When the first Google quality slap went out in July 2006, affiliates quickly figured out that adding article content to their domain and linking to it via a “resources” link or similar at the bottom of their landing pages was seemingly what Google wanted.

The one constant with Quality Score since then however is that nothing is staying the same.  So does packing in the article content still matter?  Many advertisers say that they now rarely add anything more than a contact us and privacy policy link at bottom of their landing pages and manage to get along just fine QS-wise.

Here’s my take:  When you’re first starting in a new niche with a brand new domain, yes, content matters.  Obviously, Google is familiar with landing page best practices, and doesn’t expect their big agency advertisers’ clients to send their clicks to article pages only.  Every big agency client or vendor advertiser (that Google is working so hard to attract) also has a core domain for their business with lots of content, most likely their corporate site or product catalogue.  With that domain content as a solid foundation, Google lets the advertiser send their Adwords traffic to tightly focused landing pages.

My experience with affiliates has been similar…to a point.  If the affiliate’s core domain has plenty of quality, on-topic articles, you’ll get enough leash from Google to be able to branch out in landing pages with very little other than sales copy and other conversion elements.

There is one danger for affiliates though:  If you’re promoting the same product as 25 different affiliates and don’t have a unique look or style to your landing pages, you might not pass a manual review.  When you think about it, yes Google has a ‘no-double serving’ policy, but lately that’s been getting enforced as more than just a way to keep the paid SERPs from being loaded with the ads from the same URL.  It’s also been applied recently to swaths of affiliate pages that show up in the same paid SERPs that look too close to each other, such that the customer might feel that even though the domain names are technically different, they are ending up at the same landing page again and again as they click back and forth through the paid results.

Moral of the story is to always start out with a solid value-add content base on your affiliate domain, and then test the waters as to how much leash you have to use shorter, more tightly arranged landing pages.

If you’re like most affiliates, you’ve got a ba-gillion ideas rattling around in your head:

• Things you see others doing that you could take to the next level,
• Cool ideas that are mostly unrelated to what you do day-to-day,
• Even stuff that’s way out in left field.

Here’s the thing though: most full-time affiliates who have been successful for a decent amount of time will tell you that it a) gets boring (yes: it’s boring to make millions in your basement over extended periods of time:) and b) you start to become internally focused, ending up with a limited, myopic worldview.

I used to wonder why genuinely successful affiliate marketers would sink themselves into some comparatively low-margin side project rather than just continually replicating their proven methods. Here’s the big secret though: People, at a basic level need more than just financial security/excess. Maslow’s Theory of the Hierarchy of Human Needs bears out that ‘Esteem’ or recognition from others and self confidence are actually more important to people than ‘Safety’, which includes financial security.

For some affiliates, the secrecy required to maintain niche dominance makes recognition from others of their ‘affiliate awesomeness’ and achievements out of the question. Their neighbors only know they’re “on the internet” somehow, doing who knows what. So, many affiliates take on some of those not-directly-relevant side projects or ideas to stretch their creative wings, recharge, and maybe get a little nod from their peers.

So, yes, staying focused on the basics of keeping your cashflow going is important, but once that base is adequately covered, trying your hand at one of those potentially less profitable projects so you stay sane (and hopefully grow as an entrepreneur) is totally reasonable. You may even learn some things that increase your core marketing business over the long term!

For Content Network advertisers, placement reports were a God-send when they were first released, finally providing visibility into where Google was placing your ads. Since then, they’ve added some awesome site-exclusion capabilities, allowing you to block your ads from showing on everything from image sharing websites to parked domains and forums.

Here’s what I think are the most important reasons to run a placement report at least twice a month on your content-only campaigns:

• Get rid of sites sending you garbage traffic. This used to be just MFA sites, but now includes the social networking sites we’ve all come to realize aren’t exactly a gold-mine…
• Get rid of irrelevant sites ruining your overall campaign CTR and Quality Score. Tens of thousands of impressions or more and no clicks? Gun them.
• Find out which sites have the best-converting traffic. Check those sites out and then bid on their domain name as a search keyword:)
• Get ideas for negative keywords. Look at the worst of the worst in terms of irrelevant traffic on your placement report and check the sites out. Try to see what keywords might have caused Google to mistakenly place you there. Once you see how it could have happened, turn those words or phrases into campaign-wide negatives.

One great way to sort and analyze a placement report is like this:

1. Sort the entire report by the ‘clicks’ column. This way you’ll see what sites send you the most clicks and be able to quickly evaluate if there’s a serious dud in the mix, toileting your conversion rate.
2. Next, sort by the number of conversions. Sorting by conversion rate won’t be that helpful as many sites have 100% conversion rates based on 1-hit, 1-sale. Get an idea of which sites are sending the money traffic, look at the adgroup that’s putting your ad there, and bid up to make sure you stay on that site.
3. Now, sort by impressions. Look for sites sending TONS of traffic with no clicks or conversions. Add these to your campaign negative sites to ensure they don’t ruin your campaign’s overall CTR

How do you use your placement reports?

