I got an email from Chris Carpenter a while back saying that GCD 3.0 was coming, but he didn’t tell me what was new and being a busy guy, I never did get the answer from him.

That is, until yesterday!

I got excited about Chris’ Google Cash Detective in the past but it was always just a hair shy of what I felt it really needed to be.  The raw information it contained was remarkable and my brain spun like mad on some of the possible things that could be done with it, but it lacked a few features - things I felt were pretty basic requirements - that it needed to really be something I would use on a daily basis.

It sounds like that time may have finally come.

Straight from the horse’s mouth, here’s a short summary of some of the new features in GCD 3, with emphasis added to what I’m most excited about:

First, all customers will get a free upgrade.  The new system
uses a different data base architecture and is much, much
faster than the old. It is also internally consistent which means
if you find a url, you can find it in every instance that it exists
in the database.  In the old version, sometimes you would get
a no data error message when you knew there was data there.

The coolest feature is that the system can tell when an
advertiser is using keyword tracking in their links.  It
uses the domain to group ads and therefore can pick
up campaigns that before would appear to be intermittently
run, but actually were the most sophisticated kinds that
are using split testing and tracking elements.

Now you will have access to campaigns with numerous
landing page urls that before would have seemed as
separate campaings.

Finally, you can sort the data using any and every variable
including dates which is key to dissecting what is actually
going on out there.

If you’ve used GCD in the past, you know why that last bit is in bold.  The most frustrating thing was that you couldn’t really filter by any criteria… you had to do a whole lot of mousing around and clicking on things to dig up information that should’ve been available en masse by simply choosing a filter and hitting a single button.  According to what I’ve been told, that is now a reality!  This will definitely have me back in GCD exploring it heavily.  I haven’t gotten to see this in action yet but it should be any day now that it gets rolled out fully.

I’m also particularly excited at the potential of finding campaigns that have a few keywords that are working, and running those keywords as seed terms through my KWBot keyword miner, and blowing up lists around those terms.  Since GCD is for the search network only, I think extrapolating to these long tail variations on the search terms, could be a good way to migrate a campaign onto the content network… or especially to other traffic sources all together.

Anyway, if you do affiliate marketing and haven’t checked out Google Cash Detective, you should really consider it.  It’s not for everyone but you’ll probably know in the first hour whether or not it will be of value to you and your business.

Jonathan

This is crazy. It’s well past midnight, and I still have to take out the trash for collection in the morning.

Why on earth am I still up???

It’s entirely my own fault. I got sucked into some training videos. I was just going to take a quick peek. A few minutes, tops.

But not this time… I’m sucked in, and I think you might be too. So I guess I had better explain myself. I absolutely had no idea I was going to be posting this tonight. I had no intention of doing so, I was just curious more than anything… but now I’m excited.

Let’s go back in time a bit shall we? Do you remember all the completely outrageous hype that surrounded the “Google Cash Detective” a couple years ago? I think it was about 2 years ago… I can barely remember now.

Anyway, it was hyped up as the hottest thing since sliced bread. It would make you a bazillionaire overnight. It would make your bed. Cook you breakfast. Clean up after the dog. You get the idea.

And I gotta say, I was very intrigued. The concept seriously appealed to my analytical nature. I mean - think about it… what if you could actually download every adwords ad, for millions of keywords, every day, for a long time. Holy cow, you’d know exactly what made money, instantly!! The Holy Grail of online marketing finally realized!

Unfortunately at the time, I was seriously strapped for cash, and it was not cheap… I just couldn’t swing it. Months later some cheap imitators came along and I bought one of them… and hated it. Returned it after 30 days and decided that “spy tools” were a total load of crap. I still feel they are fundamentally flawed and won’t make anyone rich overnight.

HOWEVER… I still think the basic idea makes sense:

* Gather intelligence.

* Analyze the data.

* Make decisions.

* Act.

In my book, that’s a winning formula.

So what’s the point? The point is… there’s now a Google Cash Detective 2 and this time I got in (thanks for the heads up Mike!!). Like I said it was really just curiosity… I didn’t expect to be particularly blown away. Sure it would probably be pretty interesting, but… I’m pretty jaded about the latest PPC fads at this point.

And then I watched one of the videos. And then another. And another. And…

And now I’m wide awake and it’s 12:28AM and I still have to take out the garbage!!!!

I’m a big advocate of staying focused, of not getting distracted, of not chasing every “shiny object” that comes along.

But I have to admit, this one is really, REALLY shiny. I think I’m going to have to take a bit of a detour and implement it. They have come a LONG way since the original, where I heard a ton of horror stories about it not working, crashing, not delivering, etc. etc. etc.

All I see now is one highly evolved, smooth, absolute monster of an intelligence weapon. I only personally know one tool that might rival this, and it’s not public.

However GCD2 is once again NOT an inexpensive product. This is absolutely not for the beginner on a limited budget. But if you have the pockets for something like this, or are already a seasoned marketer… you’re gonna want to see this. Like, NOW.

Check it out and let me know what you think… I will definitely write more once I’ve deployed some campaigns and have some personal results to share.

http://www.tooltrainer.com/gcd

Damn, why did it have to be so shiny???

Jonathan