So how easy was it to get my money back?

Surprisingly, very.

I logged in and opened a ticket to billing asking for a refund. The next day I got an email that had pages of canned response, ‘Don’t give up, have you tried this and this?’ but then at the end, a link to a Refund Request form.

I filled it out and a day later I got an email from accounting that my credit card has been credited the full amount. It hasn’t shown up in my account activity yet, but after all, it is the weekend.

4/13/09 UPDATE
Just logged into my credit card account, and a big refund was waiting there for me.

Surprisingly, the thing about Google Cash Detective that worked the smoothest was the refund request process!

Posted by susb8383 under Google Cash Detective | 3 Comments »

Well, I’ve given the Google Cash Detective a fair shot. I followed the instructions in the training videos. And although I did make some profit, would I recommend this product?

No.

Here’s why:

First some reasons that contribute to my negative overall feeling of the company:

• Buggy Product
  They had a lot of bugs when they first launched, like people constantly being kicked out or couldn’t log in. This went on for about a week. The Contact Us link went to an error page, etc. True, they resolved these things, but it still left me with a bad taste in my mouth about the company. C’mon; this had been in beta test since the year before! It really shouldn’t have been released before it was ready.


• Interface Was Still Being Worked On
  The training vidoes, especially for the Google Cash Automator (the sister product; you got 2 months free of this tool as well) had screen captures that were different than what I was looking at. So it seems that the interface had evolved even in these few weeks.
  
  Again, it makes me not trust the company to be using a tool that is still being developed.


• GCA, Cool but Overpriced
  The GCA tool looks like it is pretty cool as far as handling the bidding for you automatically. But I’m afraid to try it based on the things I mentioned above. Which means that the only benefit I’m getting from GCA right now is tracking on the keyword level.
  
  I’ve been able to use this feature to turn a non-profiting campaign into a profitable one. But I could build a keyword tracking mechanism myself using PHP and MySQL. Actually I already have for one of my websites (see another post I did on Using PHP to analyze Google Analytics Information for Affiliate Sales).
  
  One thing it is lacking is the ability to tell me what the person actually searched for, not just the keyword I have in my campaign.
  
  For example, if I have the phrase match of “red widgets” in my Adwords campaign, GCA will tell me that I got a sale for the keyword “red widgets.” But that doesn’t mean the person actually searched for that. He could have searched for “what are red widgets” or “how do red widgets compare to blue widgets” etc.
  
  Is the GCA handy? Yes. But not enough to justify $97.00/month for me, or to justify keeping the Google Cash Detective.


• Trust Factor
  My first experience with this company was purchasing the tool for $1997.00 on the payment plan of 4 payments. So I naturally expected to be charged $499.25 each time. When I got through the sales process enough to where it showed me the actually amount my credit card would be charged, it was $547.00. There was a tiny note that said “I understand this includes a one-time charge.” I clicked yes, thinking it was a mistake and I would sort it out later (after all, the hype on this product led me to believe it would sell out within an hour).
  
  When I questioned customer service about it, they said it includes a charge for using the payment plan. Now it didn’t say ANYTHING on the price page about any kind of fee. Not even an asterisk next to $1997.00.
  
  So right off the bat, I’m wary of this company.


• Forum Is Being Censored
  The first few days this tool was launched, the company was still putting out fires and just trying to get the tool to work. As a result, people were not getting answers to their questions, so they started posting on the forum.
  
  As you can imagine, there was a lot of “Chris, where are you?” and “We put our trust in you; don’t betray us.”
  
  The company found a problem with the forum software so they switched to another. During that time, almost a week, the forum was down. When it came back up, not only was every single post missing that had any kind of negative slant (there were lots, and justifiably so), but now every post has to be approved first. If you put anything negative in your post, it won’t make it past the moderator.
  
  Keep in mind that this forum is only available to members. So only people who have already paid for the product would see it; not potential buyers. But we’re still being censored.

Now to the product itself.

Couldn’t Make Money Copying Campaigns
Part of the hype of this product is that you can easily find someone who is making money selling a certain product and then copy their campaign. It is true you can copy a campaign. But of the few I cloned, it is obvious that most of the keywords were NOT making money.

For example, one of my attempts was a guide for the popular online game World of Warcraft. I found someone using GCD that it indicated was successfully promoting it because his ad had been running for a few months (high Profitability Index in GCD) with a high number of impressions.

So I cloned his keywords and ad copy.

I used exactly the same keywords and exactly the same ads. The result? 0 sales for many days. Then just a few sales for only 1 or 2 keywords out of 500.

Then I examined the keywords more closely.

