• It’s not really some super-secret hack, just utilizing something most Yahoo users have access to.
• It deals with the campaigns that either are random non-related keywords (like for ringtones), or campaigns where even though your quality score should be great, Yahoo slaps a nice “you suck” on it with 1 or 2 bars.
• You need a Gold account for this.

Okay already, now what is it?

Like I said I’ve been doing this for quite some time, as I got into Yahoo Search Marketing long before I attempted Adwords. What I noticed was, whenever I started a new campaign, I got a ridiculous amount of traffic for the first couple days, and then every day after that I got emails from Yahoo saying (this is a cut and paste out of one I got today) :

Dear Advertiser

Ads and/or keywords you submitted for account ‘My Account’ [xxxxxxxxxx] were reviewed to ensure that they comply with the Editorial Guidelines.

Keyword results:
Pending: 8
Declined: 0
Removed: 10

Note that this was my ringtone campaign where the keywords weren’t related to ringtones. Every day Yahoo took away 10-20 keywords, and these were keywords that were converting. My ads all had 1-2 bars in quality score, but I was still getting decent position because of the no competition. But over time, my accounts started to die because 1/2 the keywords had been removed by Yahoo. After even more time, Yahoo introduced it’s “Low Quality Ads” thing, where if you have too many, Yahoo turns off the entire campaign. And in an account where there’s 100+ “low quality ads”…yeah it got shut down.

So I got thinking, “Hmm…you get a really nice traffic burst when you first create the campaign, then it dies after a couple days.” This is because Yahoo throws your ad up nice and high to test out how it’s going to do. Then they calculate your quality score and if it’s low (which happens most of the time because their QS is whacked), your position drops and they start removing keywords. This is where your Gold account comes into play.

With a Gold account, you’re given the feature of importing .csv files. On a quick note about getting a gold account, you have to spend $500 in 3 months, or $1,500 in 1 month to get one. You can call and whine about it but they’re usually pretty stingy. So do what you can to get a Gold account. Now for the secret. What I did was download my campaign and open it up in Excel. I turned all the keywords back to “On” (as the status for a lot change to ‘Deleted’), changed the campaign start date to today, and then messed around with any bids that I wanted to using a simple find+replace. Then I deleted my campaign from Yahoo and reuploaded it. Voila, I was seeing that nice traffic burst again. Two days later comes and it dies. Delete that campaign, change the start date in your import file, and reupload. So it’s not really beating their quality score, more of getting around it since you’re going to be deleting your campaign before it even has time to calculate it.

I’m sure it’s easy to automate just changing the date and reuploading, but it takes literally 30 seconds to do. So for an extra few hundred bucks a day, it was well worth it. Feel free to quote me on this :

“Affiliate Marketing Problems : if you can’t beat them, get around them.”

Hope you can make some good use of this if your campaigns keep getting slapped. I was able to get more traffic for a cheaper cost, so it really helped some of my stuff. Look what you guys have done to me, making me start to give away secrets…

I have Account A – my personal and oldest Adwords account. I’ve had it for about a year now, it’s my oldest account and I’ve done the most testing in it. Overall CTR has been BAD before in this account (as I made plenty of noobie mistakes in it), but I’ve spent a good amount of cash in it. I’d put the overall account CTR (for search) at about 1%, not the best.

I also have Account B – an account for a company I own. This Adwords account is very new, just barely 2 months old. Although it is a much higher quality account. I’ve spent about the same as in my personal account A, and my overall CTR is around 8-10%.

 
Here’s where the fun comes in. I threw up a new campaign for business cards (not really a niche I do heavily right now, but I have a landing page for it) in account A and bid on just the very top keywords. I then put that exact same campaign into my corporate account B. Same keywords, landing page, ad copy, bid prices. Here are the results :

Account A – 1 Year Old Account

Account B – 2 Month Old Account

As you can see, there’s a VERY nice difference between the accounts here. Account B has great quality scores and minimum bids $0.26 cheaper. With my $2.00 bid, ads for Account A would show up on the 2nd and 3rd page of search results, while Account B’s ads would show up at the top of page 1.

From this test, we can conclude that a more “productive” account in Google’s eyes will start you off with lower bids and better quality score. Account age isn’t everything, even with an account with an ok CTR and decent spending history.

Why is this post useful?

If you’re thinking “ok great…so how will this help me?”, well it may help you. If you have an account that’s really old but have had some bad quality and CTR on it in the past, it’s probably better just to start with a new fresh account instead of staying with your current one thinking that the bids will stay good because of the account age. In my case, my personal account will be used no more and if I wanted to run any more campaigns on it, I’d start fresh with a new account.

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.

Example A

I have 1 campaign that gets a lot of impressions and horrible click-through rate (about 0.15%). It’s one of the ringtone campaigns I talked about a few days ago. The keywords aren’t relevant to the ads at all, they’re not relevant to the landing page at all, and my quality score is 3/5 on them. I have another campaign that gets good volume. The keywords are relevant to the ad as well as the landing page, and the overall CTR is greater than 2%. Quality score is 3/5 on that campaign. Does this make sense? Uh, no…

Example B

I just started a new campaign a couple days ago. Ad group 1 is kind of a broad target, it gets more volume and the CTR so far is about 2.2%. The quality score on my ads is 4/5. Ad group 2 is very tightly targeted, gets less volume, and the CTR is 30%. The quality score on those ads is 3/5 bars.

Completely confused again, I decide to call Yahoo and have a nice little chat with them…

I explain my situation and examples, and after a little mumbo-jumbo, the rep says “I’m actually still trying to figure out their quality index myself…”. Later on in the conversation he says again “yeah, but right now how quality score is calculated is still pretty unknown.” Not even YSM employees know how quality score is calculated! He told me it takes into account :

-keyword relevancy in the ad
-historical data
-CTR

But didn’t really know how they factored each one in. From my best experience I’d say they weight it by :

-CTR (although even that’s shaky with the most recent example)
-keyword relevancy (keyword insertion in the title is almost guaranteed at least 4/5 for me)

Historical data doesn’t seem to make much sense as I’ve had that crappy ringtone campaign running for 7 months and the CTR is always awful.

What can we take from this? Don’t think you’re doing something wrong when Yahoo slaps your ads with a mediocre quality score, and don’t think you’re doing something right when some ads have a good quality score.

Dear Yahoo,

Give us some answers!

Love,
Concerned Marketer

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.