SEO

It’s been over six weeks since I launched JUMBOKeyword.com, my free online AdWords tool offering 70+ 1-click Google AdWords, keywords and text editing functions to help you create, manage and edit hundreds, even thousands, of AdWords keywords quickly and easily.

I thought it would be interesting to look back at my first month’s marketing efforts and discuss the results achieved. The stats were provided by Google Analytics.

Time span

April 6 to May 5, 2009

Web Site Statistics (Google Analytics)

Visitors: 52,162
Unique visitors: 44,822
Average time on site: 25 seconds

Fifty-two thousand visitors may sound impressive to some people (or not depending on your point of view), but it’s not really because I paid for most of the traffic. The real test would be when I switch off the paid traffic.

Visitors (125 countries/territories)

United States:	46,692
China:	1,815
United Kingdom:	347
India:	303
Canada:	257
Ireland:	185
Australia:	173
Germany:	124
Indonesia:	104
Turkey:	103

Top Traffic Sources

Direct / None:	15,258
Bravenet:	14,282
Google AdWords:	2,065
Mikes-Marketing-Tools.com:	1,466
StumbleUpon:	4,642
Google (organic):	770
JavaScript-2.com:	78
JohnChow.com:	52
Search (organic):	64
Ask.com:	45
MichaelWong.com:	34
Twitter.com:	26
URLWire.com:	18

Length of Visits

Length of Visit	Visits	% of visitors
0-10 seconds	43,759	83.89%
11-30 seconds	3,801	7.29%
31-60 seconds	1,587	3.04%
61-180 seconds	1,698	3.26%
181-600 seconds	891	1.71%
601-1,800 seconds	368	0.71%
1,801+ seconds	58	0.11%

We can safely say that a visit between 0-10 seconds means the visitor left the site without using the keyword editor. I would expect the average time on site to increase as I reduce my advertising efforts and rely on repeat visitors.

I am going to list the various marketing and advertising methods I used to promote JUMBO Keyword .com. I provide exact statistics and my thoughts on each method’s effectiveness.

Bravenet Media (Pop-Unders)

I purchased a $500 pop-under campaign with Bravenet Media, which sells advertising for its Bravenet network. I bought advertising on Bravenet because Bravenet had delivered positive return-on-investments on a pay-per-sale offer I promoted last year.

I wanted the campaign to just target U.S. visitors, with a frequency cap of one unique visit per 24 hours. That cost of $6CPM meant I would receive 83,333 impressions or visitors.

The campaign went live on April 17 and wrapped up on May 1, resulting in about 6,000 impressions a day. But when I checked my Google Analytics stats, it registered just 46,580 impressions for the landing page that I gave Bravenet. So in effect I was charged $10.73 CPM, not $6 CPM.

I brought this to the attention of the sales rep, Melanie Peake. She told me that before they attempt to deliver a pop under, they test to see if a user is blocking pop-ups. If they are not, they deliver a pop-under. But if they are, they deliver a floating div - in other words, a pop-up.

All along I thought I was getting 83,333 pop-unders for $500. Now she says I got a mixture of pop-unders and pop-ups. I don’t like pop-ups because they are intrusive and most people simply close pop-ups. I told her that they cannot promise pop-unders and then deliver pop-ups. They are two different products. I would never buy pop-ups for the reason I gave above.

Another thing was that I didn’t understand why Google Analytics didn’t track the pop-up impressions. Melanie told me that floating divs are loaded in iframes, and iframes are not tracked through Google Analytics. Hmm… I’m none the wiser.

Anyway, Melanie did the right thing and offered to deliver an addition 66,226 pop-under impressions, which I gladly accepted. By the way, I forgot to mention that out of all the impressions Bravenet delivered, an impressive 99.54% were from the United States.

It’s difficult to judge whether the campaign was a success or not. It delivered the traffic from the targeted market, the United States. The test will be how many people return to the site.

If you want to try Bravenet Media, I recommend you:

• insist on receiving only pop-unders - no pop-divs or pop-ups
• target U.S. visitors only or whatever country you want (non-U.S. visitors should be cheaper)
• set a frequency cap of one unique visit per 24 hours
• provide a landing page so you can monitor the quantity and quality of the traffic
• monitor the traffic with traffic analysis software such as Google Analytics
• use a tracking ID if you’re promoting a pay-per-lead/sale offer

Google AdWords (Pay Per Click)

Google AdWords advertisers are everywhere so I set up two Google AdWords campaigns targeting all languages and all countries.

