This was written near the end the refund period (around April 8th) inside the Google Cash Detective— after honestly trying several things with no success and watching many frustrated users. Sadly, this is hard to sugar coat in humor.

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Being honest, I find myself on the fence and confused as to whether or not I should continue or get a refund for GCD.

I don’t think there is one answer, I really think it does depend on where you are in the game, and what you have at your disposal.

For me, I measure things by opportunity costs, and progress towards desired outcomes.

The desired outcome for most here, I imagine, is making money as quickly as possible and eliminating the possibility of losing money as much as possible.

If you ONLY had $2k in your hand, right now, you could spend it on on either:

1. GCD/GCA (1yr subscription)
2. 20x $100 test campaigns or 10 landing pages
3. Developing 10 informational products

**Since GCD/GCA will never send you a paycheck** and you NEED to get campaigns/products up to get a paycheck. If I only had $2k, it would be no question I’d go with the latter two… However if you have more than that, the answer gets less clear…murky even.

So what do you need to make Money Online?

Rabid Market + Good Marketing + Good Product = Success

or

Rabid Market + Better Marketing than your Competitors + Better Product than Competitors = Success

Finding a market can be done in a bunch of different ways. In the test phase, you want 20-30 solid keywords not 1000’s, and there are multiple ways to achieve this: WordTracker, Wordpot. To determine profitability use slower/complimentary approaches like Affiliate Espionage.

Here is the key quandary to me, given the above…

Just how useful is GCD as a tool?

PROS

• Months, eventually years of data to search through.
• You CAN find profitable campaigns.
• You CAN find good affiliates to stalk.
• You CAN easily find hot markets.
• You CAN EASILY find what’s NOT working (e.g. Fapturbo froth+churn)..this could save some serious $$$.
• You are surrounded by a good community here going through the same challenges on the same tools.
• The spy and automation tools are here to stay, and are changing the affiliate marketplace, get used with them, or else you will be out of business in a year. Being here can help shape them in the direction you want them to go.

CONS

• You CAN find other people’s profitable campaigns…. but that doesn’t mean they will be profitable for you, just by cloning.
• GCD keyword research many not be any more profitable than using traditional approaches (in at least one seminar with Frank, he didn’t use GCD at all).  This is a core frustration— As I am reading through the forum, I see many frustrated cloners wondering why they haven’t made a single sale on a campaign using a strategy that should supposedly work. This is not that they aren’t making good money, that I could understand…just zero sales! It’s not GCD’s fault, it’s just a tool that collects data we tell it. GCD has limited knowledge of the past, but it is not omniscient to ‘reality’ of the living breathing marketplace as it exists right now, and isn’t a crystal ball at all. I wish I had better answers to this one.
• Like the Death Star, GCD it’s operational but not fully complete, and not easy to use. I know from personal experience in high-tech startups how difficult building apps of this scale are. ..I know that Chris and team are working very hard on it. I do empathize…it’s a small team, and there are only so many hours in a day! In one of the training videos Chris said he’s spending 15hr days…I’ve been there. Regardless, as a consumer I am disappointed. Maybe I got blinded by the sales video and copy which made it appear like GCD was solid and complete and bug free, and would be a genie in the bottle. It wasn’t, the training that is up is great, but incomplete, and guessing at present rate a month or two away from completion. So this feels a bit like supply your own manual. I’ll admit, part of my dissatisfaction is pride, had it been my product I would not have released the product in the state I was in. To their credit, Chris and team have given an extra time, and are headed in the right direction.

Just how useful is GCA as a tool?

GCA too is an advanced feature— I know how it’s supposed to work…but I don’t know how to use it (I really couldn’t comprehend the training videos) …or even if I can use in conjunction with tools like Affiliate Prophet, which I DO see immediate return on investment for.   I may be wrong as I don’t fully understand..but I don’t think GCA is meant for new campaigns. In the beginning of a new campaign, I’m not convinced that any tool can absolve a person from paying attention and learning what’s going on, or even if that’s a desirable goal. Just my opinion that if you care to make money, you should care about what people are REALLY searching on, and what terms are really converting to sales, adjusting copy/ads as you go. No tool can fully automate that.

Again, if I am just starting out with 20/30 keywords, Adword Editor is tedious, but easy enough to use. Long term with dozens of campaigns… I can totally see the value of GCA and $97/mo is cheap, cheap cheap…once those campaigns are profitable, and there is ‘money to spare’.