A lot of them were keywords that someone playing the game might type, but not necessarily someone who was looking for a guide, for example “flying mount.” Others were keywords relating to a competing product like “Joana guide.”

But some of them were totally off the wall. I found one keyword that was this:
“how to start an organic farm.”

What?? Where did THAT come from? No idea. But it’s clear that just because someone has an ad running for a long time does NOT mean it is being profitable. The only keywords that resulted in sales for me were when someone typed in something that exactly related to the product I was trying to sell.

Maybe this particular affiliate has so much money to burn and so many campaigns running that he can afford to be careless, but I can’t.


• Database Contains Limited Keywords
It’s probably true that their database of keywords is in the million range. But these are all keywords that someone came up with. I searched for a keyword that I currently have a profitable website for, and my info didn’t come up. I know my website is there because I could search for it using the landing page query, but it did not show my profitable campaign in the results when I used the keyword query.

Compare this with a program like AdSpyPro which lets you put in your own keywords to examine. True, you have to wait a month while it compiles the data, but you have more control over what niche you’re researching.


• Everyone is Promoting the Same Clickbank Products
  In the training videos, Chris encourages us to promote Clickbank products. He says that there are over 10,000 and room for everybody.
  
  Well, that might be true. But there are only a handful that meet the other criteria he recommends: a Gravity Rating > 100, commission >= $25.00, and a GCD Profitability Index > 2,000. So this means that lots of people using the Google Cash Detective are now trying to promote the same products.
  
  Here’s an example. In one of the videos, Chris found a Clickbank product for a reverse phone search. He set up an Adwords campaign for single keyword (exact match) and came back hours later to find multiple sales at a profit.
  
  I saw a post on the training page; someone tried exactly the same thing, exactly the same keyword and ad, but got no sales.
  
  Why? I’m sure it’s because everyone who saw that video rushed out to do the same thing. I didn’t even see Chris’s ad show up when I typed that keyword into Google.


• The More Popular it Gets, the Less Useful it Becomes
  Here’s an example. Everyone who signed up for the tool also got at least 2 months subscription to the Google Cash Automator, which means their keywords will be tracked. Their destination URL will have ?tid=123 (some unique id) at the end.
  
  But this means that if you’re using the tool to see the affiliates who are promoting a certain landing page, you see pages and pages of results that show a value of 1 keyword. It is more likely that there are many keywords for the same promoter, but since every destination url is unique because of the added keyword tracking, they all show as if they are a separate affiliate instead of one affiliate promoting one webpage with many different keywords.
  
  
• The More Popular it Gets, the Slower it Gets
  I tried to search for a particular thing and I got over 1600 results, which took what seemed like a long time to show (it was probably only 5 seconds). Then when I clicked on one of the links to see the detail, there was no way of getting back to my list of results other than to click the browser’s back button, which caused the whole search to execute again. I gave up after trying to see the detail for 3 results.

In closing, I can see that the Google Cash Detective is a valuable tool. It is definitely helpful to see easily what others are promoting, how long their ads have been showing, and what their keywords are. I might be willing to pay $20 or $30 a month for this. But not $160.

I’ll be asking for my money back. And I’d better get the full $547.00.

Posted by susb8383 under Google Cash Detective | No Comments »

I tried writing my own tracking script so that I could track keywords to the conversion level for affiliate products. It worked pretty well, but I found one flaw due to the fact that Google doesn’t always seem to set the cookie.

So instead I decided to find software that was already out there to do tracking.

I found something called Prosper202. It is free, open source that runs on your own host. (They also make a version called Tracker202 which is hosted by them).

Here is my experience:

Installing
I downloaded the zip file and installed it per the instructions. You have to know a little bit about how to get around your cpanel on your webhost. You must create your own database and user, but that’s ok. No biggle.

The instructions said that once it is installed, you just have to go to the installation domain and be prompted for the database and user you had created. This didn’t happen for me. Instead I got an error that it couldn’t find 202-config file. When I looked at the files that were there, I found that 202-config-sample, so I looked inside it.

It had ‘put your database name here,’ ‘put your username here’ etc. When I filled in this info and saved the file as 202-config, everything else worked as it was supposed to.

Getting Started
So I logged in and then stared at the main screen. I felt like an idiot because I couldn’t see any choices of what to do. So I tried to run the video tutorial, but instead of using one of the standard video players, it wanted me to download another one. I started to and then bagged it and went to the text tutorial.

The instructions didn’t match what I was staring at. They said to click on Step 1 and then do such and such, but I didn’t see anything like that.

I finally realized that I needed to click on Tracking202 first. Now, if you’re not aware that their hosted version of this product is called Tracking202, you’d never know to do this. But since this is probably the same splash page they use for that, it makes sense in hindsight.

