Google Shadow – Direct Linking Redux
If you’re subscribed to an Internet marketer’s mailing list, you’re probably getting told today about a new product coming on Tuesday called Google Shadow. Google Shadow is from the same guy who brought us Affiliate Project X and other products, all of which focus on making money with affiliate marketing and Google AdWords. Those products like to show you images like this one:
Looks impressive. Does Google Shadow actually work? Who knows? I don’t have any special insight into it. (If you want, I can send you the same promotional emails everyone else is sending…)
However, there’s one thing I can talk about which is at the heart of Google Shadow and that’s something called direct linking.
Direct Linking Explained
Direct linking is a funny term, because in this context it’s an oxymoron. Direct linking is an AdWords technique where you send traffic directly to a merchant’s website via your affiliate linking. You’re not actually “directly linking” to the merchant’s website, but anyone who clicks the ad eventually does get there. This is as opposed to “indirect linking” where anyone clicking the ad ends up on a landing page you control, such as a review page or a squeeze page.
Some examples here might help. Here’s an example of indirect linking:
Google Shadow Review
Don't Buy Google Shadow
Until You Read This
GoogShadow.com
It’s indirect because the destination URL — the URL the user sees in his or her browser’s address bar — is not the official Google Shadow website.
And here’s an example of direct linking:
Buy Google Shadow
Learn Direct Linking Secrets
Google Doesn't Want You To Know
DJKShadow.com
This is direct linking because the destination URL is the merchant’s site. If you click my affiliate link, http://egiguere.djkshadow.hop.clickbank.net, you’ll see that’s where you eventually end up. (And if you buy the product from there, I get a commission, so thanks in advance!)
Problems With Direct Linking
Direct linking was a quick way to make a few bucks in the early days of Google. In fact, the “original” AdWords infoproduct called Google Cash is all about making money with direct linking.
Google’s quality control folks didn’t like all these affiliate ads showing up, though, and so eventually they instituted a rule that made affiliates work harder to get their ads to show on Google. The rule is quite simple: only ONE ad for any given domain gets shown at a time for a given keyword.
Say there are 10 affiliates all using direct linking to promote a product. Only one affiliate’s ad is going to be shown. Which one? Either the one that has the highest bid or the highest clickthrough ratio — probably a combination of both. In other words, Google forces all the affiliates who are trying to make money with direct linking to compete directly with each other. Only the strongest survive this virtual bidding war.
The result was that most advertisers abandoned direct linking and switched to using landing pages on their own sites.
Direct Linking Today
Note that Google didn’t ban direct linking. They just made it harder to do. In some ways, it’s too bad, because direct linking was an easy way to get an AdWords campaign going… you just concentrated on getting the ad clicks and let the merchant worry about converting the traffic into sales. You can setup direct linking campaigns very quickly. (That said, if the merchant’s landing pages sucked then you wouldn’t want to necessarily use direct linking.)
What have the Google Shadow people figured out? I don’t know, to be honest. Probably a way to find keywords with traffic but little or no direct linking competition, which would let you use direct linking without getting into an expensive bidding war with other affiliates.
I guess we’ll see what’s what on Tuesday.
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57 Responses to “Google Shadow – Direct Linking Redux”
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“Google Shadow is from the same guy who brought us Affiliate Project X and other products, all of which focus on making money with affiliate marketing and Google AdWords. ”
Well IF it’s anything like APX or “Day Job Killer’ it’s just another overhyped, overpriced crappy ebook.
Thanks but no thanks.
The direct linking method is funny coming from “Chris” the author releasing Google Shadow. In one of his past ebooks, Chris recommends using an unrelated or dummy domain (I think he even uses amazon.com in one of his example) to avoid the Google “single domain rule”
So his would read:
Buy Google Shadow
Learn Direct Linking Secrets
Google Doesn’t Want You To Know
Amazon.com
With Amazon.com actually being whoopdido.djkshadow.clickbank.com
Which is interesting because most of the AdWords ads I see are linking to a squeeze page in order to glean email addresses.
Finally, who really does “make money” ebooks with AdWords anymore? New ones especially. Most of the top sales for new ebooks are going through opt-in lists.
And, if this if all Google Shadow is 40 pages on direct linking, then I am saving my 97, 67, 47 and/or monthly recurring fees.
