Affiliate Musketeer

3 Easy Steps to Improve AdWords Quality Score from 3/10

If you refer to one of my earlier blog posts about opening up a new AdWords account and throwing the net large and wide from the off, you’ll see that I made some serious mistakes with that campain.  The result was that all of my keywords, despite being in extremely tight AdGroups, were getting a google quality score of 3/10.  This was a fairly new experience for me because for the last two years – as long as Ive been a Certified AdWords Professional, I’ve never experienced a Quality Score of less than 7/10. (more…)

Stop Poor AdWords Quality Scores Forever

I set up a PPC campaign for a relatively competitive group of keywords this week (avge £2 per click, about 5m results, PPC ompetition of 8/10) and I was reminded of a very important rule to observe when setting up PPC campaigns with AdWords and, more specifically, what NOT to do when setting them up. (more…)

£550 Commission Last Month but Now I’m Stuck!

Last month I earned £550 commission from one of my sites through Commission Junction.  I spent £200 on Google AdWords to make this money.  Obviously that means that particular campaign made £350 gross profit.  Now when I setup affiliate marketing campaigns, I like to try and keep them all distinct and transparent but this month dug myself a very big hole.  Basically, due to very poor cash flow management and budgeting, I’ve totally messed up this month’s campaign.  Although I made £550 in commission last month, my AdWords bill for that campaign came in BEFORE my commission was paid into my account.  What this means is that since September the 5th, I have been unable to run AdWords ads for this campaign because the cash was unavailable for Google!

Commission Junction pay out on the 20th of every month, so I won’t actually receive that chunk of commission until then!  What that means in practice is that from the 5th September to about the 21st, (16 days!!), my highly profitable campaign is a sitting duck!  I have an extremely well performing PPC Campaign with practically 10/10 quality scores across the board (see one of my articles on how I did that here), I’m whipping the competition with really high CTRs and I have a product that is selling like hotcakes but I’ve been an utter plonker by utilising my full budget last month and being careless with a few other purchases which has left me totally stuck.

I now have to wait until the Commission comes into my account from CJ before I can pay Google and turn my campaign back on!  Doh!

So the moral of this little story is before any campaign, always check your payment dates and budget.  Check your cash flow because it is vital.  Before you treat yourself with that chunk of commission, make sure you’ve paid your immediate suppliers!

How do you Improve Quality Score when Promoting Affiliate Products

When you use AdWords to promote affiliate products you have two choices on how you want to do it.  The first is to link your text ad directly to the affiliate offer by putting your affiliate link in the destination url of the ad.  The second is to direct traffic from the text ad to your own landing page where you then link out to the affiliate offering.  The only way to achieve a high quality score (and thus better CTRs and CPCs) is to use the second method.

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How To Track Which AdWords Keywords Convert to Sales via CJ

I had a problem.  I was pretty good at using AdWords and fairly new to promoting products via CJ.  I knew that to understand my traffic and find out which PPC keyword terms turned into sales, I had to have some way of measuring them and here’s how I finally solved the problem…

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How To Increase AdWords Quality Score With Better Landing Pages

Good keyword research forms only part of the most effective AdWords strategies. The other part is good content. You may think this is a given, that you’d only be advertising via AdWords if you already had good quality content in place but you’d be amazed at how many associates I’ve worked with and helped that simply did not use effective landing page copy. I’ve written a few tips in here about how to increase your quality score through better quality content.

Quality scores and quality content go hand in hand.  To give you an example, here’s the ins and outs of one of my own AdWords campaigns and landing page combinations which went from an OK quality score of 7/10 to a great quality score of 10/10 simply by writing better, well researched content specifically related to the keyword, ad group and ad text I was using.

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Is It Possible To Get 10/10 AdWords Quality Score?

Update 1st June 2009:
All you need to reach the magical numer is:

• This software to help you obtain a high CTR (20% +)
• A highly targeted landing page (using title and heading tags properly)
• A good article written by this guy to create a healthy dose of content written around the keyword in question.

So, absolutely yes, it is possible!  You can get the holy grail of quality scores by following google’s guidelines but if you’ve tried that (and like me most of you will have!) and it hasn’t worked, you might want to try some software that will do it for you or you may want to keep trying yourself until you hit that golden 10.  Either way, here’s what I did to get a quality score of 10/10 for one of my campaigns:

• Increase CTR to 20%+   (If you need help with this, see James Schramko’s Double Digit CTR page)
• Used an ‘Exact Matching’ keyword
• Keyword also present in source code title, meta keywords and meta description tags
• Tightly grouped Keywords in tightly knitted AdGroups (SpeedPPC will do this for you)
• Keywords in AdText but not exactly the same keywords as the actual keyword you are targeting
• Keyword did not appear in body text of landing page but it was present in a <h2> tag in the landing page footer
• Keep the landing page ‘on theme’

I looked at this in much more depth in my post about how to get an AdWords Quality score of 10/10.

Resources To Help You:

• AdWords Beater - How To Make Profitable, High, Double Digit CTR AdWords PPC Campaigns
• Speed PPC – How To Increase Your AdWords Profits By Spending Less Time Arranging AdGroups and More Time Earning

Does Google Look At Meta Keywords For Quality Score?

An interesting question and one which was posed to me by a friend of mine who had noticed an increase in quality score just by having the right keywords in his meta keywords tag.  I have to say, that in my short time looking into Quality Score, that on two research projects where I managed to achieve a quality score of 10/10, the keywords were present.

One example was a car rental website with the exact matching keyword ‘car rental in san jose costa rica’ and one was for an exact match ‘how to fix the red ring of death‘ xbox 360 landing page.  In the first example, the meta keywords were: “costa rica, car rental, san jose, cheap, discount, 4×4″ and additionally, which may have also contriubuted, the page meta description was: “Vamos Rent-a-Car is the most affordable car rentals company in San Jose Costa Rica offer discount car rental and car hire service with basic insurance and a cell phone included.”

It is interesting to note that in the san jose costa rica example, the keyword did not appear in the body text of the page at all…

How To Get 10/10 AdWords Quality Score

Introduction:
OK, I thought I’d post this just to show you an example of a website that is attaining a 10/10 quality score as at 1st December 2008.  Surprisingly, it does not include all of the elements that you’d normally assume to be present for such a feat.  The site and adwords keyword that I will be looking at are in the Car Rental industry, but more specifically, and here is some link love for the owner of the site for allowing me to analyse it, the Costa Rica Car Rentals industry and the site in question is leading Costa Rican Auto Rental firm, Vamos 4×4.

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AdWords Quality Score Dropped from Great to OK – Why?

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?

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