This email is for those of you who are
conducting Pay Per Click marketing using Google
Adwords.
I've received emails from a few of you who are
experiencing "high minimum bid" problems, so I'm
going to address that problem here.
First of all, you should be aware that Google
runs a 'quality score' algorithm on all websites
published by Adwords publishers, and it crawls
regularly to check this information. The quality
score is determined by a number of factors,
including your ad's clickthrough rate (CTR),
relevance of your ad text, the historical
performance of the ad, and the quality of the
website's landing page.
Your quality score determines the minimum bid
for your Adwords ads. So if you have a high
quality score, you have a low minimum bid, and it
costs less to use Adwords. If your quality score
is eye level with the gutter, you're going to end
up paying between 50c and $50 for each and every
click on your Adwords ad.
The part of the quality score algorithm that
you should be concerned with most specifically
centers around your landing pages. A landing
page is (quite obviously) the page that a person
first lands on when they click your Adwords ad.
Google singles out landing page behaviors that
they consider to lower the user experience, and
penalises them. (A poor user experience means that
users are less likely to click an Adwords ad in
future, meaning that even though Google will lose
a lot of money initially due to fewer advertisers
on Adwords, they will ensure the longevity of
Adwords as a whole by retaining the loyalty and
goodwill of Google users. Google rides into town,
defends the defenceless and shoos the baddies
away. Yay Google.)
As a result of this heroic behaviour and
self-sacrifice on Google's part, if your website
contains with landing pages that fall into the
"poor user experience" category, then your
Adwords costs will shoot through the roof,
sometimes overnight. Let's quickly take a look
at the sites most affected, and why Google chooses
to single them out: Squeeze pages:
These are the pages that usually follow the
following formula: Big header, bulletpoints and a
form to sign up for more information or to receive
a "free report". They're usually very brief with
the sole aim of getting an email address out of
the user. Google considers these to be "poor user
experience" sites because they don't contain much
content and they don't offer the user any
alternative action other than the signup form.
Affiliate "review" sites:
These are the one-page sites with a whole bunch
of affiliate reviews for products. The aim is to
get users to click on one of the review products
and purchase through the affiliate link. By the
looks of it, Google doesn't consider that these
sites provide enough content to warrant a decent
quality score.
Sales letters:
You're bound to have seen these pages.
Sometimes they're short and to the point, but
often they go on for screens and screens... one big
long sales letter. Since these pages often have a
lot of content, you have to assume that the
penalty is because they contain no external links.
Most normal sites have multiple pages. Those that
don't are obviously selling something. This
applies to squeeze pages as well.
Arbitrage sites:
These are the sites set up purely as AdSense ad
farms. The user clicks the AdWords link and is
taken to this landing page which contains very
little besides a whole lot of AdSense ads with the
aim of making more money from AdSense than is
spent on AdWords. These sites provide a very poor
user experience indeed. The user clicks on an
AdWords ad expecting to find the information
they're looking for, and they're sent to another
page full of more ads! You can understand why
Google would want to kick these sites in the bum.
Ok, enough of the recap. What can you do about
it?
LINK TO CONTENT
This is something I've tested extensively and
has yet to produce a ridiculously high minimum bid
price. The idea is that you want to boost your
quality score by producing a multi-page website
with lots of content. Of course providing pages
and pages of content doesn't fit so well with the
single-minded nature of an affiliate review or
squeeze site.
With these sites you don't really want your
visitor wandering around too much. So how can you
provide lots of content while keeping your
visitors flowing through your site correctly?
Well, I stick very closely to the landing pages
that used to convert well, but have made some
almost unnoticeable, but very important additions...
What I've done is to add a bunch of links to
the bottom of my landing pages, reasonably small
and unobtrusive and unlikely to attract much
attention. Make a "contact us" link, a "privacy
info" link, you know, the standard stuff. But also
make an "articles" link. Have that "articles" link
go to another page in your site with maybe about
ten to thirty articles in it. Warning: Don't use
fre.e article sites like EzineArticles.com to get
your articles because the articles on your site
need to be unique content.
What you can do is join a private label rights
website, such as plrpro.com, and then simply
re-word the articles to make them unique. Then
post these on your website. Or you can hire a
freelancer from elance.com to write some unique
articles for you. This should cost about $100-200
for a set of 10 (550 word) articles.
So now your landing page links to an article
page with thirty articles in it, and you suddenly
have a content site. You can try to make money
from your article pages if you feel so inclined by
including an image and an affiliate link, or
throwing in a bit of AdSense.
You can repeat your reviews at the bottom of
each article too, if you like.
RELEVANCY! RELEVANCY! RELEVANCY!
You need to make very sure that your landing
page is optimized for BOTH your search term AND
your Adwords listing. All the words you use in
your Adwords ad should be used on your landing
page. In other words, make your site relevant to
your ad. If that means you need to make separate
landing pages for each ad or ad group, then that's
what you need to do. No point arguing the matter.
BREAK OUT THE SEO
If you haven't already optimized your site for
organic search engine listings (ie. not
pay-per-click), now would be a good time to do
that as well. It stands to reason that what works
for boosting relevancy from a SEO point of view
will also boost relevancy from a quality score
point of view.
So if you've been a bit lax on the SEO front
with the idea that since you're paying for your
ads it doesn't apply to you... you now need to think
again. By optimizing your site you're not only
increasing your relevancy to your search terms
(and hopefully lowering your minimum bids) but
you'll also be helping improve the flow of free
traffic to your site, and you'll be less likely to
feel the effects of future algorithm changes.
It's like brushing your teeth. It just needs to
be done.
Once you've implemented all this stuff it might
take a while for Google to crawl back your way. So
you can either be patient, or request a manual
review from Google. As I said, these are the
things that have been working well for me and for
people I know.
We've had particular success with linking to an
articles page, but I'm not sure if this technique
would work if these sites were human-reviewed at
any stage. The best thing to do -- and it's not so
hard when you think about it -- is to just ensure
that you're providing a site that's worth
visiting. Forget about what you're trying to
achieve in terms of profit and look at it from a
user's perspective. Worthwhile? No? Back to the
drawing board.
That's my two cents, guys, I look forward to
your comments on this one.
Regards,
Andrew
Save My Marriage Today
P.S. For an illustrated example of the landing
page concept, see the image link below:
http://www.savemymarriagetoday.com/affiliates/#landing
SaveMyMarriageToday.com
Level 2
107 Cashel St
Christchurch 8011
NEW ZEALAND
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