If you are running PPV, you are most likely scraping URLs. If you are scraping URLs, then you have probably wasted money on bad targets. I certainly have. Here’s a money-saving tip that will keep you from blowing through your testing budget bidding on google.com or answers.yahoo.com:
Go through your scraped URLs before you launch the campaign!
Nobody has cleaner URLs than this dude...
Yes, I understand that if you are targeting thousands of URLs, it can be time consuming to go through them one-by-one. But here’s the trick: you don’t have to! If you have your list loaded up in Excel, just press Ctrl + F to open up the Find menu, and then search for the usual culprits:
google.com, facebook.com, yahoo.com, wikipedia.org, etc.
Alternatively, if you are using AffExpert, you can filter these domains during the scraping process. Just click the “Show/Hide Domain Filter” button on the URL Scraper tool, and it will open up a second box where you can put in the URLs you want to filter out. Done and done.
So there you go, a simple tip that can easily save you $20 a campaign or more.
I don't want to link to my blog post in your comments but I made a video on using excel to delete duplicates and quickly delete longer than 40 char. domains (especially for mediatraffic)
Not a big deal but some don't think about it. Good Post.
You can throw the link down, I don't care. Also with Media Traffic, sometimes I just chop the URL down to 40 characters. Sometimes you only need the first part of the query string and you will still get the traffic. Other times though, it will cut off too much of the string and you will just match every single view of the root domain. It's hit or miss…
Number 1 – fantastic tip
Number 2 – that picture is awesome. lol
To check out the number of words in your search string try typing :
=LEN(TRIM(B2))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(B2,” “,””))+1
You need to replace the B2 to be the cell you are looking for the answer for.
To find out the number of characters it is simply :
=LEN(B2)
If you want to join up a bunch of columns :
=CONCATENATE(A3,B3,C3)
so if A3 is * B3 is your keyword and C3 is * the joined up version would be :
*your keyword* perfect for using on say Mediatraffic.
My favorite tool for manipulating spreadsheets is an excel add-in called Pup7 (or Pup6 if you are using an earlier version of Excel). It’s like excel data manipulation for PPC or PPV on steroids.
Wow that is some true Excel genius there!