All posts in Google Adwords

Affiliate marketing tip for the day : be very careful with what you do with your Adwords account(s). I don’t know why Adwords built their system in some ways, I guess they want to keep the most solid advertisers up. Here’s some things you should be careful about doing, because if you’re not, the following may happen (all of which have happened to me) :

• They will completely turn off your account and put it “under review”. This could take a couple days for them to get on, and until then all your ads are down.
• They will just slice and dice your campaign down to nothing. One day, volume. Next day, nothing.
• They’ll raise your minimum bids to $10.00, once again killing your campaign down to nothing.

We don’t want any of these things happening to us, so here’s a checklist of things to be careful doing when editing your Adwords accounts :

• Pausing a campaign. I don’t like pausing campaigns with the plan to resume them. Sometimes we have to do it and it’s fine, but I’ve had times where I paused a campaign and when I Resumed it, volume was waaay down. Instead of pausing the campaign, I just set the budget really low which will turn it off. I haven’t noticed any volume changes when doing that.
• Dropping bids too fast. This may be the #1 killer for me, and the thing I’ve learned most from. I’ll have my bids at $1.00 and drop them to $0.50, only to see my impressions go from 1,000,000/day to 5,000/day and no clicks. Be careful when cutting your bids.
• Too much optimization. This one sounds completely retarded, but it’s happened to me many times. I’ll edit a bunch of keyword bids, make new ads, change budgets, and then notice that none of my ads are running. Call up Adwords for them to tell me “Your account is currently under review.” This one’s kind of hard to avoid, but it’s what sometimes triggers your ads going down.
• Budget changes. I’ve had my budget at $1,000/day for testing, and then once everything was good I just wanted unlimited so I upped it to $50,000/day. This tipped off Adwords and once again, my account was put under review.

Alright, just some of the things I watch out for in Adwords.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Adwords came out and introduced a new factor into rating a landing page’s quality score.

As part of our continuing efforts to improve the user experience, we will soon incorporate an additional factor into Quality Score: landing page load time. Load time is the amount of time it takes for a user to see the landing page after clicking an ad.

Why are we doing this?
Two reasons: first, users have the best experience when they don’t have to wait a long time for landing pages to load. Interstitial pages, multiple redirects, excessively slow servers, and other things that can increase load times only keep users from getting what they want: information about your business. Second, users are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt your conversion rate.

When are we making this change?
In the next few weeks, we will add load time evaluations to the Keyword Analysis page (we’ll notify you when they are available). You will then have one month to review your site and make necessary adjustments.

After the one month review period, this load time factor will be incorporated into your keywords’ Quality Scores. Keywords with landing pages that load very slowly may get lower Quality Scores (and thus higher minimum bids). Conversely, keywords with landing pages that load very quickly may get higher Quality Scores and lower minimum bids.

In my opinion, this won’t make any difference on a good affiliates campaign; in fact I think it will help give them a higher quality score. I’ve said it before that load time is a very important thing, not because it’s now a factor in quality score, but because it plays a big role in conversion rates. Some of the crappiest landing pages have the highest CTR because the image quality is simple and very low sized. This makes the page load lightning fast, we have to remember that some people are still in the stone age and have dial-up connections. You only have so long to capture a visitors attention, and seeing a blank page certainly skyrockets their chances of leaving before they give it a looooong chance to load up.

So upgrade your hosting if need be, make sure your images aren’t 10MB a piece, and start using GIFs or compressed JPEGs. Now will load time not only increase your click through rate and overall profit, it’ll help your quality score as well.

Popularity: 4% [?]

It seems like I’m not the only affiliate who’s been affected by Adwords going nuts on a ton of accounts. I logged in yesterday to see a lot of my search campaigns slapped with $5.00-10.00 minimum bids. They must have done a quality score update, because people are getting slapped left and right.

For example, I’ve had one campaign running since November, so about a solid 4 months. CTR has been 14% lifetime for that campaign overall, and my quality score was great 100% of the time with $0.02 minimum bids. Spending was about $2,700/day on that campaign. Landing page was fine, links, content, etc. it was a functional site. Does this deserved to be slapped? I didn’t think so, but apparently Google did. They went on a spree or something, because most of my search campaigns on personal AND corporate accounts got slapped. I’m sure once I call up Google they’ll hopefully be able to do something about it and remove the slap, but it seems like they did some default automated action to go in and jack up everybody’s bids. There’s a discussion going on about this at Wickedfire, so you and I aren’t the only ones that have been slapped. Here’s a quote from that thread :

truth been told. This was my best site. Over 100 pages of unique content, blog posts excluded,

And I have been slapped 980 degrees around.

It seems that even those with huge content sites are getting slapped as well.

Am I no longer an UberAffiliate and going broke? Haha nooo, my income has taken a slight to moderate temporary hit, but things will bounce back and my accounts will be running fine soon enough. It just goes to show to definitely not put all your eggs in one basket. If you were making your living on one Adwords search campaign and this happened, you’d have no bread money until it got fixed.

I do believe this was just one of the infamous Quality Score slaps, and it has something to do with my landing pages. I have some creative ideas on how to fix this issue so I don’t get slapped again, so I’ll be sharing them if they work out. My landing pages weren’t simple “bridge pages” with just a Continue button and no content, I had a lot of unique content, links, all that jazz. Kinda sucks though because I actually have to sit down and do some work, haha. I’ve been lazy though and busy with getting my house etc, so a good kick is what I needed.

Thank you Google.

Popularity: 4% [?]