If you use Google AdWords, nothing is more frustrating than having your minimum bids being jacked up to some crazy amount which makes it impossible to profit. In our industry, this is known as Google Slap. Notice that the ones who always suffer from it seems to be affiliate marketers.
Before you throw your arms up in total frustration, let me clarify that Google is NOT against affiliates. What they want is to show the most relevant search results for their users. Understanding their purpose & making some small changes based on that will help you overcome Google Slaps once & for all!
1. Relevance & Quality
The sole purpose of the existence of Google is that they want to offer the highest quality search results. This is also the reason why they were able to beat other search engines to grab the biggest market share in terms of search.
What they want from their results, (both organic & AdWords) is relevance & high quality content. How exactly they define it, it is not easy to explain, the best I can do is to share what works for me time & again.
2. Harsh Reality
You were slapped by Google because the quality of your content on your website is not good enough in the eyes of Google. Alright, that sounds harsh, then again, I do not want to sugar coat stuff & pretend to make everything sound like a bed of roses.
AdWords have their set of best practices, just follow them & your quality score will be good & it will result in you being able to get lower minimum bids. If you want to use their system, follow their rules, simple?
3. The Most Horrid Mistake
Dumping a huge list of keywords into a single adgroup is the most horrid mistake that most beginners do, this might be the main reason why your bids get jacked up so high.
Just think about it, how can a few hundred keywords be related to each other? Take time & split your keywords into smaller groups. Maybe under 15 or 20 keywords per adgroup & all the keywords must be within the same theme.
4. Improving Quality Score
High Quality Score = Low Cost Per Click (& Low Minimum Bid)
Getting a lower cost per click & a lower minimum bid is the main reason why you want to take some time to improve your quality score. This small little improvement will surely improve your bottom line.
Improving your quality score is simple, first of all make sure the keywords in your adgroup are all related to each other & they should all fall within the same category or same theme.
Having lesser keywords in each adgroup will allow you to accurately match your keywords with your ads, which will help you appear more relevant & at the same time increase click through rate of your ads.
Dynamic Keyword Insertion: this is a very useful tactic & you may want to check out this article by Google.
5. Improving Landing Pages
Keywords
On your landing pages, add your keywords in your title tags, meta tags, meta description, H1 tags & headline. This sounds like on-page SEO & it does help a lot in your quality score. Sprinkle the keywords naturally instead of stuffing them all over.
I use WordPress for my landing pages because it is easy to add keywords into my title tags, meta tags, meta description, H1 tags & headline. It is also very easy to add additional pages.
Admin Links
To make your site more credible, you should have a few administrative links such as privacy policy & contact page. This is part of the requirement of Google & since it only takes very little time to add them, why not.
Images
If you have images which are NOT totally relevant to your page, such as guarantee seal, order button & such stuff, you need to rename them with numbers. Most people will name their order button as order-button.jpg, you should name it as a123.jpg or 123.jpg or something like that.
For relevant images, name them with your keywords. Maybe your offer is an accounting software, you can name your image as accounting-software.jpg or name-of-accounting-software.jpg or your-keyword.jpg. You get the idea.
You can also put your keywords in the alt text of your images. Once again, do this naturally, instead of keyword spamming.
Incoming Links
Some people say that having some incoming links to your landing pages would also help, however, I do have some landing pages without a single incoming link yet my quality score is still very good.
Yahoo & MSN
Use Yahoo & MSN pay-per-click! I used to think that there are a lot less traffic with Yahoo & MSN, however, if you add more keywords, you end up getting more traffic. Also, there is less competition compared to Google therefore the clicks cost lesser.
Best of all, they are so much more forgiving than Google AdWords & you can get away with some mistakes like adding many keywords in a single campaign! You can even get away with direct linking most of the time! No kidding!
At least for now, we can still get away with all these stuff, just remember that things will change in future, it is just a matter of time before Yahoo & MSN become as strict as Google. Therefore, take advantage while you still can.
Do not just take my word for it. Try it for yourself. You will be pleasantly surprised.
Conclusion
Now that you understand how Google works, how you can follow their best practices & end up being totally unaffected by any slap. As simple as it seems, all you need is just a few small changes & you will be alright.
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