Setting up a Campaign
As I clicked through the steps and followed their help text, I found the interface to be very simple and easy to understand. Well, except for one thing. When you enter the destination url, it says something like “you have to understand how subids work on your affiliate network or this won’t work.” Now I understand how subids work, but I didn’t quite see how to relate this to the destination url. I think they need to be a little more explicit or give an example. It turns out you need to add it yourself to the end, such as:
http://destination.com?tid=

But other than that, the instructions were pretty clear.


The Basics
So here’s what the software does. You enter in information about your campaign just for reporting purposes, such as campaign name, ad name, etc. Then the software assigns a unique id to that combination and gives you tracking code that looks something like this:
http://www.tracking.internetmarketingkultch.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=851&t202kw=

‘tracking’ is the subdomain I set up (it isn’t really; it’s just for this illustration).
851 is the unique id that the software assigned to that campaign/ad combination
Note that the link ends with ‘kw=’

Now what you need to do is use this as your destination within GoogleAdwords, for example, and add their dynamic keyword code to the end, like this:
http://www.tracking.internetmarketingkultch.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=851&t202kw={keyword}

So now when someone clicks on your link, it will go through the tracking202 software first and will pass it the searched keyword and the unique id. The software logs this entry and then forwards them onto the destination url.

Then to relate your campaign to sales, you copy/paste just the subid number from your affiliate network stats like Clickbank.

Sending the Visitor to Your Website
If you want to have the destination be your website instead of a direct link to an affiliate site, you do two things: 1. Make the destination url be: http://www.mysite.com?
The software will tag “t202id=” and the unique id onto the end of the link. 2. Put the code they supply for a postback pixel onto your thank you page.

Sending the Visitor to Your Website and then onto an Affililate Site
This is a little more tricky, but not that difficult. Again you send the user to your site with ? at the end, like:
http://www.mysite.com?tracking.php?
which means the software will add ‘?t202id=’ and the unique number to the end. Then you have to use php to grab the t202id value from the url and pass it along to your affiliate network as their subid. But since I was already doing something like this in my own tracking script, it shouldn’t be hard to modify it slightly.

Reporting
From the little I’ve seen, the reporting is pretty cool. Check out the screen shot below. You’ll notice that it shows you at a glance what the visitor searched for, what browser was used, etc. One thing to notice is the column right before the ip column. This represents filtered clicks vs. real clicks.

According to the forum, "Real clicks (green) are clicks that you get charged for. Filter clicks (red) are clicks that you’re not suppose to get charged for. Examples of filter clicks include google bots, yahoo bots, etc crawling your ad. Other filter clicks include repeat IP addresses that click on your ad more than once within a certain time range because Google does not charge you for additional clicks by the same IP within a specific time range…"

This can provide powerful information. If you look at my example below, you can see that the same ip address clicked 6 times and another clicked 8 times. This could imply that someone is comparison shopping on the Google ads. It’s definitely good information that I haven’t seen anywhere else, like in Google Analytics.

Problems
There are a couple of problems I see with this tool.

1. One of the pieces of information it asks for is the max cpc. But the software doesn’t save this info by keyword, only by campaign. Most people have different bids per keyword, so this information is useless.
2. The other thing it asks you for is amount of the sale. But if you’re sending people to a site where they can buy different products for different prices, again this is useless. It would be much better if they let you copy/paste the subid AND the commission from your affiliate network.
3. Since you never actually enter your keywords into this tool, you have no way of comparing what the person actually searched for with the keyword of your campaign. For example, you might have this in your campaign: “red widgets” but someone might search for “what exactly are red widgets” and see your ad. It’s too bad they don’t have the option of importing your keyword list.
4. The keyword tracking depends on you adding a dynamic keyword onto the end of the destination url in your ad. But not every search engine may support this. (The big three all do; Google, Yahoo, and MSN.)
5. It asks for your affiliate url at the campaign level. But Google Adwords (and I assume the others) lets you put in a destination url at the ad level. You could have two different ads in Google going to two different landing pages, but you can’t specify that with this tool.

With that said, as long as I can download the unique id plus the keyword, then I can import that and my affiliate network commission information into another tool like MSAccess for analysis.

Summary
For a freebie tool, I have no complaints. It saved me a lot of time writing something like this myself. But you still need another tool to do in-depth analysis, especially if you use different bid prices for different keywords. I would also rather have a tool that lets me input keywords to start with and then assigns them a number rather than depend on using a dynamic keyword in the ad.

Posted by susb8383 under Recommended Products | No Comments »