One of the most common asked questions when people advertise with Adwords on the Google Content Network is:

“Why are my content impressions so low?”

… and“How can I get more impressions on the Google Content Network?”.

Let’s see why this can happen …

There are some obvious and some not so obvious reasons. I found out that there is a very special reason why this can happen. I think it is the most common reason for low impression share especially for affiliate marketers. It has nothing to do with how high you bid or how good the CTR (Click Through Rate) on your ads is.

The more obvious resons for low impressions are:

Ads are not yet approved. You can see it in the “pending review” status

Keywords used are to narrow. This can happen if you simply select to many and specific keywords. Google might not find enough matches for your keyword-theme in the content network.

Too much negative keywords. If you select for instance the same hundreds of negative keywords that make sense on search, you might exclude too much content, because one of the many negatives are on the same page as all the keyword phrases that you want to target. Content does not work like search, where you have to get the exact query of the user matched to your offer. In fact on content there is no query; the user hasn’t entered one, he usually is just browsing the net. So less negative keywords, or even no negative keywords (use site-exclusions instead) works better.

I only exclude very obvious negative keywords like “scam” or such that totally disqualify for your offer: if a keyword can have different meaning, like “windows cleaner” could be for the Microsoft-Windows or for actual cleaning of windows. So if you would have a room cleaning-service you might consider “windows xp” as a negative in content as well (If you wanna digg deeper, here is a great post on negative keywords on AdWords).

Bids too low and too much competition. If you try to advertise on keywords that have a very high competition like for instance “forex trading” there might be so many running content campaigns already, that you have to bid higher to get any share of the impressions.

Bad history in the content network. You get penalized if your account history is bad. Nothing new here. If it’s the case and you made a lot of content campaigns that really were badly structured, not relevant and had bad CTR etc. (happens to newbie-accounts a lot), you might want consider creating a brand new Adwords account and cancel the old one, making it better this time.

No relevance. This obviously leads to a low quality score, similar to search campaigns. If your keywords are not relevant with your text on the landing page.

Really Bad CTR. Although it is common knowledge that CTR of a content campaign is not as nearly as important as in search, I think if you have a low CTR (0,1% and lower) on your ads, Google will prefer other campaigns. I personally saw campaigns with high CTR (and making everything else right) really take off on the content network. It would be extremely irrational if it would be otherwise. If you think about it, Google makes money if users click on ads, so it will prefer ads with higher CTR. Also on a side note: a high CTR gets you a low CPC!

Change in the available inventory. The content network means AdSense on publishers websites who control their inventory totally. So if they have sold better campaigns directly or simply decide to narror their inventory for AdSense, this has an impact on running content campaigns. They can also filter campaigns and say “I don’t want to see this campaign on my site.”
So especially if you run placement campaigns on content, this may alter your volume of impressions dramatically up to the point where traffic from a certain site vanishes completely.

Those are all more or less obvious reasons and even if you bid very high (like $2 per Click and above) and have relevant keywords and a good CTR (like 0.5% and more) it still can happen that Google is not giving you any more impressions. I found out there is one special reason for this:

There is a Quality Score on the Content Network

Yes, there is a quality score for your content campaigns (see also Google’s QS Guidelines).

If you bid high, have relevant keywords and everything else should work out, the one reason for low impressions may be a bad quality score. Especially for affiliate marketers the main reason for low impressions in the content network may be due to a low quality score of the content campaign. This means especially the landing page.

Here is the problem: you can’t see the quality score of the content campaign!

Unlike any search campaign, where the quality score is shown for every keyword, on content there is no display of the quality score in the Adwords interface. I recently talked to my Google Rep about this and Google confirmed that the landing page quality score of one of my campaigns is low and also that I can’t see it myself:

“Our system has crawled the sites for these campaigns and deemed the landing pages in question to have low quality scores. Your landing page quality needs to be improved if you’d like to increase your Quality Scores, lower your costs and increase your exposure on the content network.

Let me explain why we incorporate landing page quality into Quality Score: Our market research shows that low quality sites lead to a poor user experience, and unhappy users are less likely to click AdWords ads. High quality sites lead to better user experience and a higher return on investment for advertisers.“

After asking where the landing page quality score can be reviewed:

“Unfortunately, it is not possible to view this information within your Adwords interface. Due to the dynamic and automated nature of the way our system crawls your sites, we cannot provide you with any more information on the quality score of your sites at present. This information would not be present in the ads diagnostic tool for your keywords.”

Obviously that’s a flaw in the current Adwords system and a reason for much frustration among advertisers. Hopefully it will get corrected in future updates, since all of the latest updates were all very impressive, especially for content network advertising.