One campaign was for the Google search and search partners network, while the other was for the content network. The reason why I didn’t combine both the content network and the search networks into one campaign is because I use different keyword formats to target search and content networks, a technique that most affiliate marketing experts recommend.

My keyword categories included AdWords, Google advertising, Google products (GoogleCash, etc.), keywords, and pay per click. I set a max cost-per-click (CPC) of $0.10 and a budget of $10 per day for the content campaign.

I value search traffic higher than content traffic because they are proactively searching for a solution. Hence, I set a higher CPC of $0.20 and a budget of $20 per day for the search campaign.

The Google search and search partners network campaign produced the following results:

Clicks	Impressions	CTR	Avg. CPC	Cost	Avg. Pos
1,335	329,801	0.40%	$0.11	$153.07	5.0

The content network campaign produced these results:

Clicks	Impressions	CTR	Avg. CPC	Cost	Avg. Pos
3,884	2,719,466	0.14%	$0.05	$191.74	4.1

The fact that the content network generated almost three times the clicks for half the cost didn’t surprise me. What surprised me was that virtually no content traffic came from English speaking countries such as the United States, UK, Canada, Australia. They were all from countries like China, Turkey, and Taiwan.

I had made a mistake targeting non-English speaking users. They generally don’t end up being paying customers (for affiliate and advertised products) so the value of that traffic was minimal to say the least.

As a result, I decided to remove all languages except for English, and remove all countries except for nine English speaking countries, including Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Ireland, Malaysia, New Xealand, Singapore, United Kingdom, and the United States.

I also removed Google search partner and just kept Google search traffic to minimize the risk of click fraud and ensure the traffic was of the highest quality. The search campaign click through rate dropped marginally from 0.40% to 0.39%, while the average CPC increased 54% (6 cents) from 11 cents to 17 cents.

The content campaign click through rate dropped by half almost, from 0.14% to 0.08%, while the average CPC dropped from 5 to 4 cents.

StumbleUpon (Targeted Visitors)

StumbleUpon is a social booking service where users bookmark sites they ’stumble upon’ and are offered similar sites other users have bookmarked. With over six million users, it is one of the most popular social bookmarking services around.

StumbleUpon users are shown websites in a framed window, so it’s almost as good as a pop-under. Each visitor costs just 5 cents, so it is very cost effective.

I paid $500 into my account and set up two campaigns; one targeting ‘internet-tools’, and the other targeting ‘marketing’. You can choose from 500 categories. I set a maximum of 100 visitors per day, targeting U.S., male only users, between the ages of 18 and 65.

StumbleUpon provide daily visitor stats (last 23 days only), along with the percentage of users who liked or disliked my site. I didn’t take much notice of these stats before until now. I see that in the internet-tools category, I can see 5 liked and 10 disliked ratings. Whereas in the marketing category, there are 56 liked ratings and only 15 users who disliked the tool.

While the internet-tools users are overwhelming negative towards the tool, the marketing crowd were the opposite. The lack of responses, especially positive responses, in the internet-tools category made me realize that I am wasting my time targeting the internet-tools category. Hence, I have paused that campaign.

Google Analytics show that while not every visitor was from the United States, 97.4% of visitors were, which is acceptable. The disturbing statistic is that the average time on site is a mere 3 seconds, which is poor.

I have just paused the internet-tools campaign so that may help improve the average time that StumbleUpon users spend on the site. Although the remaining campaign is targeting users interested in marketing, I think the category is too broad for my AdWords tool. There is no category for AdWords or pay-per-click, so I think I will stop the campaign, which I have just done.

Google SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

I have been doing SEO since the late 90s so I guess I know a thing or two when it comes to SEO. I specialize in optimizing for Google so any rankings I get for Yahoo! or MSN Live are a bonus.

I registered JUMBOKeyword.com in January 23 of this year and launched the site in April 6. In just over 5 weeks, JUMBO Keyword .com has already achieved some decent top 30 search engine rankings.

Keyword	Google	Yahoo!	MSN Live
adwords keyword tool	#8	#8	#12
adwords software	-	#22	-
adwords tool	#18	#28	-
google adwords tool	#9	#29	#29

Those rankings aren’t generating a great deal of search engine traffic at this time. That should improve when the rankings improve over the coming months. I will explain how I achieved these rankings in a future post (maybe the next post).

