There’s not much to say in this post other than this is the second and final part of my first attempt to show you how I set up my AdWords PPC Campaign for my affiliate site. There’s lots of things I’m not happy with after watching it back again and I feel like I’ve made some serious blunders with regards to structure but hopefully it’ll offer some useful tips for those new to AdWords PPC for affiliate sites.

I’m going to follow the progress of this campaign and will regularly blog about it as I go. Once I’ve got the full campaign up and running (maybe 50/60 AdGroups?), I’ll lift the lid off my AdWords account again so you can see the entire structure of the setup.

This will be even more valuable if the bar stools site actually starts turning a profit in the meantime!

Set Up an AdWords PPC Campaign for Your Affiliate Site – Part 2

.

Now I’ve always held firmly to the belief that I did not want to use PPC on this site at all because the competition seemed too tough and the return seemed too low. I actually think it still is but I am at the point now where I really want to drive some traffic to this site to get a glimpse of what could be and so, with this in mind, I’m gambling on a little PPC experiment and I want you all to join me…

Set Up a High Quality AdWords PPC Campaign for Your Affiliate Site – Part 1

If you watch this and you want to add in your own tips then please do! If you think you can help, I want to hear…

And, true to my recent promise to spread my work when I’m in a good working mood, I’ve scheduled Part 2 of the “Set Up a High Quality AdWords PPC Campaign for Your Affiliate Site,” for tomorrow

.

I didn’t really have an idea for any content to create today but I resolved to get something on the site. I eventually settled for some ‘best selling deals of March 2010′ posts, where I highlight a couple of favourable looking deals, write a pragraph or so about why they’re doing so well and then link out to the merchant’s site. After completing the post for my new affiliate site, I decided I’d do the same for my older PPC-powered site with no real goal of content in mind.

I ended up writing two posts for the older PPC site as this historically has been my biggest earner and is coming into prime season. This time it was a lot easier to think of content. I simply logged into my google analytics account to see what traffic the site had received and to my surprise the PPC-powered site had experienced its highest traffic day ever yesterday – 174 unique visits with a 45%/45%/10% split between PPC/Organic/Directs-Other. I checked the organic search terms and found a couple of visits from google for the search ‘product type deals’…(where product type = my actual product type but I won’t reveal it yet!) Having tested the search myself on Google, I am ranking #2 in organic SERPS for this term but it seemed easy to hit up #1 spot.

So, after seeing this, it was an easy job to knock up a post highlighting some ‘product type deals:March 2010′. Again, I highlighted 3 of my products for this month and wrote about a paragraph or so about each one with a ‘Buy Today for Only £XXX’ link to my merchant in the post. All my SEO semantics were spot on, H tags, italics, bold, internal links and relevant content and I imagine I’ll take over the #1 spot for this term (it’s not very competitive) in the next couple of weeks.

After making that post I felt pretty good about things and just kept going and wrote another post about one of my products in specific. I highlighted some key (unique) features and made the post. We’ll see how it goes but in short, I managed to write 3 healthy, unique content pages tonight in about 3 hours (they required some minor research and images) – 2 for my PPC site and 1 for my new affiliate site which you’ll have seen mentioned in earlier posts.

I am happy with this work and feel like I have succeeded in something tonight because despite my lack of earnings and my failing enthusiasm, I have gutsed it out and just got down to business. Deep down inside, I know it was worth it.

The new account was just that, completely new with no history and the strategy I used within the new site was something that I would have done within my own account – which must have an overall quality rating of excellent. I realised that this lack of account history combined with my fairly advanced adwords strategy (I used around 150 keywords spread across 18 AdGroups) may have been too much for the new account.

The result was that after the first two days of running this campaign and running up a minor cost of around £25, all my keywords had been reduced to a quality score of 3/10 and were now at the status where google says ‘minimum bid not high enough for first page’ or something similar. I was puzzled at first and immediately increased all CPCs to match the google advice. I left the campaign going for another day and noticed even less impressions and clicks than the two days before…something was wrong and I started to re-assess the situation. Here’s how you can increase your Quality Score from 3/10 to 7/10 in 3 steps.

1. Build Good Quality, Keyword Rich Landing Pages

The first thing I tried was to re-create my landing pages. I adjusted the title, checked the heading tags, checked the in-page text content, made sure I wasn’t redirecting or hiding any links and added a couple of extra paragraphs of content and a couple of images. After a day’s worth of adjusting the page, I was happy that my landing page, whilst not perfect, was good enough to avoid such a low quality score.