It is interesting that you can see an initial quality score for content campaigns in the AdWords Editor, which is similar to search campaigns. But I’m not sure if this quality score is up to date and relevant at all to the content network. I would doubt it, considering the results from content campaigns showing 7-10/10 keywords quality scores in Adwords Editor … and still getting very low impressions. I think it’s more like a single content network quality score, which is highly influenced by the landing page.

So what can you do?

I have found that landing page quality is most important for content campaigns.

Of course there may always be a slap of your campaign and it stops, the same as in search. You don’t see a single impression then, which is a clear sign. As long as you see impressions, it is not slapped. You can make sure if you check the quality score of a keyword in a search campaign for that domain. If it is 1/10 the domain is slapped and won’t work on search or content.

But a slap aside, I think in order to have a great landing page for the content network, you need a very keyword-relevant content-rich, especially text-rich landing page. I find that I get significantly more traffic to content network campaigns where the landing page has a lot for actual and relevant text on it. One page landers, possibly even with graphics instead of text are really bad content network landing pages.

So create a content rich landing page with lot’s of relevant text.

Another thing that might help is to consult with your Google Rep and try to improve your landing page. As always do it politely and in a cooperative manner and you can expect some actual useful help!

So that was my insight into how to increase impressions on the content network. If you have any questions or comments, please post them below. You can also always post in the forum.

Hopefullly Google will integrate the Content Network quality score into the interface soon.

Related posts:

1. Tips for Success on the Google Content Network
2. How to Use Placements on the Google Content Network
3. How to Get a Great Quality Score on Google AdWords

The Google AdWords Content Network is the largest advertising network on the planet. Many people still turn it off on their campaigns (ok initially) and then never use it (which is a mistake). The fact that you can advertise on websites like the NYTimes.com shows the huge potential. You can use not only text ads but also image ads, which get more attention and can produce a higher CTR.

I personally often get a better ROI (Return On Investment) on the content network than on the search network.

The whole field of advertising on the content network is still much more nebulous than the advertising on search. It is very hard to get definitive and test-proven answers regarding the content network, especially if it gets more advanced than just putting a text-CPC campaign with keywords on automatic placements.

Placement targeting means selecting the websites you want to advertise on. These pages are pages that you know convert or that proven themselves in Automatic placements already. You can get very granular here, selecting single pages. Of course you can also select the whole URL. The power is in selecting the placements that are:

• Most relevant
• Have a reasonable volume of impressions
• Produce a decent or better great CTR
• And first and foremost produce conversions, i.e. sales or signups (You use the built-in AdWords conversion tracking, right?!)

The whole process of optimizing a campaign on the content network to higher and higher ROI results in placement targeting. That means take the best converting websites and put them into a new campaign/adgroup and try to get as much out of it as you can.

You can see the process in this short video:

The perfect Content Network campaign

Usually the time-line of a content campaign looks like this:

1. Create a CPC content campaign with a theme of keywords and automatic managed placements (means Google selects the sites using your keywords as a guide). Maybe use data from a search campaign to begin with (keywords, ads).
2. Over time select the websites with the best ROI (they make you money) and also decent CTR (high CTR means lower costs, regardless of CPC or CPM payment) and put them into Managed placements,
   while excluding those placements that does not convert or have a very low CTR.
3. If you have managed placements that produce a high ROI, i.e. good conversions you may consider opening a CPM campaign instead and try to really take over the whole placement for your benefit.

Especially the 3. point is like the ultimate goal of a content network campaign. If you use CPM placements you can take over the whole ad on the site, whether you use an image ad or a text ad and kick out all other advertisers (Google may blow your text ad up so it takes the whole adspace on the website). The idea is if you have found a great page that converts well for you, scale it up and try to get all adspace there is. If it is a website with large volume, this can be extremely lucrative.

That’s the exciting theory.

Solving Problems to get to the perfect Content Network campaign

The most common problem you see today in internet marketing forums is that the content campaign is not getting enough impressions. Initially your content campaign will be send out to many placements and it will be tested by Google. How is the CTR and how is it competing with other campaigns? Which placements work for it?

Many campaign run dry on impressions after this initial testing phase, especially in niches with high competition, where there are a lot of other already optimized campaigns running. One of the best things you can do is create great adcopy that users click on in the content network. CTR is the most important factor if it comes to being better than the competition and to get low bidprices.

There may also other issues that prevent you from scaling a campaign up and we will look into those in the next postings about the content network …

Related posts:

1. Tips for Success on the Google Content Network
2. Low Impressions on the Content Network ?

I just posted a new topic over at the WickedFire Forums about the current state of the risk free trial (RFT) offers on most of the affiliate networks and the difficulties to promote them on the mayor advertising networks (Facebook, Google, Yahoo …). Here it is:

I want to take a look at the current situation with rebills. Those are in general the most popular and best paying offers on the Affiliate Networks.
They are in verticals like weight loss, anti-aging and beauty and many others and high traffic keywords like “acai”, “resveratrol” and “weight loss” are the target audience. So just let’s say that they are highly popular.

