All posts in Google Adwords

This goes along with what I posted about a few days ago – you can’t be afraid to lose some money initially. We know that Google factors CTR a lot into your quality score. So in the beginning (when your minimum bids haven’t been slapped yet), instead of bidding at your target bid prices and working on different ads with the best CTR, show Google that you’re the man! If you’re bidding for your target range, your ad may be in the #8 spot and a good CTR for you would be 1-2%. That’s not bad, but you may get slapped (unless your landing page is insane). While a 1-2% CTR would be nice in the low positions, CTR in the premium spots have for me been on average of 8%-20%. That’s a HUGE difference! Jack your bids up like crazy in the beginning and see that crazy CTR (you’ll be spending a ton too), and Google will reward you.

note : this tip is not for those who can’t afford to lose a lot of money initially. Your CTR is going to be sky high which means you’re going to get a lot more clicks that are all a lot more expensive. But this will give your campaign a crazy CTR which means the slap will have a much less (if not any) impact on you.

It’s easier to describe by example, so here’s an example of a campaign I launched a couple weeks ago. The landing page for this campaign started out very simple. No articles (just main page text), single page, no outbound links, no privacy policy or any of that. It was a very relevant page to the keywords though (domain, title, header tags, article), and did look awesome (low bounce rate which is also good for quality score). All my quality scores were great, with $0.05 or less minimum bids. So I bid $1.50 on this group of very short tail keywords that got a lot of volume. CTR started off at about 10% with my clicks coming in at about $1.25 a pop, average position was 1.5. At this point I have great quality score and a lot of volume, but I’m losing money. Over the next couple days, bid prices naturally fall to about $1.00. I dropped bids down to $1.25 – over the next couple days average CPC naturally fell to $0.80, average position still 1.5. A couple weeks later, my average CPC has dropped down to about $0.58, my average position is still the #1 spot and quality score is still great. Once it drops naturally below a certain point, I’ll just keep dropping bids lower and lower and lower, until I start to lose position.

Plus, getting huge volume also allows you to test things faster (ads, landing pages, everything) because you’ll compile data much quicker.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Some of the most common questions circling the affiliate realm are “how do I increase my quality score?” and “how do I increase my Adwords quality score?” Quality score is a changing game, a changing pain, and a formidable foe to tackle. The benefits of conquering it are worth it though, as you can transform and offer that’s actually losing money into one of your best offers. I think many things come into play when talking about landing page quality score (as one of the most overall important factors in quality score is CTR). I’m going to run through and describe a bunch of different tactics for making your landing page look more like a fully-blown website that Google will love. Google doesn’t want to see bridge pages any more, but actual websites. We can do our best to make our bridge pages look like websites, while still having the feel of a simple CTR landing page.

Note that all these tips aren’t things that have a gigantic impact on quality score, and some of you make think they’re completely useless. They certainly won’t hurt, so they’re all things to test with. These are in no particular order.

Domain Name

If you’re promoting a niche, buy a separate domain name for it. Don’t use a subdomain in one of your other sites (eg. www.britneyspearsfan.com/creditscore), take time to search for a nice domain. I try to keep my domains short (2 words), .com almost all the time (unless there’s a really nice keyworded .net), and user friendly. Remember these people think they’re clicking on a real website where they’ll find the solution to their search. Display URL also takes up 1/4 of your ad real estate, and can impact CTR. So make sure your keywords are in your domain in a non-awkward fashion.

When grouping keywords, I usually send the ads to different pages with those keywords in the domain. So if one of my adgroups is targeted to “dodge auto insurance quotes”, my domain would be www.AutoInsurance.com/dodge.php. This ads more relevancy to your page, and will make your page look completely relevant.

Content

Content is key…it’s what Google wants to see. They want to see a completely relevant site, and for that you need to have content. Now I know there’s always occurrences when the top landing pages for really popular keywords are just a straight up landing page, no content or fully blown site. It’s my impression that these sites are sort of grandfathered in from being in Google so long and having a HUGE long term CTR. These are the big boys that have been making big bucks for a while.