I’m off to sunny San Diego for some R&R the the week of April 7th, so I thought I’d share the bookmarks I make a point of visiting every day (some work related, some not so much:) Enjoy!

Google’s Inside Adwords (Gotta keep up with the man…)

Zenhabits.net(My daily reminder to simplify)

SEOBook Blog (Aaron’s posts are always worth keeping up on…)

Matt Cutts’ Blog (More keeping up with the man….)

Andrew Wee (Reminds me not everyone pays for traffic…lol)

Jonathan Volk (This is one of the ‘meatier’ affiliate blogs)

Earner’s Blog (Stu is the man, just wish he posted a bit more…too busy making money instead of just talking about it…)

MacRumors.com (I’m a Mac addict, I hate myself for being such a sheep but I just can’t look away….)

QuickSprout.com (Neil Patel’s personal branding blog)

SuperAffiliateMindset.com (My buddy Amit:)

Valleywag.com (I love Gawker’s trashy blogs, especially when they cover web 2.0)

Traffick.com (Andrew literally wrote the book on Adwords)

Fake Steve Jobs Blog (More Mac silliness, but really funnny)

Shoemoney (I pretty much just read this one for industry gossip)

And of course, some news…. (Huffington Post - Drupal CMS at its best)

Back at it April 15th!

I saw this thread about Google slaps last night and thought this post stuck out as interesting:

Here is how I recovered from a $10.00 Quality Score!

We run a campaign that has a similar daily spend and has over 1200 keywords. We have been “slapped” with a minimum bid of $5-10 CPC on hundreds of our over the past few months.

After doing a bit of research on the issue I was not able to find concrete evidence that the issue was not a “glitch” in the Adwords system.

This is what I did to resolve the issue.

In Adwords Editor, I copied all the keywords that had the higher minimum bids into a 2nd version of the same exact campaign that only had adgroups with the slapped words in it. I then deleted the words from the original campaign, posted the changes, waited a half hour, then posted the new campaigns with the slapped keywords.

Viola! No more high minimum CPC’s. This has works for a period of time until SOME of those words get slapped again. I do the same, and create a version3 campaign.

I have not had to do this for a while now as it seems as though our keywords have not been slapped again.

FYI, in the secondary and third duplicate campaigns that only have the slapped words in them, I use the same exact campaign, adgroup, adtext, landing pages, etc.

My conclusion, is that it can be glitch in the system as well as it can also be “true” poor quality scores that are triggering this to happen. In our case, without knowing the full QS algorithm, we did not deserve the higher min cpc. So I just was persistent to getting the words showing up. But if you are have experience with Adwords and their guidelines, you should be able to see whether your landing pages and kw’s are relevant enough for the ads.

One last thing. I do see more long tail “slapped” words then 2-3 keyword and key phrases, in my alternate campaigns.

You can view the whole thread here

Google has announced that likely starting in April, they will be applying ‘landing page load time’ to the list of keyword-level Quality Score rating factors.

Affiliates (and all advertisers) using the following ‘load time inhibitors’ will be assessed low keyword Quality Scores:

Here are some tips for improving your load time:

• Use fewer redirects.
• Reduce the page size by using fewer, smaller, and more highly-compressed images.
• Do not use interstitial pages.
• Minimize the use of iframes on your landing page.

It should be pretty clear that NOW is the time to be improving the loading speed of your landing pages. Here’s a couple of great page load analysis tools to point out any weaknesses your load times may be suffering from:

Landing Page Load Time Calculator from WebsiteOptimization.com

Yahoo Firebug (Firefox Addon) Plugin

Of course, for the test to be meaningful, use the same destination URL you use in your Google ads.

Late last week, Matthew, RevenueWire’s Security & Privacy Analyst, volunteered to create a privacy policy template for use by our blog readers and of course, RevenueWire affiliates.

You can download the Free Privacy Policy Template here

A couple of notes on the use of a privacy policy on your affiliate website or landing page:

• Be sure to personalize the template for your particular site (there are a few bracketed areas that should be customized for each individual website …. Don’t just cut-and-paste the whole thing without customizing
  
• Take out any sections that you don’t feel apply to your particular site
• Don’t worry about duplicate content if you use this template, Google just wants to make sure you have a privacy policy on your site (for quality score reasons), they’re not indexing the content for searchers.

Thanks again Matt!

I posed a question to one of my contacts at Adwords about why Google’s conversion count is often lower than those reported by the affiliate network.

This was an interesting tidbit from the reply:

Google AdWords conversion tracking only reports conversions
that occur within 30 days of an ad click. If a customer converts after the
30 days have passed, we don’t report that conversion. When viewing
conversions for a specified time period, note that conversions are
assigned to the date on which the ad click occurs, not the date on which
the conversion occurs.