If we look at the merchant, the network, the affiliate, the customer and traffic-source, we have all 5 participants of the party. If there is a sale, the ideal situation would be a win-win for everybody, all would be happy at least to a certain degree.

But that’s not the case.

What’s the problem here?

I’d say if there is a sale, the following is the most likely scenario (on the long term):

1. merchant is happy
2. affiliate network is happy
3. affiliate is happy (all 3 happy, although a little ignorant and selfish)
4. traffic-source has some issues (look at Google: wants to make money but has to keep the customer=user happy, also ethical issues)
5. customer may be most likely more unhappy than happy on the long run (rebilled and cant cancel)

As an affiliate marketer it’s hard to resist the free trial offers because they promise a great return. Leaving ethical things beside for a moment, it’s damn hard to advertise for it. Look at the discussion about review-sites and flogs. Try to get a rebill offer on facebook. Get google-slapped once a week.

There are problems over problems and what’s the most important question?

How can you eliminate those problems?

I think there is only one way how these problems can be eliminated. And that is the customer has to get happy mostly. If that happens, also Google or Facebook would not have such a hard time approving Ads to their userbase.

How can that be achieved?

I don’t think the rebill risk free trials (RFT) are the problem. But missing transparency in the way they are promoted, mostly on the merchants landing page, are the 1. problem. And the 2. problem is the customer care after the sale is made. So in that way the customer get’s the feeling he has been ripped off and scammed and as long as this is the general feeling of the customer there will be a problem with RFT.

What annoys me personally as an affiliate marketer is even if you put your best efforts at campaigns and creatives and so on, due to the nature of the offer you run into problems (you cant even advertise on Yahoo.com, Facebook and partially Google).

I think there has to be an adjustments on the merchants side, where there is more transparency and service, which means cutting some profits short term for all 3 profiting parties. But the whole business-model would profit long term. As a merchant you would be able to build a long term business and not one that gets an F-Rating on the BBB and is annoying to the FTC.

Finchsells came to a similar conclusion on rebills, as he wrote:

“But what the industry needs is a bunch of advertisers with products that deliver the goods. Or more importantly, products that justify their monthly rebilling structure. We have some of the best marketers in the business making hundreds of thousands of dollars. Just imagine how well they’d perform if you gave them something to work with.”

So it looks a bit to me as an “evolve or die” situation. The biggest problem and the forced evolve situation would be the banning of RFT from the mayor search engines.

“Evolve or Die” – Can this be avoided?

World of Warcraft is a re-billing system and customers pay happily every month. Advertising agencies as well as publishers love to advertise the product. The reason is the customer is happy.

Merchants try to achieve that and you will be on the next level of RFT.

No related posts.

The Google AdWords Content Network can be a real mystery. There are still some things that let me wonder what is going on. For instance if I run a Content Network campaign for a week and suddenly it runs out of impressions, even though my ads, the sites I target and the CTR stays the same. In the beginning Google seems to test every content campaign and gives it initial impressions. Later the performance (CTR) and bidprice compared to the competition determines if a campaign keeps running or not.

In this post I want to give a solid overview to run a successful campaign on the Google Adwords Content Network …

The Mind-Set for the Content Network

The Content Network inside of Google AdWords is the advertisers side of the AdSense network for site publishers. If we start a campaign inside of AdWords we can select if we want to run ads on Search only or also on Content. Most of you users of AdWords know that it is crucial to separate the two right from the start into two different campaigns. The reason is first and foremost that the user on Search is actively looking for something while the user we reach on Content is “passively” seeing our ad. So he is in a completely different frame of mind and has a different intention if he sees the ad.

In that way advertising on the Content Network is much more like buying adspace on other websites, instead of PPC keyword advertising on the search engine: You place Text-Ads or Banner-Ads on targeted websites – a completely different ball game.

Keywords in the Content Network are not Keywords

Keywords work differently for a content campaign than they work for search. The basic idea is to create 10-40 related keywords for a content campaign. Those keywords will then be used as a theme to determine the pages where the ads should show on.

All keywords for a content campaign are broad match. There is no need to insert keywords that have exact or phrase match, since those will be ignored anyway.

There is also no need for separate keyword bids, since as mentioned above, Google uses the theme of keywords to determine where to show your ad. All keywords and clicks will have the same bid for one adgroup.

Also don’t go overboard with negative keywords. While it may ok to use some negative keywords like for instance “scams” or something other really disqualifying, don’t use the negatives you may use on search. For instance the negative “free” would prevent your ad from appearing on a website where somewhere on the site is the word free – usually not a good idea.

