Check out this months featured money maker. 
Do you think Google will give certain accounts a better ad position simply based off other non-related campaigns? The answer is, most certainly YES.
This last week, my girlfriend, Maria, and I have been testing some new campaigns. She used my landing page, keywords (and even had more and grouped them better), and even used similar ad copy.
She signed up for a brand new account on Google adwords while I have an account that has a great campaign history. We ran the campaign for around a week now.
The results quite amazing. While Maria was stuck getting MAYBE 20 clicks or so per day, I was getting literally hundreds. It was funny almost, at least to me. She thought I was keeping back some magical secret but I gave her everything the same that I had.
While my traffic continues to grow each day, hers is nearly down to nothing. Crazy!
It goes to show, the more you can spend in google, the easier it is to get more traffic.
She turned to me and asked, so how should I get started? I replied, Let's set you up in Yahoo.... Hahahaha. So I got her both a US yahoo account and a UK account. She's probably going to kill in the UK market because there is so much less competition. She's going to focus in the UK for now because she used the coupon to get nearly $100 US dollars (50 GBP) for free. Sweet. You can view these coupons here.
My advice to all starting affiliates is to make some money in Yahoo first. Sure you are going to get less volume, but it's much easier to start making money. Google took me a couple months before I could really get to earning some money.
Another bit of advice is if you have a bunch of adwords campaigns with POOR quality scores you might consider moving over to a new adwords account.
Be careful with what you run on your adwords account! It could eventually make or break a campaign!
Totally…..
I deleted my old account and started a new account and got great quality scores I’m up to a 8.5 percent ctr finally and 2 percent on another campaign.
Which granted I’m still spending more then I’m making, but hopefully my bid prizes will start to decrease dramatically since I have a pretty high ctr on this new account…
It is weird that they should penalise new users like this. It does not make much sense.
Tom,
Penalize???
Where did you get that from they don’t penalize new users, you have to spend enough to get your CTR up and then you will start to break even then eventually start profiting specially on a new account.
“She’s probably going to kill in the UK market because there is so much less competition.”
Are you sure about that?
IMHO I’m not convinced that it’s any less competitive.
To be honest Fraser, every campaign that I’ve done in the UK has been cheaper than my US counterpart. Perhaps there are some niches that are more expensive though.
Jonathan - glad to hear it’s experience talking, I can’t argue with that
I think I’m sensitive as I’m fed up hearing lots of people going on about the UK being years behind in the US as if we are all still newbies over here! I do realise that’s not the point you were making though.
Google is like every other business that extends you credit (be it only for a day until they bill your CC): they want to make sure you can pay for all the clicks you’re accruing…If your card maxes out when they go to bill it, they’re out, so they’ll gradually raise your overall account traffic as your demonstrate an ability to pay.
That and your account level Quality Score….but that’s a different story….:)
We just had a prime example of that on a client’s account where they had a crawling issue that kept the google bot off the page. Campaign ran great for a couple weeks, then “bam”. Everything got disabled. It wasn’t like we were doing anything wrong. We just accidentally tried sending it to a secure page. We fixed the htaccess and called adwords support.
Of course, they had “no clue” of how that could be fixed, saying it might all naturally correct in a few days… or a few months. So we just opened a new account and everything is back to normal.
Do you have any suggestions for what affiliate networks offer the largest amount of international offers to promote?
[...] JonathanVolk - Google Adwords Account History She signed up for a brand new account on Google adwords while I have an account that has a great campaign history. We ran the campaign for around a week now. [...]