Michael Wong .com Blog (Blogging)

My Michael Wong .com blog has been around for a few years, but I haven’t been much of a blogger and let the site lapse into something I wasn’t too proud of.

With the launch of JUMBO Keyword .com I decided it was time to relaunch my blog. So I have upgraded the design and set myself a schedule of writing at least one quality post per week.

If I can manage more than that I will, but quality posts take time to research and write.

JohnChow.com (Blog Review)

I know the value of bloggers, so I paid for a review at JohnChow.com. The review cost me $500 which is not cheap but I thought it would be a worthwhile investment because John Chow is one of the best known internet marketing blogs around. According to John, his site attracts 200,00 unique visitors and 300,000 page views a month. And it has over 49,000 RSS subscribers.

So I ordered the review via ReviewMe.com on Wednesday. Four days went by before the order was accepted. The review, “One-Click Keyword Editing with Jumbo Keyword“, was posted on John’s site around on Sunday night, around midnight.

The site states that sponsored reviews will receive at least 12 hours as the top front page post. Twelve hours as the top front page post from Sunday midnight to Monday midday isn’t exactly what I call prime time!

The review itself was surprisingly long and includes several screenshots - so far so good. However, upon closer inspection the review is dry and lacks personality. I get the impression that whoever wrote the review had never used AdWords or edited big lists of keywords. And no wonder! The review was not written by John Chow - but a Michael Kwan. A quick Google search reveals a freelance writer by that name. John’s site doesn’t promise he would write the review so I don’t have grounds to complain.

I emailed John and told him that I felt giving my review 12 hours as the top post from Sunday midnight to Monday midday was rather poor timing. And if there was any chance he could leave the review at the top of the homepage for at least 12 ‘business hours’, I would be grateful. John duly obliged. I tip my hat to John for doing the right thing.

Okay, how about the traffic? Well, the review has been out for over 2 weeks now. According to Google Analytics, JohnChow.com has sent a mere 55 visitors. At least they stayed an average of 1 minute 14 seconds, so they’re quality visitors.

Is that it? Yep! I’m afraid so as far as traffic from his site shows. Google Analytics could be lying to me, but I haven’t done anything to upset it lately so I don’t think it is.

So what happened to the 47,000 RSS subscribers? Did all of them miss the article because the review was posted Sunday night? I don’t know. All I know is that Google Analytics recorded just 55 visitors from JohnChow.com. The review shows 26 comments so at least a few people did read the review and commented on it.

One thing I didn’t count on was that John tweeted the blog post to his 27,600 Twitter followers. The tweet lead back to his blog post, not directly to my site. Despite that, it was still a nice surprise. As a result, at least nine of his followers retweeted about JUMBO Keyword .com to their 18,011 followers.

So what are my conclusions? Would I do it all again? Yes, but only because of the tweets. If it weren’t for the tweets, I would say the $500 investment represented terrible value for money.

I would also do things a bit differently. I would request that John write the review. He may not do $500 reviews anymore - but it doesn’t hurt to ask. If John won’t write the review, I would insist that whoever writes it has some experience with AdWords and keyword editing, and that they actually use the tool before writing the review. I would also request they include one or two specific keyword phrases for the links to my site.

I would also insist that the review is posted first thing in the morning, around 11am EST (Eastern Standard Time) to get maximum exposure. I would also choose Tuesday to Thursday, which are always touted as the best days to send out a newsletter. Same with the tweet.

Publicity

I contacted the editors of 23 prominent internet marketing and productivity blogs, 10 search engine and marketing news sites, and an affiliate marketing newsletter about JUMBO Keyword .com.

As far as I am aware, not one has mentioned it so far which is disappointing. Most didn’t even bother to reply. At least Seth Godin responded with, “neato”.

I know an AdWords tool won’t change the world, but I thought it was good enough to warrant a mention in some of those sites. I guess I was mistaken.

Are we getting to the stage where unless a site gets millions in venture capital, or is started by someone well known, or it’s a game changer, it doesn’t break through the noise and get a mention on a prominent blog or news site? Or are we at that stage already?

Twitter (Micro-blogging)

I have known about Twitter for a while but didn’t take much notice until I decided to relaunch my blog. I figured that if I was to allocate some time and effort to the blog, I should also do the same with Twitter. The buzz around Twitter has been building for months and I just couldn’t let the hottest thing since Facebook (which I’m still not a member of) pass me by. I also thought that if I didn’t register @Michael_Wong (some cybersquatter is sitting on @MichaelWong), someone else might register it.

