Today is one of the days where I absolutely felt like crap after waking up. Granted I did stay up until 4 am working on a new site for Jeff and I. As usual I went thru my work-out routine and went for my morning jog which usually refreshes me. After taking a shower and sitting down at the command center, I started making my rounds but could not for the life of me engage in any comments or hardly any forum postings let alone want to start on the days productivity spread sheet. Sheesh!

I guess the morning work-out and jog is going to have to be revised into something harder. I started optimizing the home office a bit more (specifically the desktop) and here’s what I came up with. Currently I am still unsatisfied with the setup but at least I can run all communications off a separate machine now, which is vital considering the amount of gabbing I have been doing with affiliates, managers, network owners, entrepreneurs and marketers over the last couple of months.

A mess at first:

Popularity: 40% [?]

A lot has been covered with the 3 major search engines as of late with the CPA Marketing Series so like you, I feel as if even I may need to take a break even if it is just for a few days. We will resume the Series soon with other great places to advertise and even get into the web placement and email marketing side of things with CPA offers. For now I would like to talk about a question that was asked in the forum just awhile ago.

Whoopie: I have a shedload of ideas and things to try. Maybe it’s the AS and ADHD, but I’m having a *really* hard time pushing things through. I have … far too many ideas on the go at once, and I’m not covering all the bases I need to and therefore not seeing the results that I should. It’s not that things aren’t working, it’s that I can’t focus to push them to work even better - if that makes any sense.Anyone else have this? How have you dealt with it?

I and every other Entrepreneur/Marketer have and will experience this. This is just the nature of working online. I remember when I first started out it seemed like the only way to make money online was to write and ebook or promote one. Being online for 3+ years now, things could not be any farther from that. As a matter of fact, I’ve made my living by not even following that business model. It’s a good way (obviously for some) but not the “be all, end all”.

Here are my responses to questions asked regarding quality score. There was not too many of them. SWEET! Less work for me haha. Seriously though, check the PPC Section of the forum for more in-depth conversations.

MasterOf None: I understand that most of quality score is about having a quality site, but adgroup/keyword organization also affects things for sure. In light of this, what is the best way to structure your campaign?

Here are some thoughts I had, are any of these on the right track(assume I have a script to make all these easy)?

-One keyword to an adgroup, include keyword in ad
-Few keywords to an adgroup, include only very similar phrases
-Lots of keywords to an adgroup, but they all share a common word or two in the ad.

If I may go two for one with the questions, even if we have a quality site, should we/can we still utilize dynamic keyword insertion techniques to boost relevancy?

Personally since I use a lot of software and the Adwords Editor I tend to go for a lot of one keyword per adgroup type of campaigns. This requires contact with Google in getting the limits raised such as the 25 campaign limit and 50K keywords starting off. This also takes multiple accounts but so easy to track. If one adgroup is getting clicked on the so easy to scrub others that dont perform so well.

I stay away from adgroups with over 25 keywords if I am not doing singles. In my experience, it’s just not worth it. Spitting out landing pages per adgroup (keywords within) is the best way I have found to counter the QS.

Instead of repeating myself a bunch of times over a bunch of variations and things related to the Google Quality Score, I have decided to just take questions of it. I dont know it all, but I will do my best to answer your questions and try to provide some background and even my own experiences. So let’s here it! Just comment here and I will answer after we get a few going.

Popularity: 40% [?]

This post is probably going to sound similar to the Quality Score Rd 1. I feel I need to stretch this out even more from the number of emails I got about “quick fixes” with the Quality Score. First off, I have already covered that there is more than one quality score. At what point would it make any sense to start rattling off about ways to game the QS when in a month another update by Google would be made? I could sit here for months and go on about ways to counter each update but I am not going to. If taking the initiative to avoid Google Slaps in the first place is not your cup of tea, then I would be wasting my time trying to tell you after each update on how to fix everything. I would have to say that 99% of the marketers I speak to want to actually “play by the rules” so to speak. Everyone wants a quick fix or work-around. You are not going to get that here. As I have said before, if I did give you one, chances are there would be a ton of more problems go on in the future and it’s just not worth it….to either of us.

With that said, let’s talk about building and avoiding Google Slaps to begin with.