I haven’t checked to see if this has been documented in the Adwords Help Center anywhere (I’m lazy), but there’s a couple interesting things here:

If your sale/action is over 30 days past the date of the ad click, it’s never going to show up in Adwords. This effectively means that your cost per conversion amounts in Adwords are likely going to be inaccurate beyond the 30 day mark. Not a huge deal if you’re used to getting sales or actions pretty much right away after the ad is clicked, but on the RevenueWire affiliate network for instance, 9.6% of all digital download and software sales come in after 30 days has elapsed. That means that on average you’ll need to factor in a 9-10% margin of error into your cost per conversion amounts for reports extending more than 30 days out.

The other thing I didn’t realize is that conversions showing up today are for the original date the ad was clicked NOT the day when the sale/action/conversion was completed. Interesting… This could explain why the total conversion count in Adwords’ fluctuates from report to report. It also means the profit you thought you made today was actually the result of sales from ads clicked as long as 30 days ago.

Logging into a Google Analytics-enabled Adwords account this week you may be greeted with this message (Sorry for the tiny thumbnail):

Um, OK? So Adwords wants you to OK them accessing your Analytics data…. Time to put on your Big-G tin foil hats.

Google soothes your concerns here in the “Data Sharing” FAQ:

Will sharing my data directly affect the ranking of my natural search results, ad quality score or ad placement?
Your website data will not be used to affect your natural search results, ad quality score or ad placement. Aggregate data across many customers will be used to improve our products and services.

Why should I share my data?Many customers have requested benchmarking and conversion-based advertising features. If you wish to help improve our services and take advantage of these enhanced features once we release them, select the corresponding data sharing settings.

So, in short:

Question 1: “Will you use my bounce rate and other traffic quality details in Google Analytics to adjust my Quality Scores?”….”No”

Question 2: “Why are you doing this?”….. “Because you asked for it”…..

Wow…A little over a year ago, Google used Analytics data from MFA sites to determine who was responsible for crap traffic on the content network and then boot those users.

It’s unfathomable how much data Google now has about every aspect of web marketing and traffic patterns:

Google Analytics: Where people go online, how long they stick around, how often they come back, whether they buy anything while they’re there

Google Search: What they’re searching for

Google Reader: What they value enough to read every day

Google Adwords: How much it costs to advertise profitably in thousands of markets, which keywords make the most profit, how much credit advertisers can put up to advertise (aka. spending limit)

Google CPA/Video/Audio Ads: What kind of advertisements are most effective in getting clicks and sales, how little traffic can be purchased for on publisher websites

Google Website Optimizer: What landing pages and copy work best in each niche

Google Adsense: What contextual placements and links are most profitable

Gmail: How often certain keywords show up in viral form in people’s email revealing new trends

Google Conversion Optimizer: The Grand Experiment to integrate all the data points and see if “the computer” as Eric Schmidt refers to it, can run it all on autopilot.

Google must laugh out loud when they hear Yahoo and Microsoft talk about “Behavioral Targeting” in advertising. There is no cookie-trail in existence that could possibly give you the amount of ‘behavioral’ data Google now has.

The ‘do not share data’ link may be the only way affiliates can put a stake in the ground and keep a fair amount of separation given the value of all of this data.

Then again, what’s the point of opting out? They’re clearly already collecting it all anyway:

Will my historical data be included?

When you opt in to data sharing, we will include data from up to a month before your opt-in date to enable features such as benchmarking. When you opt out, data sharing stops on that day.

Sorry for the little mini-hiatus there….conference backlog:(

So, the forums are buzzing with Google-slapped affiliates, mostly those who were direct-linking or using different dynamic insertion techniques on their landing pages. Other affiliates affected are reporting simply moderate increases in bid prices overall.

On that note, at SMX Google shared during the PPC session:
Different types of Quality Score:

1. Overall Account Quality Score: Does your overall account perform ‘Below Average, Average, or Above Average’
2. Campaign & Adgroup Quality Score: ‘Below Average, Average, or Above Average’
3. ‘Creative Quality Score: Landing page relevance to keyword and ad text (they lump ad text in with “creative”)

This actually explains a lot… Overall account QS is affected by account-wide CTRs and payment history etc, campaign and adgroup is typically keyword grouping performance, and the keyword-ad text-landing page ‘creative’ QS has been discussed for a while now.

The account-wide QS certainly explains why older, established accounts with a long payment history often get more traffic than new accounts, and why sometimes no matter what you try, you can’t get new campaigns going (likely due to a ‘below average’ rating on your overall account).

The campaign and adgroup QS really makes you think about how “Poor” or slapped keywords peppered throughout your campaigns might be affecting your campaign and adgroup scores. They’re certainly not going to be helping your CTRs….