So for content, it’s really how much you want to test with. We’ll start at the actual main page content. Again this isn’t The End All Guide to Quality Score…this is how I do it and have success. I’ll group keywords very targeted, send them to a targeted page, and then write out a page with no keyword insertion. I’m always trying to look at it from the customers side, and what they see when they come to the site. If I were a typical searcher looking for a credit report, I’d go into Google and just throw a bunch of keywords in the search bar, something like “credit score report free experian score”. I’d click on an ad, and then the title of the site is “Get A Credit Score Report Free With Experian Score”. Now that’s exactly what I searched for, but I was just typing key terms in and it looks kind of weird. Some of the things that people search for are really weird, with phrasing and whatnot. So for that keyword, I’d probably send them to a page with the title of “Free Experian Credit Score and Report”. Throughout the page, I’d have the content rich (but not spammed) with “Experian credit report”, “Experian credit score”, etc. Some visitors do read the content and articles on your page. Some niches I have a decent percentage of visitors clicking affiliate links in the article text. So I always try to build the site first for the user, while still making it just as search-engine friendly.

Content I think also depends on the niche. On most niches I write the content like I mentioned. But on some niches like ringtones, just keyword spamming artist and song names in little gray text seems to get the job done. Ringtones you just want to get them in and out, no real pre-sale to be done there.

Now as far as site content. Google likes a lot of content, and they like a lot of updated content. Hmm…well…hmm…blog? I know some really huge affiliates who design their pages to have blogs with HUNDREDS of articles, always adding new unique articles. Most of my pages right now have about 20 unique articles, but even I am probably going to start upping it.

Tags Galore

Without spamming, you can use tags to your advantage in upping your quality score. I place h1 tags near the top of my pages, with keyword-rich (but not always…user…user…user) h2 and h3 tags. Although almost useless, my meta tags have the keywords in them. My images all have alt tags that include keywords and descriptions. Title tags are very important, they should be relevant but user-friendly.

Image Names

My image names aren’t “index_01.gif” and the such, I name my images in line with my content. My header image will be named “auto_insurance_quotes.gif”, as well as other images on the page. Since your content is going to be relevant but not spammy, when Google crawls the page they will see nothing but information on your keyword.

Inbound and Outbound Links

When I start up a new niche and landing page, I usually order bout 1,000-1,500 directory submissions for that URL. I also link to various “strong” resource pages (just search Google for your niche and link to the top organic listings). This way, my site has a lot of links coming in, and relevant links going out as well. You can also do things like buy text links on other relevant sites, so all your links won’t be just from directories.

Sitemap

Get a Google sitemap for your page. This makes Google’s job in indexing your page easier and better. There’s a bunch of free sitemap generators out there, just search the net and you’ll find one.

Footer Links

Footer links are very important in your landing page, because they show the search engine that your page has a certain trust to it. Links to put in your footer may include : Terms and Conditions, Privacy Policy, About Us, Contact, Resources, Sitemap. I actually have a little footer “package” I just always upload to my pages. Since I’m a nice guy like that, I’ve zipped up that folder and will be giving it to you guys. Nothing special, just the links package and the code to insert into your footer and {head} tags. It’s a simple script that just makes those items pop up in a new smaller window.

Download package.

Wrap Up

The points I listed are certainly not everything you can do for quality score, but are the main points I like to focus on and test. There are some other neat PHP tricks to make your page look more targeted and updated, but perhaps I’ll save those for another day. I hope you learned at least 1 thing from this article, if you’re already an uber affiliate then maybe not. If there’s anything really obvious I missed, just drop a comment and let me know. Also I’m sorry if any of it doesn’t make sense, my brain is still jumbled and aching from this crazy past week with Facebook, etc.

Popularity: 7% [?]