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