I can’t comment on the content of the product because I haven’t seen it, but I am definitely skeptical. I’ve tried direct linking myself but have never has the patience or the budget to develop a good set of keywords to use it with.
If you have listened to the audio interview you can glean that the upsell is going to be the “software” which does whatever they are doing easier for you. I can bet that is where the recurring fee is going to come from. Any takers on that bet?
I don’t know, I’ve bought Chris’ products before and haven’t hade a dime from them. What he wrote just plain didn’t work for me. Plus I’ve never made money from affiliate sales using AdWords. It always cost WAY too much for the ads. Maybe he found a loophole??
>>So his would read:
Buy Google Shadow
Learn Direct Linking Secrets
Google Doesn’t Want You To Know
Amazon.com
With Amazon.com actually being whoopdido.djkshadow.clickbank.com<<
John:
I believe the rule is that the destination AND display URLs must match. If I’m correct, your example above simply wouldn’t be allowed.
Eric:
Do you know if I am correct about the display and destination URLs matching?
Johnny
The destination URL can be different as long as it eventually redirects the user to a URL whose prefix matches the display URL. The point is that the user shouldn’t end up on a domain they’re not expecting, but you can send them elsewhere first for tracking purposes.
Eric
>>The destination URL can be different as long as it eventually redirects the user to a URL whose prefix matches the display URL.<<
I didn’t know that. BUT… doesn’t redirecting crush your quality score?
<<I can’t comment on the content of the product because I haven’t seen it, but I am definitely skeptical.<<
I just watched the Google Shadow video. This sounds an awful lot like CPA marketing. No selling. No website. Direct linking. It’s got to be CPA!
Johnny
Redirecting doesn’t necessarily affect the quality score, no. There are many legitimate uses for redirecting, after all. Even Google redirects some of its own ads.
As for Shadow being about CPA, I think it’s both CPA and traditional affiliate marketing. The earnings shown are from ClickBank, after all, which is not a CPA network. But direct linking can be used in either case.
Eric
Brad: Yes, I’m pretty sure that the continuity program is online software they’ve developed.
Oh dear, yet another ebook from Chris claiming that you can make a fortune from Clickbank.
Probably full of “secrets” like the gem from DJK which advised direct linking to amazon for electronic products with the price in the ad. Well, amazon use dynamic pricing and change their prices sometimes daily – so you would have to spend hours each day checking that your ads were accurate just for a tiny 5% commission on any sales. And if amazon got a complaint that you were advertising a product at the wrong price (customer clicks through, sees price is higher than advertised, blames amazon for misleading them: not happy) then you risked getting booted off the amazon associates program. Great advice Chris! (Not)
Likewise this new effort is more than likely just another “method” that worked sort of okay (maybe) when a few people did it but as soon as hundreds of people try doing it – result = failure! It’s still only 1 ad per domain after all.
Come on people, wake up these self styled “gurus” make money all right – but only by selling their expensive hyped to the hilt ebooks to the hordes of people caught up in the hype and expecting some “secret” or “loophole” to be revealed.
Oh come on, Marc, I’m fully expecting The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread.
Gotta admire the marketing machine they’ve built, though.
Eric
I have to agree with Marc.
The ebook money “secret” works like this.
Write an ebook with some rehashed supposedly secret stuff and include a bunch of fake CB revenue.
Sell it, get a bunch of email addresses, expect many returns.
Take email opt in list and market every darn ebook which comes down the pipe.
While making “sucker-filliate” moolah, dream up a new “Google Boffo” system, write it, get a few more early super-filliates to hype it and make a) a few thousand dollars more in sales and b) gain several thousand more email addresses.
Continue the above scheme or, as they say in the aff marketing business “rinse and repeat”.
I have bought 80% of Chris’ titles and have never made a dime with his systems. Call me sour grapes or whatever, but I won’t be buying this one.
Although there are number of problems with direct linking but its also true that direct link catches more traffic and increases the value of PPC.
To me all these kind of products seems to be scam. More over for direct linking i will say you need to have some extra money and time to invest in it. I would never give it a try.
Even if the Clickbank amounts shown are correct, what he DOESN’T say is what he spent on AdWords ads in that time period. Maybe he spent $2000 a day on them. Also we don’t know if the Clickbank income was solely due to the “Shadow”.
Rich:
Good point. If his campaign went really well, then only about 1/3 of his Clickbank income shown is actually profit after AdWords expense. If things didn’t go quite as well, then it could even be a loss.
