and you have to do the search over again. It’s very tedious if you’re trying to clone campaigns from more than one person.
Can’t Enable Tracking on Existing Keywords
I have a campaign I set up before I purchased GCD. So I want to add tracking to all those keywords. But I can’t figure out how to do it.
If I crawl my adwords account so that the keywords are now in my Google Cash Analyzer account and then add tracking, it doesn’t add them to my keywords. It only seems to work if I add the keyword through the GCA tool to start with.
Maybe there is a way to do this that I’m missing, but of course I can’t post the question because the forum is still down.
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