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Recent Google Changes and your Adwords Campaigns
By admin | October 21, 2009
If you’ve been using Google AdWords then you are likely to have been affected by the recent changes to Google’s ‘Quality Score’. Your sites may have been ‘penalised’ forcing your bid prices to be changed to a higher unsustainable level. In the next couple of articles I’ll discuss first, what has happened and then go on to to discuss ways to minimise the impact.
The Google Slap
Firstly, not all web sites are affected of course; however your sites will be hit if they are just one page sales letters, squeeze pages, pure AdSense sites.
Essentially Google came up with a new way of evaluating web sites based on a “quality score” which is and I quote from Google directly:- “A value placed on an individual domain that reflects the quality of the content contained within it.”
Which is really a way of saying that you’re going to be penalised if you don’t have enough ‘useful’ content on your site.
So if you are running an Adwords campaign using a landing page, with nothing more than a little bit of text and links to your affiliated merchant sites you’re probably going to be given a low quality score. The penalty being higher cost-per-click and lower ranking.
However note that the basis of Google’s scoring system is on the domain level and therefore on your entire website! So even if you have a highly relevant landing page with great content on it if the rest of your site is not up to scratch you could still get hit hard.
Google is also checking:
- The number of indexed pages
- Is there a privacy policy web page
- Is there a ‘Contact’ page
- How long your site has been registered and online
In other words, how long has your site been online and how much useful information are you giving away? Are you a legitimate business with contact information? Nothing wrong with that , you say, that will get rid of the ’spam’ sites that are out there.
Unfortunately, this tactic ends up penalising new businesses who have brand new domain names or who haven’t had enough time to add ‘useful’ content to their sites. It also penalises internet marketing marketing affiliates like us who use one or two page web sites to drive traffic to our merchant’s sales pages.
So, do you now have to have a complete website with hundreds of pages to promote any products or are there ways to improve your quality score that are more straight forward. The answer is yes, there are some practical steps you can take and I will be looking at these in more detail in the next article.
Remember that the most most relevant and targeted sites will be rewarded with a higher quality score and the higher your score the better. The price you pay per click will go down and your ad placement position will go up!
Conclusion
Relevancy as ever is king. We have discussed in previous articles how to focus your Adwords Campaigns on unique customer niches, with relevant target Ads and keywords. Google hasn’t so much as moved the goalposts but increased the size of playing field by a significant factor. In the next article I’ll discuss steps you can take to keep in the game.
Good Luck!
About the Author
PS. Are you pulling your hair out trying to master Adwords? I review the TOP Guides AND you can GRAB your FREE e-book “How To Find Hot Markets & Keywords” here! - http://www.moneyreality.co.uk. David Brown is a successful affiliate marketer who has learnt the hard way that THE key to being a success is perseverance.
Topics: Google adwords |
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