Johnny
Yeah, that’s perhaps the one thing I dislike the most about all the PPC-focused “make money” books and systems: they always talk about earnings, not profits. The costs to advertise things via AdWords can be substantial and it’s an easy way to throw away some money. I know, I’ve done it!
Think of it this way… if you’re making $20 per sale (typical affiliate or CPA commission) and each click is costing you $1, then you need a greater than 5% conversion ratio to make money — in other words, more than 1 in 20 clicks have to lead to a sale. That’s hard to do.
From what I can tell, the people who really make money at this have hundreds of campaigns running at any time, each testing a very small group of keywords. Detailed tracking is used to quickly winnow out the losers and to be left with likely profitable campaigns. Further tuning is then done to find the really profitable ones. Takes a lot of time to do, and definitely requires money to spend on the ads.
Eric
There is an interesting discussion about Google Shadow on the Warrior Forum.
The upshot: the guy doing this has 30,000 ads going at any time, each making a few dollars profit a month. So it’s a volume play, which is what I suspected.
Eric
Well then what’s the point of this? I can make 30,000 websites and make $100K a year from AdSense too. Maybe his software can keep track of all those ads.
I meant 100K a month
actually more than that
I can guarantee that you can make 30,000 ads much more quickly than 30,000 websites. It’s not that hard:
1. Download the free AdWords Editor (from Google).
2. Write an app that generates ads for you in the spreadsheet format that the AdWords Editor accepts.
3. Load the ads into AE, upload them to your account.
4. You’re done!
Alright, so there’s some work in getting #2 done:
2a. You need to come up with individual ads and keyword groups for those ads. This you probably have to do by hand… or autogenerate and weed out the ones that make no sense.
2b. Install a tracking script on a website you own. Have your tool generate destination URLs that go to that script and include information about which ad & keyword generate the click as well as where the click is supposed to go to (the aff URL).
All you do then is write a tracking script that forwards the user to the aff URL, inserting a dynamically-generated tracking ID (where the aff program supports it) if appropriate.
If you’re using ClickBank, a good coder could whip something up like this pretty easily. ClickBank has a notification system in place now that lets you (the affiliate) be notified automatically whenever a sale or refund occurs. You could hook this right up to your tracking script… the tracking script would generate a unique 8-character TID whenever it was called and log the information from AdWords about which ad was clicked and so on. Later if a sale occurs, you could have CB call back to the same site your tracking script is on. It could look up the info in the database (using the unique TID) and spit out a report showing which keyword and ad combos lead to which sales.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the Google Shadow software worked along similar lines.
Eric
Not to mention that coming up with content with 30,000 different sites is a lot of work, nevermind the overhead (and cost) of registering domains, hosting them, setting the site/blog, etc.
Eric
[...] that is very appealing if you can afford the upfront costs. It’s spawned a bit of a discussion on my blog, but I think the upshot is that if you have a few simple software tools you can automate so much of [...]
Eric,
My head is spinning after just reading your post. I know a bit about VB.NET programming, but I’m not brave enough to actually try to implement it! ;>)
These days it seems like programming — not marketing — is the most valuable money-making skill there is!
Johnny
If programming made you rich, I wouldn’t be here, would I?
Honestly, I still think the human factor is the most important — if you can’t persuade people to buy your stuff, you won’t make any money. I don’t think you can automate the creation of the ads in this model, not if you want decent clickthrough ratios.
Eric
Yeah I’m sure it’s easier to make 30,000 ads than 30,000 sites. Even if the sites are free blogs, it would still take time to create even lousy sites.
But I guess my point is, it doesn’t seem worth it to make $3 an ad per month. It seems like a low return for an ad. Certainly $3 a month from an AdSense site is low. Maybe I am missing something?
Looking at the ClickBank payment pages, it looks like there are two Google Shadow products being sold on a monthly basis.
The first Google Shadow subscription is for the Google Shadow “advanced affiliate training and software system”. It’s priced at $67/month.
The second Google Shadow subscription is for the Google Shadow Blueprints – “download the Shadow’s real life case studies, and swip his keywords, ads, everything”. $47/month extra.
So total cost if you take the upsell is $114/month. I’m sure they’ll have several thousand people sign up for this. I’m sure they’ll clear $100K in the first month even after affiliate commissions…. That’s a nice chunk of change for anyone.
