05
Oct
Subscriptionville.com Opens with the Help of SpeedPPC
UPDATE:
Speed PPC has just launched version 3 of this powerful tool with even more search engine support (including Yahoo), keyword libraries, ad copying, advanced bidding, cleaning features…. You can find out more and get your copy of SpeedPPC.
Through April 15th, 2008 they are offering $100 Off Speed PPC and 12 months free access to their Clickbank Mining Tool.
Well, it’s 2am and I just launched a new commercial site. The site, Subscriptionville.com, is a magazine store operated in affiliation with a 3rd party fullfillment center. This is phase 1 of the project, and I hope to eventually build this into a large magazine comparison shopping service, but that will have to wait until more time is available. One of the great things about this project is that the fullfillment company provides a datafeed of all the titles, which means I have about 1000 different items to promote and generate revenue from. One of the big disadvantages is that there are about 1000 different items to promote and keep track of. Since my primary form of advertising (at least in the early stages) will be through Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, that leaves a lot keywords and ad text to manage.Because of the volume of information to be managed, I decided it might be a good idea to invest in a tool to automate a lot of the tasks required to set up a large PPC campaign. The best tool I was able to locate is a software package and membership site called SpeedPPC. This is definitely a tool for somewhat experienced PPC advertisers, but if your comfortable with this type of advertising, then SpeedPPC can be a lifesaver for large volume, tightly focused PPC ad campaigns. That said, there were a couple of areas where it fell a little short - at least for what I needed in this case, but I expect I will get a lot of good use out of it on future projects. I plan to write a more detailed review of SpeedPPC in the near future, and will hopefully be able to offer some documentation to explain some of the shortcomings (there’s not many, but you need to be aware of them) and provide tools and information to help overcome them.Anyway, I am writing this as I have just finished building a Google Adwords campaign to advertise nearly 1000 magazine titles - 1600 ad groups, 3000 text ads and 50,000 keywords. All this in hopes that magazines might be a profitable business for the upcoming Christmas shopping season. Now that it’s 3am, I think I should head to bed…Such is the life of an web developer and affiliate marketer.
October 13th, 2007 at 12:59 am
I too have a large amount of projects going, all total is about 180,000 keywords. I looked at the website from your link, and it seems impressive, but I’m not willing to spend $500 on it.
I just signed up with PPC-Max at http://instant.ppc-max.com about 20 minutes ago and created all of my campaigns for less than $30. It’s too bad you already shelled out half-a-grand.
October 13th, 2007 at 11:24 pm
Hi Joey,
Thanks for the info on a decent alternative. After a quick look though, PPC Max is missing some crucial features, and the $30 mentioned in your post isn’t really the full story - the $30 is for the lowest level of service, limited use, and it’s a monthly charge. The fee for SpeedPPC is a one time fee and includes unlimited uses and projects. If you don’t plan on using it for more than a few of your own projects and won’t need to use it consistently over a long period of time, ppc max might be a good alternative. I am adding new projects and work with multiple clients, so, in the long run, the cost of PPC Max would probably far exceed the cost I paid for Speed PPC.
Also, PPC-Max is missing a feature critical for me, and most affiliates who utilize datafeeds, and that is the capability to pair each keyword with a specific url. The landing pages aren’t always determined by the keyword or seed term, but most often are defined by a product id, upc, or sku number. I saw nothing in PPC Max to address this - Speed PPC handles keyword, url pairing very well. Even more, SpeedPPC makes available some additional utilities that are very beneficial to affiliates that utilize datafeeds.
Now I’m not knocking PPC Max - it appears it can be a good, low cost alternative for PPC advertisers with less demanding needs who will give it limited use. I would DISAGREE that “It’s too bad (I) already shelled out half-a-grand”. The better features and lower long term cost of SpeedPPC more closely meet my requirements and is more economical based on my projected usage.
October 14th, 2007 at 2:49 am
Hello Travis,
I have a copy of speedppc, but just out of curiosity I just signed up for the $30 service from ppc-max earlier today. ppc-max does provide the capacity for datafeeds - right in the middle of the project creation page it explains the token usage fields. I have created several campaigns with it adding my speedppc tokens, and it works flawlessly with my existing speedppc landing pages. ppc-max paired my datafeed tokens the same as speedppc; one unique URL per keyword. Inputting the data from a couple of my other existing speedppc created campaigns, ppc-max actually found several errors that speedppc didn’t tell me about when I created the same campaigns with speedppc. It automatically fixed the errors and now those campaigns are drawing almost double the CTR. I am going to re-run the rest of my speedppc created campaigns with ppc-max tomorrow and see what other errors turn up. If it finds and fixes any errors in those, I will be quite a bit ahead this month.
I totally agree with you on the price Travis. It sounds like speedppc would probably be more cost effective for simultaneously creating the campaigns for several hundred adwords accounts from the ground up.
October 15th, 2007 at 5:04 pm
Welcome to the blog Chris.
I did see the tokens and how they are used - yep, just like Speed-PPC. And you’re absolutely correct that you can create a unique url for each keyword. But this is not an issue with tokens, it’s an issue with pairing - a feature available in SpeedPPC but not in PPC-max. The problem is that datafeed landing pages aren’t based on the tokens (seed, expansion, final), but rather on a unique product identifier as I stated previously. I tried several options in PPC-Max, but can’t pair up a keyword with an existing url that is defined by a value not associated directly with the seed or expansion word. Hope that made sense, and if I missed something, please correct me.
I do have a question about PPC-Max. What types of errors did it find and help you correct? When I was trying to find a way to pair a keyword with an existing url, PPC-Max would return destination URLs in invalid syntax (all the punctuation was stripped out of the URL, such as “//:”, “?” and “&”) but never did it flag that as an error.
My guess is each program will appeal to a specific type of user (kind of like the Windows, Linux, Mac debate - they’re all good in their own right - it just depends on what the end user wants and needs). Still, Speed PPC seems at this point to be the better option in my situation. Oh, SpeedPPC also offers a nice member forum where paid users get good response to support issues, insight into Quality Score, and very active users who offer a lot of good tips and advice. PPC-Max should probably consider a similar service to boost it’s offer.