More on AuctionAds that I posted a couple days back; today, I’ll touch on tweaking AuctionAds to display better targeted ads using several keyword rules.
One thing I notice is I tend to see a lot of AuctionAds on many a website, that display ads totally off topic. This could be due to ignorance on the part of the webmaster regarding the usefulness of using certain keyword rules inside AuctionAds itself. Of course, AuctionAds definitely needs a whole lot more improvement; but there are some things you can do to improve the situation.
Many topics can do well using several keywords, not just one. There may be times when you want to display products spanning a few brands but leaving out others at the same time. By adding several more keywords into your keyword string, you may be able to streamline your AuctionAds to display improved ads.
How do you do that?
Although the preview is very “iffy”, you may be able to reduce the off target previews by pressing the “Create” button each time you generate an ad. This doesn’t always work in the preview though.
AuctionAds use several common punctuation marks and definitions as keyword rules:
- the comma (“,”)
- the semicolon (‘;”)
- the minus (‘-“)
- minprice:$X
- maxprice:$X
If you want to have a list of keywords to give your visitors more choices just in case there are no products for the main 1st choice keyword, just specify a list of keywords separated by a comma (“,”) inside your AuctionAds keyword generator inside your AuctionAds account.
This will make AuctionAds first display the ads from the 1st keyword, and then if there are no suitable ones, to display ads about the 2nd keyword and so forth in order of importance/availability.
For example:
Nikon cameras, Cannon cameras, Sony cameras, Olympus cameras
will make AuctionAds show Nikon as the 1st choice, and if not available, to be replaced with Cannon and so on.
Another way is to use the semi-colon (“;”). This tells AuctionAds to display the keywords at random, with no preference.
Example:
Nikon cameras; Cannon cameras; Sony cameras; Olympus cameras
The rules defined above tell AuctionAds to display Nikon/Sony/Cannon/Olympus cameras with no preference for any particular brand.
If you want to omit certain names or criteria, you can create a filter using a minus sign (“-“) in the keyword generator. Lets say you want to sell mp3 players but wish to omit Ipod and Sony. The keywords to use are:
mp3 players -Ipod -Sony
The (‘-‘) tells AuctionAds to omit Ipod and Sony, so your ad shows any mp3 players/accesories/stuff, but never anything about Ipod or Sony.
There are might be instances you want to set a higher minimum price because you want to target the end of auctions when the bid prices are obviously higher . You can use the definitions of either “minprice” or “maxprice”.
- minprice:$X
- maxprice:$X
“Minprice” is for telling AuctionAds to display only auctions that are equal to, or more than the value given, and “maxprice” is for telling AuctionAds to limit the prices to not more than the value given (just in case the product ends up being too expensive to garner any interest).
For example:
cameras -minprice:$200
displays cameras that are equal to, or more than $200, all the time.
There is no limit to how you wish to configure your AuctionAds inside your account by the use of the keyword definitions shown above. You can try mixing them up to set up a preset formula of your own, depending on your page, keywords, topic and site.
By the way, there is an AuctionAds plugin for WordPress from OSCandy to make displaying AuctionAds easier for your site. You can define your keywords using punctuation marks from within the plugin’s options page as explained by the authors.
Just like Adsense, your AuctionAds need to be targeted before you can hope to see any kind of results from using them. So here’s to hopefully better profits with AuctionAds!