Targeting Sites with Placements

You can also target websites directly for your ads. If you use “Placements” you can say I want my ads to run on that specific website. Now you have two options: First you can also use keywords which means that Google will target those Placements but only show the ads if they also match your keywords. Secondly you can only use Placements without keywords which means that Google will show your ads on those sites on possibly all pages. So be careful with Placements only without keywords, because if you select CNN.com you may get a negative impression of the content network the next day, if you know what I mean ;)

Placements without keywords mostly make sense on smaller, very focused websites. An example would be a site about muscle building only, where you want to place an ad about an abs workout exercise.

The Ads on a Content Campaign

Text-ads on the Content Network, from my experience, should be somewhat more attention-grabbing. Having a text-ad somewhere on a text-loaded website is a different thing than having it on top or right to search results.

I really love image ads. You can also use animated flash ads which are even more effective if done right. Image ads take much more space on the website and attention from the user. You can also insert more information (with images + text) than in the text ad and therefore pre-sell the user much better.

The important formats are: 300×250, 160×600 and 728×90. Also to a lesser degree 336×280, 468×60, 120×600 and 250×250. If you want to target a specific website check which banners they use and also, very important, check in which areas of the site those are. A 728×90 (leaderboard) on the bottom won’t get a great CTR for your campaign.

A nice trick is to use text in an image ad. That way the ad may look like a giant text-ad or even as part of the website you are advertising on. This usually will improve your CTR and therefore your bid-price.

Here are two nice image ads on the popular TruthAboutAbs.com Offer from Clickbank:

The left one is from the original product owner made for affiliates. It pulled a nice CTR on one campaign I run of 1.51%. The right one is a similar format I made in a text-ad style which pulled a CTR of 2.87% which is really ace on the content network!

Another great benefit of using image ads is also that you are preparing yourself for media buying. If you have a campaign or an offer / product that really takes off and has a great ROI then doing a media buy might be the next level thing. And what could be better than having proven high CTR and converting image ads ready right from the Google Content Network?

Optimizing a Content Campaign

When I start a content campaign I make a really related keyword list and create also very related ads for it. I usually don’t start with placements – unless I already know some sites that I really want to target or that proved themselves already. Normally I let Google show me sites that work for my keyword theme.

Because after some days you can have a look at the placement report or display the sites that Google targeted based on your keywords and then optimize. You can select sites with a high CTR and with conversions (you are using the build in Google conversion tracking, right?!?) and put them into placements. You will also want to select the non-performers and put them in as negative sites (excluded). That way you can constantly optimize your content campaign and make sure you get a higher CTR and more Conversions.

Once you have found those sites that make you money you can also open a completely now adgroup for them and target a) possibly the whole site if it is not getting to broad and b) possibly start bidding by CPM instead of CPC. Bidding on CPM (per 1000 impressions) makes sense if your CTR is really high – do the math, it can be a great way to further improve your ROI.

In this campaign above you can see the Automatic placements and the Managed placements, which have a higher CTR (Click Trough Rate) of 1.88% vs. the 0.67% (by the way, both of those numbers are pretty good on the content network). Therefore the average CPC is 0.10 EUR on the managed placements. The campaign started with a CPC of 0.35 EUR and went down due to the good CTR.

Some Special Facts about the Content Network

You can’t really split test on the content network. Since the ad is a part of the targeting option that Google uses, if you use a very different ad Google would use different pages to show your ad on. Also it is not safe to say that your ads will even appear on the same page to be correctly tested against each other. On the contrary, that is very unlikely. Therefore it’s not a good idea to split-test ads on the Content Network the same way as on the Search Network.

Don’t pause content network campaigns. This fact was supported by Glen Livingston and it says if you pause a content campaign you basically say to Google please start over again and you lose your spot on the websites. On the Content Network Google is constantly pushing the ads into more sites using fuzzy logic to see, if the ads are working there. So if you stop this process, this might be a bad idea. What you could do instead is set your daily budget as low as $1/day or use ad-scheduling.

That was more of a basic article about advertising on the Content Network. I plan to go deeper in future posts.

Do you have any questions about the Content Network? What are your experiences or problems? Ask away with a comment, I will answer shortly …

Related posts:

1. How to Use Placements on the Google Content Network
2. Low Impressions on the Content Network ?
3. How to Start a Google Adwords Campaign

… or any PPC Campaign.

Many advertisers today either 1) jump into Google Adwords without having a clue what they don’t know or 2) they are too afraid of losing money to start in the first place. Both approaches don’t get you anywhere.

If you don’t have a lot of Adwords experience and already managed to get successful Adwords campaigns running (that means campaigns that make money back), the best advice is to prepare and then start small and learn along the way, while you expand your campaign. Being prepared means to have a basic knowledge of what is going on. This article will help you to understand Adwords better and get a successful campaign up and running.

Before you even start you should know clearly what you are after. In affiliate marketing the goal is to make a conversion (user takes the desired action), so that gets easy. There may be other goals though, for this article I assume we are going for some kind of measurable conversion, most likely a direct sale or lead.

1. Understand Your Niche, Your Offer and Your Audience

The first thing to do is to understand your product and the people that buy it. In affiliate marketing that is not a no-brainer, since there are a lot of products looking promising and that you can choose from. If you own your product then this should be easier :) So get informed on the product, if possible test it yourself and understand it’s benefits clearly.

Then understand what problem it solves for the customer. Robert Collier always said the secret is to “Entering the conversation inside the customer’s head.” (and Perry Marshall also likes to quote im often). If you understand the need and problem of the customer and why he may be looking for this product, you can create a much better targeted campaign. For instance look in some blogs and forums of that niche to understand the mindsets of the customers. Also study the ads of your competition.

Also check if the product you want to advertise has a commercial demand. That means if there are people spending money. You can get an idea in affiliate networks by networks earnings or EPC (average earnings pay per click) or on Clickbank on the gravity-rating. More importantly look on Google itself if you search for the product name. Are there a lot of advertisers? If not, that may be a sign that there is no one spending money to buy it.

2. Finding the Right Keywords to Start With

You don’t want to start new with very broad keywords, like “internet marketing” or “weight loss”. While they have a lot of traffic, they also have a lot of competition and are usually not targeted enough to get a good idea if your campaign has the potential to be a winner. Use the Google keyword tool to get very targeted keywords that still have a volume where you don’t have to wait to see results for months.

For instance if you have an offer towards one gender use this in your keyword, like “weight loss for men” or be more specific like “german shepherd training” instead of “dog training”. You can go even deeper. By choosing a more targeted keyword you raise your probability of getting conversions and getting your campaign faster to a profitable level from which you can expand naturally.

You can see the monthly search volume of a keyword on the Google keyword tool. Of course you can use other keyword tools like for instance the free Wordtracker tool.

3. Know Your Competition

Before you start your campaign you should have a look at the current level of competition and what they are saying in their ads and how their offers and landing pages look like. There are two basic things to achieve: 1. to stand out of the crowd and 2. to just have an attractive ad.

The way especially popular affiliate products are promoted changes over time. In some niches you see ads ranking in the top positions that talk about “Warning” or even “Scams” in their headlines. You might have a hard time competing here without a special reason that the user should prefer your ad over the ad that tries to warn him. So the idea is to get an impression what the ads of your competitors for a given keywords look like. Then you can adjust your strategy better.

4. Writing your Ads

The art of copywriting would fill not even one post but a whole blog, but here are some basic tips to get you started:

• Insert your keyword: put the keyword in the headline and possibly into Ad Text and Display-URL
• Great headline: the most important part is the headline. So make it attention grabbing and to stand out.
• Be relevant: Don’t try to get visitors to click that don’t convert. You want converting (targeted) traffic in the first place, so only put on the ad what your landing page / offer delivers
• Put your benefits into the ad text: for instance “20% Discount Code”, “Free Trial” or “Get Slim and Fit” etc. – try to speak to the emotions
• Be specific: use numbers, not: make more money – but: make $10k in 4 weeks
• Insert a Call to Action into the ad: Write what you want the user to do, for instance “Order Today and Safe!” or “Sign Up For a Free Newsletter!”
• Use the whole ad: Headline, use most of the text and don’t forget the Display-URL, the URL tells a story too

Write your ad directly related to your keyword. Remember? You want to be “Entering the conversation inside the customer’s head.” Your adcopy and your keyword and finally your landing page have to be in total harmony to maximize conversion rates, your ultimate goal.

Start with at least two slightly different ads so you can run them “against” each other and split test them.

5. Settings and Launching

First turn off the content network for this campaign, since we are targeting only search. (You can target content also of course, but don’t mix them up, they work completely different).

Then add your country-targeting (or even region/city …) and check the options: accelerated vs. evenly delivery (might want to set it to accelerated to see faster results) and turn of ad optimization (you will optimize your ads yourself).

One of the biggest mistakes beginners make is to throw too many unrelated keywords into one adgroup. You cannot do this if you want to get a successful campaign – you will fail if you do it. Create one adgroup and add your keyword or very related keywords along with your ads. To give you an idea, the keywords “google adwords tool” and “google adwords software” are still related, “google adwords help” and “google adwords software” are not.

Also activate conversion tracking right from the start. This is extremely important! Use Pixel or Javascript tracking (in the tools menu on AdWords) and implement it on the final conversion page of your landing page. Usually that’s the offer page, in affiliate marketing place your conversion pixel on the network for that offer (Ask your Affiliate-Manager if you have problems here).

6. Quality Score and Bid Management

The moment you submit your campaign your keywords will get an initial Quality Score assigned. This Quality Score is determined by your account Quality Score history, especially on this keyword and on the Quality Score history of that keyword in general (by other advertisers). Landing Page and Relevance of your ad to keyword is also important here. Once your campaign runs, AdWords will possibly adjust the Quality Score for your keywords according to your performance, which basically means CTR – compared to your competition. Please read my article about How to Get a Great Quality Score on Google AdWords – it is very important to understand the Google AdWords Quaity Score.

You want to have a bid that shows your campaign on the first page of search results, so raise the bid at least to the “first page bid” that Google is showing. If it is way too high for you, then you either have a bad history on that keyword or your landing page / adcopy is not relevant enough for it. It may also be that it is just extremely competitive – check with the Google keyword tool again to see the normal CPC for rank 1-3 on search for this keyword.

7. Tracking and Optimizing

When your Quality Score improves due to good relevance and ad copy your bid price will go down and your ad rank can go up. You just adjust your own bid according to your ROI (return on investment) and conversions.

You also want to continuously split test your best ad against an improved version. Don’t overdo it, just one new ad at the time. You can copy your existing best ad and then add one new ad. Otherwise, if you have a really bad new ad, your Quality Score may go down due to bad CTR. If you use multiple winning ads and one new ad you can test the new ad saver if that is a concern.

Track your conversions and optimize your campaigns along. You want to pause all underperforming keywords and ads and keep the good ones running. Underperforming means bad CTR AND bad conversion rate. For you the conversion rate is the most important one, for Google the CTR is most important – you have to optimize both.

Final Words

So there you have it, a complete guide to start your first campaign. I hope this helped and if you have questions or remarks, please write them into the comments or the forums!

Related posts:

1. How to Get a Great Quality Score on Google AdWords
2. Low Impressions on the Content Network ?
3. Tips for Success on the Google Content Network

On your way to master Google AdWords there is one extremely critical thing that you have to understand as good as possible: the Google AdWords Quality Score.

I’m sure you know a lot of it and probably you are a little frustrated about getting a great quality score for your keywords. That will change. If you are not familiar with this concept, please stop and learn the basics, because you can waste a lot of money, if you don’t know the implications of a poor vs. a great quality score.

Why would you want to have a Great Quality Score ?

Answer: Because you will make (much) more money with it.

Just in case you don’t know: every keyword has a Quality Score between 1 to 10 assigned to it:

1-4 is considered “Poor”
5-7 is “Ok”
8-10 is “Great

If you have a poor quality score you can literally pay 10 times more for a keyword as if you would have a great one. This means getting to great is the key to the lowest bid price which is a key to making the most money out of your campaign.

Google has introduced the Quality Score into it’s AdWords to reward good advertisers and “punish” bad ones. In Google’s eyes a good advertiser is basically one that is relevant to what the user searched for.

There are different aspects that will have an impact of a campaign on AdWords: your account history (the quality of all of your campaigns) and also the quality of the whole AdGroup you are in. And you have to get both parts right also, in order to profit the most with AdWords. Here I want to talk mainly about the Quality Score on the keyword level: Google assigns a Quality Score for every specific keyword (regardless of match type, so “keyword” and [keyword] share the same quality score, at least to my extensive observation).

The final position of your ad is still determined by your bid price, but you can lower it drastically by a good Quality Score.

The 3 Parts of the Quality Score

Take a look at this video by Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian, explaining the impact of Quality Score on your bid price (starting at around 2:00):

So the 3 parts for a better Quality Score and therefore a lower bid price are in order of importance:

1. Click Trough Rate (CTR) of the ad per keyword

CTR is by far the most important thing to improve your Quality Score. It is the direct response from the user to your ad, since it measures how many people that search for your keyword, click on your ad. If your CTR is high, Google makes the most money and you get the most possible users to your landing page. It also means your ad relates to the users and is relevant and Google is rewarding you with a good quality score and lower bid prices.

Here are some tips of what you should do to improve your ads CTR:

• Play “Beat the Winner!” by constantly improving your ad copy and split test new ads against the currently best ad
• be different: try to stand out of the crowd of the other ads, be unique
• using special chars in ad copy if appropriate, like (- or “” or TM)
• use Capitalization of the first letter in the ad text (“Learn How To Improve …”)
• include a strong call to action (“Get Your Free Copy Today!”, “Order Here Now!”)
• state the benefits for the user (“Earn 10k More with …”)
• be specific (“Lose 10lbs in 14 Days.”)
• including a question, promise of benefits, problem-solution
• use and talk to emotions (“Feel Great, Be Free …”)
• using the whole ad, i.e. adding keyword to the display URL

2. Relevancy of Keywords with Ad and Landing Page

• make new AdGroups for the keyword(s) with a special ad for it, avoiding to have only one ad for a buch of semi-related keywords (this method is also called “Peel & Stick”)
• include your keyword in ad copy (you can use keyword insertion, but don’t overdo it)
• include the keyword in the domain or path (www.keywordindomain.com/keyword-in-path/)
• create a subdomain of the keyword (i.e. keyword.yoursite.com)

3. Landing Page Quality

• include keyword(s) in best on-page SEO techniques (title, h1 etc.)
• include LSI keywords (from AdWords keyword tool)
• write unique content (Question to discuss: How important is unique here, what about i.e. wikipedia-quotes? Who has experiences?)
• add links to authority sites (.gov .edu and wikipedia)
• add “contact”, “about”, “privacy policy”, “terms and conditions”
• add more content than the landing page (create a whole site with relevant (!) content)

So,

How do I get my keyword to a 10/10 “Great”?

… and pay only half as much per click? If you start a campaign you will get an initial Quality Score for your keywords. This is determined by Google by your account history, especially for this keyword if you have already used it, and on the general performance and quality of this keyword on the whole AdWords system. From the moment on you run your first ad on Google Search your Quality Score will be calculated.

First make sure you don’t make anything totally wrong, like using unrelated keywords of have a landing page without real content. Then …

This is the #1 Factor: Focus mostly on improving the CTR by creating a better ad. If you get a relatively high CTR your Quality Score will move up over time and your bid prices will go down. Also very important to know by the way: CTR’s are measured by ad position. That means a CTR of 1% maybe poor if you are on spot 1. If you are on spot 9 however, 1% may be considered great! So it doesn’t make sense to bid sky high to get a top position and an average CTR for spot #1.

Secondly improve the Relevancy of your keyword (what the user is typing into Google) and your ad and landing page. You can do this by implementing the above bullet points.

Last but not least, you must give the system some time, while you work on your running campaign. I have seen improving my campaigns over a period of 1-2 weeks, constantly getting lower bid prices (“First Page Bids“) and higher Quality Scores.

I wish you the best luck and please comment about your successes, experiences as well as any questions! I will answer them all.

Related posts:

1. How to Start a Google Adwords Campaign
2. Low Impressions on the Content Network ?

Well for starters, you can make a lot of money if you do it right. That is not bad at all, isn’t it?

But as I looked at Affiliate Marketing in more detail as I stopped working at my first internet company, which had the typical office, people you work with and work for you and all the potential stress-related responsibilities, I recognized some interesting benefits of affiliate marketing.

The 4 W’s of your work life

The 4 W’s is a great concept introduced by Tim Ferris in his book “The 4 Hour Work Week” (which I highly recommend for affiliate marketers). It says the quality of your work-life balance depends largely to how many of the four W’s you control in your life:

“Money is multiplied in practical value depending on the number of W’s you control in your life: what you do, when you do it, where you do it, and with whom you do it.” –Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek (2007)

So what, when, where and with whom are the 4 W’s here and think about it for a moment in the context of Affiliate Marketing:

What – you can basically chose in which niche you want to operate and which products and in which way you want to promote.

When – a huge advantage since there is no schedule for you when it comes to affiliate marketing. If you want to, you can work only at night. Or only in the morning and try to catch up to Tim Ferris creating a 4-hour work week.

Where – is another great, great benefit of Affiliate Marketing. You could literally travel the world by managing your online affiliate business. Or how about living in Hawaii or Tokyo or Paris or anywhere in the world you would like?

With Whom – you can select your business partners, the networks you work with and the products and companies you choose. Most likely you can’t get around Google, but who can today? ;)

The freedom to choose

Affiliate Marketing scores extremely high on the 4 W’s and it basically means one thing: freedom. You are really very free in what you do here. But with this freedom comes also responsibility for yourself and the need to push yourself to your own goals, because no one else will do it for you if you are your own boss. But that is the opportunity here.

No related posts.

As I started out in Affiliate Marketing the obvious thing to do was to take a product that looks good, has a fair payout and is in a niche that you are familiar with – and then send traffic to the offer page in the hope of making a sale.

Sounds familiar?

Sure, this is the basic model. But in order to succeed you have to be ahead of the crowd where it counts the most. You have to move to the top 5-3% of the people that really get Affiliate Marketing and never look back. You have to become a Master of Affiliate Marketing.

In order to do that you have to focus on the most vital things that determine your success with affiliate marketing. So you have to master …

The 2 Core Skills of Affiliate Marketing

1. Generating laser-targeted Traffic

In my last post How to Learn Affiliate Marketing I already lined out the importance of not only generating traffic, or even targeted traffic, but laser-targeted traffic. You have to become an expert in getting the right traffic – read reaching the kind of people that are an exact match for the product you are offering.

If you get the first part of the formula right, the next part is:

2. Converting that Traffic into Sales

If you’ve done the first part right and you got the right people in front of your offer, the next task is to convert them to take action! The action is most likely to make an order, although it may be something else like opting into a mailing list. But you have to get them to take action and make the conversion. Otherwise you will have paid for a user that won’t make you any money back, losing money in the end. You don’t want that to happen too often :) So you have to master the Art of Conversion.

This then concludes the basic Success Formula for Affiliate Marketing:

Traffic x Conversion = $$$

Those are the two most important skills you have to master. If you can become insanely good at generating targeted traffic and converting that traffic, I can guarantee you a huge success in affiliate marketing and so in making money online.

So how do we get insanely good at generating the right traffic and converting it into money? That is the whole topic of this blog and if you keep reading through the posts, reading my exclusive free newsletter and participate in the forums, you will very likely make fast progress towards the ultimate goal of becoming a Master of Affiliate Marketing …

Related posts:

1. How to Learn Affiliate Marketing

Isn’t it amazing?

With affiliate marketing you can sell a great product without even owning one – that means without the hassle of designing a good product, paying upfront for creating it and without taking care of customers later. But it gets better: with the use of today’s fantastic advertising tools, like Google Adwords, you can sell it to the whole world! Well, the whole internet world at least.

When I got that – that it is that easy today – it really blew my mind. All you have to do is get the right product and the right advertising method and you are good to go on making a living online …

Is it really that easy? Well, almost …

You have to understand how to laser-target your audience

When I first got in contact with affiliate marketing I thought it is nonsense. I’ll tell you why:

At that time I was growing my first internet company. It was a german gaming Network called ingame, which had a lot of visitors who play hardcore computer games. It were about 40 million monthly page impressions in Germany which was a lot back in 2002. To earn money we sold banner advertising (and still do) and I also tried affiliate networks.

You could also call affiliate marketing performance based advertising: you only earn money if you make a sale. If you do so, it’s a win/win situation for the advertiser as well for the publisher. But the affiliate products of the german affiliate networks did not work; I made no sale of those products and went back to selling the adspace on CPM basis. I concluded affiliate marketing doesn’t work and it’s a waste of time.

Why was that?

Answer: Targeting.

In affiliate marketing you have to laser target the product to the person you are offering the product. That is the basic key. Otherwise you won’t make any sale.

Now you may say that is obvious and the basic of any marketing activity – and you are right, but it isn’t always done right, is it?

You see we had a lot of people who played computer games excessively in their spare time. Wouldn’t it be logical to sell them Dell computers and iPhones? No, because it is targeted yes, but it is not laser-targeted!

There is a difference and the difference is 1 out of 1000 buying your offer versus 100 out of 1000, if you get the right product to the right audience. If you laser-target.

Google calls it relevance today and it is one of their main goals: to give the user the most relevant results – in other words: to target the search query of the user to the best result.

Now in the above result offering a Dell computer to a 19 year male who plays World of Warcraft wasn’t wrong targeting, but it was not very good targeting. Selling them the AddOn to World of Warcraft or a so-called Game-Time-Card to expand your playing time, that was laser-sharp targeting and that brought home the money …

Laser-targeting is easy, if you know how …

With this gaming network I had a very, very specific audience, and a big one. Nevertheless you can only sell to them what they need and if you have a website in a certain niche, you are basically stuck in that niche.

Not so anymore. The big shift is pay per click advertising on search engines.

When I started with the first network, AzoogleAds, on 6. April 2009 I immidiately made over $100 sales a day and went to over $500 in 4 days. Next month I was over $1,000 in sales daily. You can see the numbers on the statistic screenshot to the right with the combined sum for April and May of $53,761.49 in total sales revenue.

Now those are not terrible huge numbers and of course you have to subtract the pay per click costs, which were 45-55% on Google Adwords. But to start with them is a goal attainable in Affiliate Marketing, if you have the right knowledge.

With todays advertising you can laser-target any audience you want, using Google or Yahoo as your laser and reaching nearly anyone worldwide to sell your product. No, not your product, one of the best products as an affiliate! You are not stuck to a certain audience as in the example above, you are totally flexible and can switch your laser in a heartbeat.

And that is the magic between Affiliate Marketing and Pay per Click Advertising.

… but you have to master the 2 basic skills of an Affiliate Marketer

In order to really succeed in Affiliate Marketing you have to be ahead of the crowd. It is so competitive in the most money-making niches that you have to be among the 10% of the best on the top. You have to master the two core skills that determine your success as an Affiliate Marketer. And those skills are: Generating laser-targeted Traffic and Converting that traffic into sales.

Related posts:

1. Master the 2 Core Skills for Success with Affiliate Marketing