Technoprovement: The Blog of Sam Jones

This post might be lengthy. I haven’t written on my blog in a year and a half but I have to put this down somewhere just so I can put this thing behind me. I’ve felt sick to my stomach for the last 24 hours and I just received some information that has helped me to understand the full picture of what happened to my company’s Adwords account. This is a valuable lesson for me in business and could be even more valuable for new internet advertisers who are just getting started.

By day I am a programmer and a systems administrator. By night (and pretty much my entire weekends) I work with my girlfriend, my cousin, and his fiance as part of an internet marketing company we created. What we do is to create advertisements to promote other websites, buy advertising space for these advertisements, and we are paid a commission if our ads perform (if we earn money for the website owners). This is known as affiliate marketing. I really love it because we get to combine all of our skills and build something cool. We are paid if we perform, and we lose money if we don’t. In that sense it’s very exciting (as you might imagine).

I had really just been getting started advertising with Google, having worked very hard for the last year to build a bankroll and the skills to believe I could be successful with them. And my first few weeks of testing were going really well. Google has a tremendous amount of inventory and wonderful targeting allowing you to reach your intended audience. Long term I felt like Google was going to be a huge part of our success.

Yesterday I discovered that my google Adwords campaigns had stopped receiving impressions. My cousin who works full time for our company called Google’s support line and was informed that we had been suspended for what we were told was “repeated violations of the display url policy”. This meant that when visitors were clicking on our ads they were not going to the sites that we had written on the ads.

Not to get too technical here but the reason for this was that certain websites only pay for internet traffic from certain countries. So the intermediary between us and these websites (the affiliate networks) will redirect traffic that is not coming from the correct countries to other websites where the traffic can still be profitable. Usually this is ok (because the other website is similar), and the affiliate networks will turn it off if you ask them to. Generally the affilate marketer does not receive any commissions from this “untargeted” traffic. The only way to see if this is happening to to view the link from a computer in that country, or to use what is known as a proxy.

We thought we had all of our campaigns setup correctly. We had asked the affiliate networks we were working with to insure that this geo redirection wasn’t enabled because our first set of ads were getting disapproved for this problem. Eventually all of our ads seemed to be setup correctly and we thought we were good. Then yesterday we get suspended and we were left scratching our heads as to why.

Today, after talking to every connection we have that “knows someone in Google” and getting more feedback on our specific case, we found out that one affiliate network we were working with was redirecting international traffic to an adult offer. We’ve never promoted anything adult ever and don’t intend to in the future. And we hadn’t run any Google traffic with this affiliate network before.

Google caught this problem and the new ads we made were never approved, so thankfully no one was sent to that adult page. This of course got our account flagged though.

Google suspends people for doing horrible stuff. Some affiliate marketers promote very shady offers, and of those some are outright scams. Google has to be vigilant against people trying to game their system for financial gain. Its possible that they saw this situation and thought that we were intentionally doing this.

The only way we could have caught this to to have checked the links from proxies in multiple countries, and in the future I’m doing this with ever offer I run. New advertisers, especially if you are getting into international traffic this is very important to remember.

Google, if you ever let me advertise again, I promise to you I will never promote anything through this particular affiliate network in the future. I’ve turned off all traffic from everywhere else that I was sending to them. This was an accident, we didn’t know what was happening, and it will never happen again. You can verify from your logs, we don’t own the last hop (their tracking domain), and no paid traffic ever went over to them because the ads pointing to them weren’t approved.

Either way I am very sorry, I’ve tried extremely hard to be professional and this is a huge disappointment. At first I thought there was just a technical glitch and now I realize that it was much worse.

To new advertisers, be very careful who you work with. There are now over 300 CPA affiliate networks and some of them will cut your throat to make a few extra dollars. This is a painful lesson for me and ultimately it could be fairly devastating for my company’s long term plans. Fortunately we’ve made it as far as we have without relying on Google’s traffic, but if they were our primary source and we made the mistake of working with the wrong people we would literally be out of business now. So for even experienced advertisers expanding into new traffic sources, be careful as one mistake can cost you dearly.

I apologize for the delay in posting over the last 2 months (both regarding part 2 of the Python bot series and new articles in general). I’ve been doing a lot of traveling not keeping up on things as well as I should. So in that vein, I’ve decided to write a post with some quick tips on traveling for the technologically-inclined.

1. Skype, Skype, Skype. If you are going international, get an account and prepay for some phone time. Then buy a portable headset and microphone. Whether you bring a laptop with you or go to Internet cafes, Skype will allow you to make calls for incredibly low rates anywhere you can get an internet connection. For me right now, my cell phone costs 50x what Skype does per minute to call back to the USA.
2. Manage servers? Sign up with Pingdom for active monitoring. You can then rest assured that as long as you aren’t getting emails or SMS messages, your servers are working fine. This is a good idea even if you aren’t traveling, but since you might be checking your voicemail less (or never) if you are on the go, moving more communication to email can be very helpful. This of course requires you to still check email but you might be already planing on doing this anyway.
3. A Nintendo DS can help you pass time on long flights and train rides. But to carry less stuff, get a mod card and put all your games on one cartridge. Only games you already legally own of course (wink wink).
4. On a budget and/or want to meet more people? I recommend exploring the options of couch surfing and staying at youth hostels. In either situation you might end up scoring free wifi as a great bonus.
5. Use online apps to help plan your trip and save money. A great list of the 25 best is located at this geek travel guide

Have a safe and happy trip!

It’s 2008. We are all now spewing information about ourselves in every which way. This is great for sharing our lives online and using the internet as a social medium. The only problem with this is that this system begins to break down more with each additional service that you use. And you have to use multiple services, since you have different friends and audiences on each. You have no choice in the matter. What’s worse, they don’t always often almost-ever play well together. It’s like they don’t even care about you.

Continue reading ‘WordPress as Your Ultimate Social Network-Part 1′

We are even getting made fun of on slashdot.

Check out the article and then check out the tags.

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/07/146201&from=rss

I’ve been thinking a lot about the brain’s relationship with consciousness lately. I realize that while I don’t recall my birth, its fairly assured that I did experience it, and consciously at that with all that screaming and crying that I’m positive accompanied the event. My ability to recall memories, and even my understanding of the world around me is undoubtedly a function of the facilities present in my brain. Yet, I was still conscious and existing at a time where those facilities weren’t yet performing. I existed, in a sense, without my brain.

So where am I going with all this you ask. Remember when you where a kid and years seemed to go a lot slower? Well, a new year in your life was a much larger percentage of your total conscious existence. From age 4 to age 5 (probably right around your earlier memories that you can recall) you experienced a total of 25% more lifespan. Now, one more year in your life results in a much smaller additional percentage. Your perception of time is completely based on this.

I think the clock begins to swing the opposite way as we approach death. As you go down to your last seconds of life, and then milliseconds and microseconds, your perception of time will spike to infinity like the limits we learned about in Calculus. You won’t be existing as part of the world we live in and understand now, because you step off that bus and approach infinity, but it doesn’t end.

It just stretches, forever.

(apologies to American Beauty)

Added del.icio.us and twitter support. It’s getting there…