So I signed up and decided to display the tweets on my blog. And once I decided to do that, I couldn’t exactly not tweet. So I did. I soon realized just how powerful Twitter can be. Twitter is like RSS but better. Like RSS, followers have to opt in to follow you, so you can’t get into trouble for spamming. And they can opt out at any time. So there’s no possible way they can complain of spam.

I don’t spam - never have, never will. But I did get into a slight bit of bother a few years back. I built up a mailing list of about 10,000 people but I didn’t email the list for a while. After a few months, I sent out an email and a few people, who had obviously forgotten that they had subscribed to my double opt-in list, complained to my web host and domain registrar, GoDaddy.com.

GoDaddy immediately threatened to disable my MichaelWong.com domain. I think there were 2 complaints out of 10,000 subscribers, but that’s all it takes. That is the domain I use for my main email address so it would have caused a massive headache if it was shut down. I decided not to build another email list. I know all the big marketing experts say it’s essential to build a list. I have left a lot of money on the table by not building a list. But the fact is the trouble just isn’t worth the effort.

Anyway, back to Twitter. The benefits of Twitter include:

• Anyone can see how many followers a user has
• Tweeting takes a lot less effort than sending out an email to your list or writing a blog post
• Users are much more likely to retweet something they like to their followers than send an email to their list or write a post in their blog
• You can respond to any user without being accused of spam
• It’s free: email lists can cost a bit to maintain when you have thousands of subscribers. Whether you have 100 or 1 million followers, it’s always free to communicate with them on Twitter.

The results speak for themselves. I had no mentions in blogs or newsletters. But at least 35 Twitter users who liked JUMBO Keyword .com enough that they tweeted about it to their 108,000 followers. I didn’t include John Chow’s 27,600 in that number because I paid for the review.

I think the main downside with Twitter is that users follow so many people and some users tweet so often that there is too much noise. Hence, most tweets just pass users by. Another issue is time. People tweet any time day or night, and unless someone is actively reading every tweet they receive or is following every tweet on their computer or mobile phone, the chances are most tweets just aren’t getting noticed.

Still, I consider Twitter to be a good marketing channel. It gives you the potential to reach a large audience, quickly, for free. SEO and Google AdWords is still the best form of marketing for me. But SEO takes time, and AdWords can cost a bit.

Press Release (URLWire)

Aside from when I sold my last internet company, this is my first press release. I wrote the release and decided to hire Eric Ward of URLWire.com to send out the release. I hired Eric because I’ve known about him since the late 90s. According to his web site, he has been in the industry since 1994 and has announced thousands of web sites including Amazon.com, Microsoft and AOL, to name a few.

Unlike most press release websites, his site really gives you the impression that his contacts/subscribers welcome his announcements. He says he doesn’t just send an email blast to everyone on his list. Instead he selectively emails those contacts that he feels would be interested in your website.

Anyway, I paid $495 for a press release on April 9. For technical reasons, Eric didn’t announce my site until May 5. According to Google Analytics, URLWire has sent just 45 visitors. Google shows 530 web pages mentioning the release but they link back to the announcement in URLWire.com. These seem to be automated news feeds, not write ups.

Conclusion? I would use Eric’s services again, but only if I really had a major news-worthy story to tell. Trying to get mainstream media to take notice of a free AdWords keyword tool without a real story just doesn’t work - at least not for me.

With blogs, Twitter, social bookmarking (Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.), forums and newsletters, news of a great web site will spread like wildfire without having a press release. Journalists and reporters typically hunt down stories on the web nowadays. Ten years from now press releases might be ancient history.

Conclusions

I am glad I tried all those marketing tactics. Some worked better than others. There are many other marketing tactics I didn’t try, including viral marketing, video marketing, submitting articles to article directories, blog commenting, etc. There just aren’t enough hours in the day for me to do everything.

To be frank with you, JUMBO Keyword .com hasn’t taken off anywhere as quickly as I had hoped. I will give it a couple more months before deciding whether it’s worth me putting any more effort into it.

I gave it a fair go (as Aussies here like to say) and learnt some valuable lessons. I hope sharing my experience with you helps you too. Subscribe to my free email updates, RSS feed or follow me on Twitter at @Michael_Wong for more marketing results in the future.

Tweet This Post