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 »

Here’s a follow up to my post a few days ago.

(Whoa! Just had two big honking wild turkeys walk just outside my window. We’ve never seen turkeys here. But back to the topic at hand…)

I had taken the two keyword phrase matches that triggered my two sales and used the Google Adwords sales query report for those two days to try to figure out exactly what the person typed. Then I took both phrase match and exact matches of the actual keywords the person typed, phrase and exact matches of my original phrase, and a couple other phrase/exacts of very similar words, and put them all into their own campaign. I made the daily budget be $50.00 instead of $25.00 that it had been.

The result?

Day 1: no sale.
Day 2: no sale.
Day 3 (yesterday): A sale!

Using my Google Cash Automator tool, I could see that for just those few keywords in my new campaign:

cost: $2.43
Impressions: 361
Clicks: 5
Revenue: $22.62

That’s a profit of $20.19. Ok, I’m pretty happy about that.

It’s interesting that all 3 sales of this product have been to women. That’s not what I would have expected.

So now what? Crank that baby up. I’m going to set the daily budget as high as I dare so that my ad shows more often.

It is interesting too that I still got the sale on a phrase match even though I used the sales query report to add more exact matches to the campaign.

Posted by susb8383 under Google Cash Detective | No Comments »