Just when you think you have all the inner workings of Adwords and quality score down cold, they go and surprise you. None of us are immune from the apparent wrath of the Google slap, as I found out with one of my most solid campaigns. This particular group of campaigns was structured really well, good CTR, optimized ads, relevant landing pages – all the stuff you are supposed to do. Google let it run for 7 months and I thought we had a happy relationship going, but then 3 days ago - boom, $10 bids for everything. I have contacted Adwords, and am still waiting for a response. (perhaps this campaign is also too targeted?) I just kind of find it sad that Google would let something run so long, and take so much of my money, then basically tell me to get lost. It makes me long for the old days of brick and mortar business where you actually had a relationship with suppliers and vendors, and business had thing called loyalty to their customers. Of course my measly $75k is nothing to big G, and wouldn’t even register a blip on their radar. Oh well, just more to spend with Yahoo and MSN.

This will be the start of a new series of posts as I try to recover the campaign from the smackdown. It should be interesting for both reader and author

One of the big weaknesses of Yahoo and MSN’s PPC interfaces is their lack of offline editors to build a campaign. Fortunately you can build all your campaigns with the Google Adwords editor, then export those results. From all the tools I have tried, the Adwords editor is the fastest way to build up a campaign, so I start every campaign there, regardless of where it will end up. It’s pretty simple to do, but there are a few things to watch out for.

Google:

Once you build your campaign the first step is to export it as a CSV file. Once you have the CSV file, you are ready to import it.

Yahoo:

To get a Google Adwords CSV file into Yahoo you first have to convert it. I believe you need a Gold account to use this tool, but it’s not hard to get one. Simply point it to your file and click “convert”

Once you have the converted file, there may be some formatting issues. First check to make sure the program joined the 2 line Google ad text into the 1 line Yahoo format correctly. Then search/replace the content matching column from on to off. Once everything looks good you can upload the converted file.

Once imported, set your GEO targeting and other options and you are ready to go.

MSN:

For MSN, no conversion is required. Just point to your Google CSV file and choose import.

MSN magically converts your file and uploads the new campaign. But now you have a big problem. MSN imports the new campaign with all the adgroups inactive. You then have to manually go and active each adgroup. If you have a large number of adgroups (like you should) this is a huge task. I have talked with the MSN people and they say they are working on a solution, but for now it’s a manual process. This makes the MSN import process the hardest by far. But it is still much faster to build the campaign with the Adwords editor and import, than it would be to build the campaign in MSN itself.

I have recently launched a big campaign on Adwords. To my surprise, my bids instantly went to $10 after uploading the campaign. Now this wasn’t some junk campaign with a million keywords in one adgroup, and a shady redirect landing page. This was a super tight campaign with no more than 3 keywords per adgroup, and each adgroup sent to a highly targeted landing page. So naturally I requested a manual review from Adwords support. I never expected the response I got.

First they gave the standard quality score stock answer, but then I quote:

“Additionally, when I was reviewing your account, I found that your keywords are highly relevant to your products and/or services. However, your keywords may be too specific. We’ve found that Google users are less likely to search for highly specific keywords. They’re more likely to search for a commonly used term. “

WTF? My kewords are “too specific”? You want me to use general search terms, that aren’t so targeted? This really goes against everything they have ever put out about their quality score and their desire to provide the most targeted and relevant results to their users. To further confuse the issue, they go on to say:

“Although specific keywords are usually better than general ones, a keyword list that’s too small or specific can limit your ad exposure. Showing your ad to your entire target audience can help improve your ROI and campaign performance.”

OK, so what I submitted is usually better, but for some reason it’s not in this case? Apparently Google no longer wants advertisers going after anything but short tail keywords. This exchange is just another reason why I prefer YSM or even MSN to Adwords these days.

Ok, this title may be a little misleading. You aren’t really gaming the quality score by following these tips, you are just working with their system and giving Google what it wants. You may have heard some of these, or they may be new to you - but I can personally vouch for the fact that these methods work. Without further ado here are 4 techniques to acheive that high quality score:

1. The “player” approach. It’s hard to get a good CTR and quality score with low bids. So when you start a brand new campaign, come in with a high max CPC. Higher than you normally would run the campaign. It may cost you, but it should help your initial CTR and allow you to snag a good score. Then you can back the bids down slowly.

2. Adgroup structure. Put all your keywords into adgroups with common semantic meaning. Google will see this similarity and reward the group with a high QS. Don’t allow poorly related keywords to creep into your adgroups. Keep the number of keywords as low as possible in each adgroup.

