Well, I got another sale yesterday! That makes three total! Yippee!!

The last two sales (in two consecutive days) were both for the same Clickbank product. (The other products never had a single sale).

I’m going to try a new strategy.

In my Adwords account, I have each different Clickbank product in a separate campaign, and I’ve set the daily budget at $25.00 for the campaign, per the recommendations in the Cash Detecitive training video.

I was able to take advantage of the keyword tracking functionality of the Cash Detective tool. Actually it’s part of the sister tool, the Google Cash Automator.

For that particular Clickbank product I had about 500 keywords. From the keyword tracking, I could see that my two sales came from almost the same keyword. The only difference was a plural. (Actually it was a phrase match, so I don’t know what the exact keyword was that they searched for).

As of this writing, I spent a total of $71.03 on Google ads for that product and I made two sales ($45.24 revenue). Pretty bad.

BUT…for just those two keywords I only spent $13.66.

So for just those keywords, I actually made a profit. But my ad didn’t run very much because I had a $25.00 daily budget for the entire campaign.

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to peel just those two keywords (well, maybe a couple more that are extremely similar) and put them into their own campaign. Not just their own adgroup; their own campaign. Then I’m going to crank the daily budget for the campaign up higher.

In theory I should be able to keep making a profit on those two words, and increase the profit as I increase the daily budget for the campaign.

Makes logical sense, right?

We’ll see how this works….stay tuned.

Posted by susb8383 under Google Cash Detective | 1 Comment »

Well, the forum is finally back up. It looks like it went up two days ago.

But as I suspected would happen, all of the previous posts are gone, most of which were from some very disgruntled people complaining (justifiably) about the lack of customer service, support, and communication from Chris Carpenter.

Now I really think that the whole “our forums were messing up the performance of the tool” was a total farce and it was just an excuse to delete all the negative threads.

But the good news is that I made a second sale!

Today someone bought one of the Clickbank products I’m promoting.

Here are my stats so far:

Product 1: 20 impressions, 0 clicks.
Product 2: 4,960 impressions, 211 clicks, ad cost: 86.47, 1 sale (16.61)
Product 3: 14,410 impressions, 110 clicks, ad cost: 68.27, 0 sales
Product 4: 12,121 impresssions, 95 clicks, cost: 64.84, 1 sale (22.62)

So here’s the depressing summary:

I spent $219.58 to make $39.23.

Well, I say ‘make’ but that isn’t really even true. Clickbank has this policy that they won’t give you a dime of your commission until you get 4 or 5 different sales. They say it is because they want to make sure you aren’t just using your Clickbank account to buy products for yourself at a reduced rate, but I think that’s a bunch of bonk.

They could easily compare the name on the credit card or Paypal account with the name they’re sending checks to.

But anyway…I still have a couple of weeks to decide if I’m going to keep my Cash Detective membership. Unless I make a few hundred dollars **profit** in that time, it is extremely doubtful.

What I’m going to do next it try to figure out how to see what keyword my sale came from using the Google Cash Automator.

Addendum: Here’s an interesting fact about their forum. Now they have moderators approving every post before it shows up. If you write anything negative about the product, it doesn’t make it past the gatekeepers.

Here is a post I made in the forum in response to a poster who noticed the old posts are all missing.

My post:
The day the forum went down I had a sneaky suspicion that all the posts would mysteriously vanish. I really wonder if their ‘reason’ for taking down the forum was a farce and it was really to delete all the negative threads. Which is a bummer because I really did find some useful training info from fellow members.

==== Moderator’s Reply
"Hmmm. You are entitled to your opinion. But this sort of post will just cause negativity. It has been removed. If you don’t like our moderation, and you are unhappy with the way things are going, please open a support ticket and your concerns will be addressed.

We hired a person full time to manually cut and paste the best content from the old forums. This is an on-going process. It is real. I hurt my hand cutting and pasting over 90 entire posts. They are distributed around the forum.

The old forum broke, and we are now using a totally different piece of software now. It is much newer, and has been heavily customized. So – concerning your allegations that it “was a farce” - I would like to set the record straight with you, and I don’t think GCD staff should have to prove our claims in public, in an open debate.

Thanks,
Jonathan
P.S. – It is nothing personal, but I’m not all that keen to fight opinions, lies and allegations in the forums. The moderators have too many important tasks to attend to …"

It’s probably true that they really did have problems with the forum software, I’ll admit that. But censoring every post that is negative just doesn’t seem right.

In fact, someone started a thread that the Google Cash Detective posts should not have to pass through a moderator first. They said they haven’t seen any other forum that requires this, and since everyone on the forum is a paid member anyway, free speech should be allowed. After a few posts of people who agreed, the moderator posted the following. And then he locked the forum so no one else could comment on it:

"We understand all of the advantages, and the disadvantages to this approach. There are many other forums online, that offer an unmoderated, “free place” to learn and share. In our quest to offer the best information possible, we have decided to moderate each and every forum post at GCD. This decision will certainly irritate many of you, but we believe it’s for the best … We hope you will see the wisdom of this approach in the future, as our forum continues to grow with high quality content. The GCD forums will continue to be moderated."

Posted by susb8383 under Google Cash Detective | No Comments »

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.

Posted by susb8383 under Google Cash Detective | 1 Comment »