I expect the system to go live any minute now, they usually open up a bit before the “official” time.
Eric
I dunno, $3 profit per month times 30,000 is $90K/month. I’d be happy with that!
Eric
It’s not the Clickbank earnings that matter..
It’s not the AdWords spend that matters..
It’s the return rate for the ebook which matters..
Why bother spending 1.00 per click for a 20.00 profit if the buyer asks for a refund after download? And a bunch of them do..
And I would take the 90K in AdSense earnings over the 30K Adwords ads. A lot less to manage..
If you have listened to the audio interview you can glean that the upsell is going to be the “software†which does whatever they are doing easier for you. I can bet that is where the recurring fee is going to come from. Any takers on that bet?
I still do direct linking but behind a tracking url on my system that allows me to change the url so that I can still do somewhat of an a/b split test.
I’ve been tried to search Googleshadow information and I found your site right now. So thanks for your info.
I miss the good old days of Google Cash – Life was a lot simpler and you didn’t need a degree in Computer Science to make a buck. There has been a veritable explosion in ‘make money online’ and ‘affiliate money making’ posts, ebooks, courses etc. since 2009 kicked off. Yet there appear to be relatively few people who are actually making more than a few dollars using these techniques.
Thanks for the explanation of direct linking. I have always thought about doing it in one of the areas I work in. Also, nice write up on Google Shadow.
I bought google shadow and returned it after2 hrs, the ads were getting google slapped!!!
<<<<<>>>>>
It sure as hell is! It’s just another followup of a over hyped product to make some easy money!
I bought Google cash way back when and I did make a few bucks from it. The information had a few holes in it and it took some trial and error, but it did work. I never had the money (or the nerve) to really invest heavily in Adsense though. Of course, Google eventually made short work of that little technique. Seems they’re always ruining my fun:)
Is it worth the money? I doubt it. I’ll stick to learning SEO and only play with PPC when I can afford it
I am always suspicious of these “secret” methods for profit. Once the secret is revealed all the completion results in the inability of anyone to make a profit. Except the promoters of the system of course.
“Google Shadow however, takes the cake for worst product release of 2009 so far”
http://tactictester.com/google-shadow-review-crap/
I think ebooks are designed to get only one person rich, and that’s the author… Tread carefully… It would be interesting to see one though, maybe one day I should get one, but then I wouldn’t want to give the author the satisfaction.
Sounds rather similar to the google cash method to me
WOW! Thank God for these forums. Here’s another one I nearly bought. I guess the better the sales letter you can write, the more suckers like me willkeep getting caught! Five years now and I still haven’t made money on-line. It just gets more and more frustrating for a newbie. Too high tech now. From what I read evrywhere, its samo samo with the guru’s the only ones making anything worthwhile! Time better spent on ‘working’ in the real world! At least you are in control. What really pisses me off is they all hide behind the screen. No-one to exlain or hold your hand when it counts. Oh well, nearly ’sucked again’.
What about using indirect linking to one of your site that has php redirect that is a direct link to your affiliate site, can you not just do that?
Yeah, I’ve also read some of Chris’s stuff and although it’s extremely well written and marketed, the returns are just pitiful. I don’t even know if he uses his own techniques anymore.
@Luca – Well, I don’t think he’s talking about PPC per say, this is something else. It’s a bit out of my spectrum of things I deal with, so I need to read this article a few more times myself
Man I would like to be the owner of that clickbank account. These secret methods aren’t really secrets but more so refined techniques of an experienced individual. It takes skill imo.
If you have listened to the audio interview you can glean that the upsell is going to be the “software†which does whatever they are doing easier for you. I can bet that is where the recurring fee is going to come from. Any takers on that bet?
I hjave worked with CPA programs that do not allow direct linking. My squeeze pages forward app. 80% of the traffic which I believe is okay.
I believe that knowing what keywordsd are cheap for a given domain would be nice to know. But don’t forget that with a squeeze page you are able to work to get a better quality score because you control all aspects
Thank You Eric – this was exactly the information I was looking for. Nice clear explanation of the direct linking restrictions that google has added.
Let’s face it…if these systems worked and made money…they certainly wouldn’t be selling them to you
)
online money making breakthrough? Don’t think so …
@Search Engine Optimization Service – I’ll take that bet
I would take the 90K in AdSense earnings over the 30K Adwords ads. A lot less to manage