Strategic Marketing At Warp Speed

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:

This can be one of the easiest ways to get cheap clicks in Google. However with Placement Targeted Campaigns thru Adwords, this can also be one of the most frustrating campaigns you may ever put up. There is just not a lot of information out there to help with questions on Placement Targeting. Personally, I have a three ring binder that looks like it’s been thrown in a swimming pool 3 or 4 times. This notebook contains successes and TONS of failures. Most of the stories you here are of people totally getting their asses handed to them with Placement Targeting. I know I have. With that though, I’ve become better educated and learned to speed up the research process to test out pages to specifically advertise on.

Placement Targeted Campaigns were originally created by Google to allow you to advertise specifically on sites in the content network. It gave you full power to pick where you wanted to advertise. It also charged you on a CPM basis (per 1000 impressions). Since then, the placement targeted campaigns haveevolved into something even better. You can now target individual webpages on sites as well as pay cost per click instead of CPM.

My Tips

1. I hardly ever advertise on sites specifically. I have only found a few rare instances where this worked. There are just too many variables to consider. Some of these sites may receive 100K uniques a day, and if your paying on a CPM basis, you can burn thru your budget quick.
2. I never paid cost per click. I always paid on a CPM basis. I have tried paying on a cost per click basis and never have I gotten my ads to run. I have no idea why. I’ve spent countless phone calls with Adwords Reps and never once got a solid answer or even enough information to help me in any way.

There really is nothing special or different about Adcenter in terms of using keywords to drive traffic via pay per click. However one of the toughest things I have found is that while I like to soak up some misspelling and typo traffic, aside from using domain variations, it’s quite a ride trying to keep misspelled words and typos active with MSN. The MSN bot is generally sent out to crawl your pages after you get your campaign up and I can tell you from previous experience that this is not always a pleasant experience. I really dont know what the hell is going on over there in terms of bots, indexing and rankings. Generally back in the splogging days all I had to do was put up a blogger blog with a few trackbacks or blog comments and VOILA! The rankings fell from the heaven. Also I had always found that if I actually made more than one post on these blogs I would rank well in MSN for related keywords. Today however, I dont think that it could be any further from that and I actually HARDLY pay attention to the SEO side of things with MSN.

With that said it gives you a little idea of how erratic their crawling bot can be. Seriously, I’ve seen campaigns generated with SpeedPPC targeting one keyword per landing page. I’ve generated hundreds of keywords/landing pages centered around certain industries with offers only to have them ALL go down before. This situation has happened more than once to me and while it was a hassle to call them up, a campaign built with landing pages centered around 1 keyword is the easiest thing to get reinstated. While it’s a bit more work than the norm, this is generally how I like to do things granted I have the times and tools to do it.

Finally back and ready to go. Fortunately we get to talk about a potentially really cheap source of paid traffic but on the other hand we are going to deal with a company that hires some of the dumbest most unknowledgeable people to help act as their PPC “specialists”. In case you are wondering, here is one of the conversations I have had with a MSN Adcenter Rep awhile back. So to answer a lot of questions that have already been asked, YES, keyword stuffing FTW on Adcenter. Now I am not saying to go stuff thousands of keywords on a landing page and expect the approved keywords to fall from the heaven. Shit dont work that way. It might work here and there but for the most part that is a really lazy to try and do shit and you’re likely to burn a lot of budget. Now having a landing page relevant to say 50 keywords at a time? You bet your ass. Ruckles loves doing this to MSN. Especially at the speed you can spit landing pages out…or at least the speed I can.

Dont abuse the fact that you can game Adcenter with keyword stuffing. Their bot is a sensitive little prick, their staff is normally slow, and their “specialist” whom you will be calling are as fast as snails. Relevancy is still key with MSN with a touch of “we know how to game you easy”. MSN Adcenter is really secretive about their Relevancy Formula. Of course we can figure that your Bids and CTR play important roles in the formula but everything else is very foreign. As a matter of fact, from what I have seen for quite awhile now is that nobody over there really knows anything about it either. I only say this because I get the same ole stuttering “I have sausage in my mouth and cant speak right” type of responses. You should always appeal any keywords that get disapproved. I highly suggest that you call them. You get to experience how bright their specialists are first hand. Sometimes you can literally run circles around them while at other times you may think about putting a loaded gun in your mouth. It’s a crap-shoot but you should appeal anyway.