CBTool Blog

I stumbled upon Willie Crawford’s blog and noticed a post about PPCDefender – a piece of software that is supposed to stop programs that try to spy on competitors PPC campaigns. Some notable examples of the “competition spy” variety are GCDetective and AdSpyPro.

I’m not impressed by PPCDefender. Software like AdSpyPro lets you find profitable keywords, ad copy and products. PPCDefender only makes a feeble attempt to protect one of these – the product, or more precisely the landing page. Someone using PPC spy software could still as easily discover your profitable keywords and ads.

PPCDefender is a simple PHP script that achieves some level of “protection” by only allowing visitors who came from Google to see the page. This is done by checking what URL they came from – the “referer” URL feature that most web browsers support. Repeat visitors will also be admitted because PPCDefender creates a cookie to identify them. An experienced programmer could easily spoof the referer URL (or the cookie) and make PPCDefender think the spy script is legitimate visitor. There are also other ways to defeat the “defender” but I won’t describe them here as it would get very technical soon.

And yes, the PPCDefender script is of course “encrypted” and anyone trying to overcome it would have to spend days reverse-engineering it, wouldn’t he? No, not really. The encryption (actually obfuscation) is trivial and it wouldn’t take more than half an hour for someone with enough PHP experience to crack it.

PPCDefender in it’s current form is only a temporary annoyance that the PPC spy programmers could solve in less than a day. The defenders author promises to keep up to date with competition spy software evolution and update PPCDefender as needed… we’ll see how that goes. I suspect he won’t have much success.

If you’re really paranoid…

If you really want to protect your AdWords ads from scripts like GCDetective you could change the Display URL and/or the Target URL for each ad frequently (at least once a day). I haven’t tried to reverse-engineer PPC spy software but I think it probably uses the URL(s) to identify each ad. PPC spies aim to find ads that run for a long time and if the URL changed often it would look like they are different ads every day. For an even more reliable protection you could slightly change the ad text, display URL, target URL and the product link on the landing page and identifiable portions of the page (like title, etc). This process can be automated with some effot but is it worth it?

I think for the anti-intelligence tools this will be a losing fight overall.

White Shadow :: Jun.26.2007 :: Reviews :: 6 Comments »

Don’t buy it. If you already did – tough. All it has are two simple link cloaking methods based on HTML, similar to what one of my free cloaking scripts does + some cookie stuffing. I wasn’t impressed – well, actually I was impressed they managed to sell this stuff.

On a completely unrelated note, ClickBank seems to have skipped an update today, so CBTool hasn’t been updated either.

White Shadow :: Jun.17.2007 :: CBTool News, Reviews :: 2 Comments »

“15k In 7 Days” is an audio interview + a PDF transcript that talk about building a responsive list and just how exactly did Brian Edmondson (a little-known marketer at the time) make more than $15 000 from his small opt-in list just in one product launch he was an affiliate for.

I’m pretty sure all the “super affiliates” are going to roll out cool presells and bonuses for this one, giving you a bunch of enticing reaons to buy it from them. Go for it. It’s good. I’ll just give you some facts :

• This report tells you how to get an “optimized list” – a list of responsive subscribers and buyers, not freebie seekers.
• You’ll find out how Brian’s list generates him more than five times the income/subscriber than is the industry average.
• Why you must build a personal relationship with your list.
• How the often shunned list-building strategies like safelist advertising and giveaways can provide you with high quality subscribers instead of freebie hoarders. Just a few tricks you need to know…
• Other good ways to build your list.
• How to condition your subscribers to buy from you and not some other affiliate.
• … plus a lot more about opt-in lists and marketing.

On the topic of fluff – it’s not a “step-by-step blueprint” or something of that kind, whatever you might see someone write. There’s good info inside and you’ll need to listen/read through the interview and make notes. No “get rich in 5 minutes” plan here.

Check out 15kin7days.com for more info, it’s going live today.

White Shadow :: Jun.12.2007 :: Reviews :: No Comments »

What is it?
NeoPerformancer is a system designed to optimize your PPC performance. Basically it’s a keyword-tracking script, with lots of features :

• Helps you discover new and profitable keywords.
• Detects click fraud and presents detailed statistics.
• Allows you to optimize your landing pages by dynamically inserting keywords on the page.
• You can both link directly to vendors’ sales page or your own landing pages.
• Automatically calculates costs, profits, CTRs and ROIs on campaign, group and individual keyword levels.
• + more.

My Impressions
I’m quite interested in affiliate marketing-related software, and keyword tracking in particular (I even have my own free click tracking script), so naturally I went out and got NeoPerformancer the day it came out. After testing it for a while, I thought I’d write a review to help people decide whether this tool is the right for them. Here’s some of my experience with NeoPerformancer :

So, installing it is pretty straightforward – it’s a bunch of PHP files, that you put on your webhost, then create a database for it to use (you might need to consult your host’s documentation if you’ve never done this before) and run the installation script. NeoPerformancer comes with step-by-step instructions on what to do.

After it’s set up, you can log in to a management interface that looks a lot like Google AdWords – same colors, same layout, etc. It was purposefully designed to be similar to AdWords and thus greatly reduce the time needed to learn to use it. In my opinion, it only partially accomplishes that task – while it looks the same, there are many tiny differences, that made me go “Hmm? I didn’t expect that! What does this do?”. However, while it’s not a “zero learning curve” as claimed on the authors page, you can get up to speed pretty fast, especially since there are instructional videos available.

NeoPerformancer campaigns are again similar to AdWords – each can contain a number of groups. A group is either a “direct linking” group, or a “landing page” group and has an associated URL and a list of keywords. You have to add the keywords manually – while NP will get you some new keywords, you need to do the initial research yourself. Each keyword is assigned a unique link, and it is possible to copy & paste the whole list to an AdWords adgroup. You can also assign the cost-per-click in NeoPerfomancer. NP provides a number of statistics for every keyword.

In tracking keyword profitability, NP didn’t live up to my expectations. You have to enter the income for each keyword, manually, to calculate ROI and related statistics. While I didn’t expect the author to provide automatic sales data analysis for all the different merchants/services out there, it would be nice if popular ones like ClickBank or PayDotCom would have been included. It’s not that hard, I’ve done it before. Honestly, the whole keyword-level income tracking is confusing in NP and the documentation is lacking (at the moment at least).

In Conclusion
Well… It’s good, but not great. In my opinion, there’s still work to be done to make this a top-notch product. Worth considering however.

Visit NeoPerformancer Site For More Information

White Shadow :: May.30.2007 :: Reviews :: No Comments »