3. Clearing bad results. Sometimes despite all your best efforts, you will experience the Google slap and your bids will shoot to $10. When this happens its time to clear these results away. Delete all keywords, ads, ad groups. Make a change to your landing page that the Google bot will see. Wait 20 minutes. Rebuild the campaign in the reverse order than you deleted. Hopefully, this will bring your bids back down.

4. Super relevant landing pages. This is probably the best way to affect QS. Make every landing page relevant to every keyword. Google loves to see the exact keyword used in the search on the landing page. There are several PHP based ways to capture the search and display it on the page. When Google sees super relevancy, they reward it with super quality score.

This may have slipped underneath many people’s radars recently, but you can now bid CPC for Google placements on the content network. Let me repeat that, you can now bid CPC for placements on the content network! To me, this is one of the biggest developments with Adwords in the last year. It totally re-writes the playbook of how to use the content network. Rather than using the rifle approach, where you have to narrowly target certain sites after randomly finding them with keyword campaigns, you can use the shotgun approach, and blast your ad everywhere to see what sticks. You can essentially use Google’s content network like you would Adbrite’s. With the old CPM model it was necessary to carefully choose the site’s you targeted, which made finding high converting sites difficult and time consuming. But with CPC bidding, you can be far more loose with sites you choose to target.

Not only do you have all these advantages, but you can have a placement campaign up and running in 5 minutes with almost no research time. Write a couple ads, select your placements, and your good to go.  Using one of the 4 targeting options they provide, you can quickly generate a huge list of sites to run your ad on.  The more offers you can quickly prospect, the better chances you will hit on something. Then you can further expand the offer with a keyword targeted campaign or other techniques. Now you can see why I find this so important.

Does it work? Yes! I have been rocking placements for all they are worth ever since the CPC bids came out a few weeks ago. I was tempted to not blog about it, but big G’s content network is big enough where there is room for all of us. So jump in and give it a try. If you want to know how to set up one of these campaigns , see this Adsense tip post I did last week which gives most of the steps. Have fun!

I was talking with a client whose online advertising campaign I have managed for a while. When explaining all the inherent difficulties keeping ads running on Google Adwords (quality score, keywords going inactive, etc) he asked “do we really need to use Google then?” I thought this was an interesting question and wasn’t sure how to respond to it. In fact, I kept thinking about it long after the conversation. Everyone has different goals and objectives with their PPC ads, but I finally concluded that for me, the answer was no. While I would never want to voluntarily stop using them, I didn’t necessarily need them.

Could I survive, even thrive without using Adwords at all? Absolutely. In fact, I’m pretty sure that if it came down to it, I could make a nice affiliate living with any 1 of the big 3 PPC engines by itself. Putting all your eggs in the same basket is never good. Even with Google’s domination of the market, they don’t own all the clicks in search. In fact, when you combine MSN and Yahoo into one category, it’s a big enough volume to rival Google in some niches.

Each PPC engine is unique in its traffic, ad CTRs, and ultimately conversion rates, so you really need to become an expert in all of them to gain maximum advantage in this game. That’s not even to mention all the 2^nd tier engines out there. So if you told me I could never run another Adwords ad, I would have to scramble for sure, but I’m confident that I could make it without Google.

With a PPC text ad, 4 lines are all you get to make your impression. Yet most people give little thought to the display URL, which is 25% of your ad’s real estate. The display URL should be a major concern when writing your ad. I would venture to say that it’s more important that your description even.

Buy a new domain:
This is one place not to cheap out and try to save a few bucks by using a bad domain name. Go ahead and register a new one, or even multiple new ones to test a new offer. Using an old domain that you had lying around, that kind of fits the offer is a recipe for failure. Besides, 1 conversion could recoup the domain cost for a year.

Buy a good domain:
For some reason I don’t have any trouble finding good domains. I never buy .NETs or .ORGs, only .COMS. I hardly ever use hyphens or weird punctuation either. Remember, you are buying the domain to instill confidence in the searcher, not for SEO purposes. Obviously, the shorter the better, but multiple related words are better than punctuation I find.

Test display URLs

I like to run multiple ad copies in Google with the only difference being the display URLs. I have seen big changes in CTR from various URLs tested. Once you find the best converting URL you can switch everything over to that URL.

There is a lot of buzz out there about Google’s new PPA (Pay-Per-Action) ads which are currently in beta. I will post my views of the service after I have had a few more weeks to see the real world results, but until then, here is a step by step guide of how to set up a PPA advertising campaign on Google. There are 14 steps and screenshots in total.

1. First step is to create your action and setup conversion tracking. By going into the conversion tracking section and choosing “Create New Action”.

(Click images to see full size)

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