2. Check Ad Text, Keywords and AdGroups

I went back into the AdWords account and double checked all ad text, keywords and ad groups to ensure they were well matching and tight. They were.

3. Turn off all AdGroups except one

I then started to think that I was just basically too new for Google to like me. So I tried to immitate a smaller, less knowledgable AdWords user in order to build up some account history. I turned off 17 of my 18 AdGroups so that I was left with only 1. I increased the minimum CPC to the amount that google said I should (£1.50) per click (this had become artificially inflated due to me starting off the account in a poor way and had increased my minimum CPC due to my poor quality score). Now I had to increase my CPC just to get back on the first page of results because I was now confident that if I could get my ads showing, people would click on them.

I did just that and now that everything was in tune, my CTRs for that 4th day increased from less than 1% to between 4-6%.

The following day my quality score increased to 4/10.

I left the campaign running for another day exactly as it was and again, CTRs remained stable at between 4-6%.

The following day my quality score increased to 5/10.

The next day I reduced my minimum CPC (I could see that average CPC paid was about £1.25) to £1.40 and continued to pull in a 5% avge CTR.

I continued this process for about 14 days, each day reducing my CPC a little in line with avge CPC paid the previous day. My CTRs have remained constant since then and I’m now paying less than £1 avge CPC and my quality score on this adgroup has increased to 6/10, with one day fluctuating into 7/10. I am estimating that as I repeat this process across the second of my 18 adgroups, my overall account quality score will increase and as a result, my overall CPCs reduce.

So to put it all in a nutshell: if you are starting a new AdWords account or don’t have a very good historical AdWords Quality Score performance record then start small with one very tight adgroup and refine/hone it until it starts to obtain a better quality score. When you are happ at around 7/10 or 8/10, open up your next adgroup and build outwards form there.

Happy bidding….

The problem with this method is that since Wednesday last week (5 days ago), AdWords has suggested that my quality score is 3/10 for about 80% of my keywords. This has then had the knock on effect of increasing my minimum keyword bid in some cases by over 100%.

How To Prevent Poor AdWords Quality Scores

This is a stark reminder for me that prior to ever turning on my AdWords campaign, I should have had a landing page setup for each keyword group I wanted to target. The problem I’m now going to have is reversing the penalties and from my experience, it’s a lot easier to fall down than to get up when it comes to Google. This is what I should have done to prevent this from happening to me:

1. Research tightly grouped keywords in small AdGroups
2. Prepare keyword rich, well written landing pages for each of the target adgroups
3. Turn on campaign

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!

With the first method, you will find that google may intially give you a decent ‘inital’ quality score value but you’ll find after a day or so (in some cases less depending on volume), that you’ve been slapped – a google penalty which penalises non-relevant ads with high CPCs. The AdWords system automatically finds affiliate links in destination urls as non-relevant and will therefore always slap you for it (you’ll end up paying $5 per click or something crazy like that). There is a guide available to help you fight off the google slap but my honest advice is to avoid this direct linking method at all costs. Besides, you can have more control over your own landing pages which will ultimately help you split test for better conversions.

To use your own landing pages, direct traffic to them and receive a much higher quality score when promoting affiliate products, read this post to see a live example of how I did it with a clickbank product.

When you’ve finished reading that, you might then want to read about how get a 10/10 AdWords Quality score.

Like everyone else looking for the solution to this problem, I googled it. I eventually found my way to a popular software program that you’ve probably heard of already called Xtreme Conversions. This was the first method I tried to successfully monitor my conversions.

This software basically generates a piece of code that you paste into your affiliate landing page which then records all the keywords users searched for. The trick with this software though is that it automatically appends either a TID (for clickbank products) or SID (for CJ products) to the click through. How this works is it gets the keyword from the AdWords ad, passes it through its software, records the keyword and assigns it a numerical ID. This numerical ID becomes your TIDs and your SIDs. When you make a sale via CJ, the SID numerical value will be assigned to the sale and will show up in your CJ sales reports. To find out which keyword generated that SID, log into your Xtreme Conversions page and it will show you a list of every keyword and its assigned ID. From this table, you can see that SID 45 for example, came from the AdWords keyword ‘Blue Widget’.