First off when you’re an Adwords advertiser this does not get you or your site into the good graces of Google’s natural search results. It does not matter how much money you spend, you cannot buy your way up the ladder. The only thing you might get from this is by having Google’s bot checking your ad and visiting your site and when it gets there, it finds content that it was not aware of. Big whoopie doo. If you build like me, then it’s a matter of pinging to let G know you got new content.

This can be one of the most frustrating aspects about Adwords, especially when first testing out offers just to find keywords that will bring you conversions. There is a lot that goes on in testing such as adding, pausing and even deleting. Everything you do INSIDE your account is monitored and a history is recorded with it. Now I have personally asked Google Reps about Account history and while they say that “account history DOES NOT directly affect your quality score”, they have said that “account history is VERY important to the success of your campaigns”. What a vague reply.

Here are some tips, findings and experiences I have had that helped my account history perform at its best.

Keywords that suck affect your ad groups. Pretty simple right there. The problem we face here though is whether to delete these keywords or try our ass off by making other adgroups and re-submitting them. Watching the performance of your keywords is one of the most important aspects of using PPC. With using Adwords, it’s pretty much a “make” or “break” situation. The better your performance history is with long running ACTIVE campaigns, the more likely your going to get breaks down the road from Adwords.

In my experience when you move keywords it has never had a negative impact on ANY of my accounts histories. For this matter alone, I recommend that you move keywords into different adgroups. As a matter of fact, I recommend that you move keywords around every now and then anyway. You should always be striving for better adgroups and keyword performance. Sure you may face bumps along the way but the more you use Adwords and get use to it and the more you strive to improve your adgroups and keywords, the more likely that your going to get a better performance across the board.

First and foremost you want to seek the advice from Google themselves. With that said the very definition that Google provides (which is very vague) of their Quality Score is here:

The components of Quality Score vary depending on whether it’s calculating minimum bid or ad position:

• Quality Score for minimum bidis determined by a keyword’s click-thru rate (CTR) on Google, the relevance of the keyword to its ad group, your landing page quality, your account’s historical performance, and other relevance factors.
• Quality Score for ad positionis determined by a keyword’s click-thru rate (CTR) on Google, the relevance of the keyword and ad to the search term, your account’s historical performance, and other relevance factors.

So now you may start to get a bigger picture about Quality Score. There is not just one you have to deal with but two. There may be more (according to the affiliate chatter) but those are myths so we are going to stick with what we know. Just realize that facing Google slaps can come from many angles. You need to recognize WHY you are getting slapped.

To keep from this and actually trim away the possibilities of being slapped or just getting good Quality Scores across the board, I have already pointed out that you should be building quality sites. Ever read an Adwords Ebook or been to another Affiliate’s blog to hear them talk about how they like to test offers with JUST a landing page instead of building a mini site around it? Well, in a sense that is true but the vital information that is most likely left out is that they already HAVE BUILT a high quality site that these pages are residing on. AHAH!

So what’s my take on building sites around CPA Offers?

Ahh well we’re here. Google Search. The Pain in the ass Quality Score. How do we beat it?

Let me start off by telling you that there are a multitude of factors that determine quality scores thru Adwords keyword search campaigns. A lot of people (marketers) are only wanting to hear “how do I beat the QS”, or “what’s the quick fix to get my campaign running again”. This is very tiresome to answer and lately, I’ve pretty much ignored the questions. The reason is this:

No matter how many freakin times the people who know say it, some people just cant comprehend it. Now I am not saying that I wont write about a few tricks I use to game Adwords because I am going to get to that soon enough. If you want the shortest, bluntest and most honest answer on how to get good quality scores, then it’s quite simple.

BUILD SOMETHING OF QUALITY

It’s that simple. The days of our shitty affiliate sites are coming to end. However as marketers we adjust and evolve. Personally been doing it for 3 years now with almost a year and a half exclusively online. I’ve literally gone from a page with 5 banners on it (yes I actually made money with this shit back in the day), to building sites made out of Wordpress with article directories and forums attached to them. In today’s world with Google: “He who adds the most user value..wins”.

In thinking of terms of beating the quality score you really have to open your mind. This is going to really require some deep thinking. In my experience you are going to need a few things and here are the most important ones: