Affiliate Musketeer

I’ve just launched a new landing page for a product I’m promoting via PPC. I am an AdWords Qualified Individual, and I understand the relevancy of text and the concept of theme but this drop has made me stroke my stubbled chin in puzzlement.

Yesterday when I started the campaign, I had a Quality Score of Great 9/10 for both of my Ad Groups on 95% of their keywords. If you want to know how to improve on this, see my post on how to get an AdWords Quality Score of 10/10. Anyway, back to the point at hand, the campaign had been live for about 10 hours and was achieving a CTR of about 4.5% but my conversions on my landing page didn’t seem to match. As always, I felt the urge to try and tweak things a little but am now considering the possibility that the tweaks I made to my landing page have affected the Quality Score of the campaign adversely. So what did I change?

Well, first up I was trying to write a good, rich content landing page, with plenty of correct SEO techniques. The page was well written, 100% unique and made appropriate use of H1, H2, H3 tags, emphasis, underlines and bold. It was written for the human, not the search engine and it was completely on topic, relevant and semantic.

Now, when I first launched the AdWords campaign, I had a quality score of 9/10 and a minimum bid 0.02 to be on the first page. This seemed to stay for around 8 hours, during which time I made an adjustment to my H1 tag and added 3 prices to 3 product reviews. So, for instance, let’s assume my original header read:

You’re here because your brand new HD TV with built in Blu-Ray just lost its picture on Sky

And the new header:

Learn how to fix your Blu-Ray HD TV picture in just 60 minutes from your own home

Now this is not the niche I am in, and I have tried to emulate the concept of the change as accurately as possible. If you can imagine that prior to the change, my keywords (all based around ‘fixing HD TV’ terms) had a Quality Score of 9/10 and then after the change (although I can’t be sure it was the change in H1 tag that caused it – this is why I am investigating it here!) and about 8 hours, it had dropped to only 7/10.

Could the small H1 tag have such a dramatic effect on Quality Score?

I am going to investigate this in three ways:

1. I am going to test the theory on an existing AdWords keyword that has had a solid QS of ‘Great’ for a couple of months and a Quality Score of 9/10 and just slightly adjust the landing page H1 text to still be relevant but in a different way – Smells like LSI ?
2. I am going to create a new landing page using the same philosophy as the one that caused this whole investigation and not change anything for over a week.
3. I am going to create a second landing page with a not so good (in my eyes) quality score to see if new campaigns get some sort of quality score boost until google has a good chance to investigate them further.

I did mention another change earlier, but I fail to see how this could affect the quality score at all. Basically, there was 3 product reviews on the site and initially, they had a price just above the affiliate link to ‘prepare’ the user for the price when he lands on the merhcant’s product page I was promoting. I removed these prices completely to let the affiliate find the price after he’s clicked on my link (I’ll leave the conversion up to the merchant, it’s their job to create high converting pages – at least that was my thoughts).

Other than these two changes (the H1 tag and the price removals), no other changes were made to the landing page so either the quality score dropped because of 1 of these changes or it dropped due to time. I will post again once my investigations are complete.

Afterthought: Once I saw the QS had dropped from 9/10 to 7/10, I also added links to a ‘Privacy Policy’ and ‘About This’ page, just in case it was a time-related factor and once google figured out I was promoting a product as an affiliate, they tightened up their hold on me.