Each time a sale is made, an SID is appended to the sale and you can reverse track that to the keyword level to see which keywords are performing for you. Obviously you can cut the ones that arent.

Working with WordPress

For my affiliate sites I like to use WordPress. I like to use wordpress because its easy to update, has thousands of available free themes online and has a virtually unlimited stream of plugins and extras to help give my users a more comprehensive experience. Anyway, I found that if I used Xtreme Conversions (the none Pro version), that although it was tracking my keywords well, I couldn’t quite figure out how to set it up so that the code that it generates only needed to be pasted into my header.php file. If I only had one static landing page then the XC code and setup would have been perfect but because WordPress uses the same header include to generate every page, I found that it was generating an extra ‘frequency’ each time a page was loaded, even by the same user, and this distorted my stats. If you go and have a look at the Xtreme Conversions page, you will see some screenshots that will make more sense of what I’m talking about.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, the only way I could get it working properly with my wordpress pages was to either upgrade to the Pro version or install a php plugin to wordpress that would allow me to insert php code directly to posts. I tried the php plugin but it still did not work as intended and by that point, I was fed up with faffing around so looked for another alternative.

Simple, Free, Effective Way to Track AdWords Keywords via CJ

I went back to google and tried again. This time I found an old thread on the Digital Point forum that showed me what I needed to do in a nutshell. Now although this didn’t work for me right out of the hat, it did lead me to the location where I was finally able to put the whole thing together and this is how I did it:

1. Log into your AdWords campaign and setup all of your different ads so that they pass the exact keyword search typed in by the user to get to you. With Google AdWords, you can use the Dynamic Keyword Insertion to achieve this goal like so:

Your adwords destination url:

http://www.yourdomainhere.com/yourlandingpagehere.php?kw={keyword}

You can see the bold at the end. This is what you need to append to the end of your destination url in your adwords text ad/ad. What this does is it will add the {keyword} the user searched for to the end of the string so that the url passed to your page will be:

http://www.yourdomainhere.com/yourlandingpagehere.php?kw=your keyword

Now what we need to do is set up a way to pass that keyword to CJ by adding an SID to the end of all of our outgoing CJ affiliate links. So that the outgoing link would look like this:

http://www.cjlinkwouldgohere.com/cjlandingpageorproducthere.php?SID=keyword

This can be achieved with the following php script:

<?php
$keyword = $_GET[’q'];
if(!strcmp($keyword, “”))
{
echo ‘<a href=”http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-2412142-10482525?sid=Default”>Anchor</a>’;
} else {
echo ‘<a href=”http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-2412142-10482525?sid=’ . $keyword . ‘>Anchor</a>’;
}
?>

You should re-write this code because if you copy and paste some characters such as the ‘ or ” can get mixed up by your browser/my page. If all of your links are being generated in this way, then you will be able to track your keywords via CJ and see which ones are making you money.

If you are using wordpress like I do, then the plugin you need to be able to insert this code where your link needs to go is called phpexec. Just write the code inside a blog post or page but make sure the code is inside some <phpcode> </phpcode> tags.

My thanks go to Jim Karter who helped me track my adwords conversions with CJ on his original post here.

Hopefully it will help you too!

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.

I have two pages targeting the keywords xbox red ring of death [one] and [two]. Now I have used my ‘about page’ in this particular case as an excuse to write good, related content. The target keyword in both of these cases is ‘how to fix the red ring of death’ using exact matching keywords.

Now on page one, I have really written the content around this phrase whilst in page two, I have divested slightly. The difference is that page one receives a quality score of 10/10 whilst page 2 only scores 8/10.

Project: Fixing the Xbox 360 Red Ring of Death

So, how did I do it and what is actually different about the content?

Well, first of all I have to be honest and say I didn’t write the content myself but took advice from a great professional content writer whose quality of work constantly excels all expectations and who charges a more than fair price for the priviledge. Actually, at the moment, he’s running a limited time special offer deal so if you want to increase your landing page quality but just don’t have the time (like me!), then make sure you give this a look ASAP.

Ok, so back to the point at hand, how exactly did we do it? Well, as with any content you should be writing it for the end user, not the search engine spiders or PPC bots etc. This means you need to create a structurally and intellectually sound piece of writing using the core target keywords (‘how to fix the red ring of death’) and base the article around it. This doesn’t mean spam the heck out of the article by frequently referring to the keyword, but by perhaps including the keyword and variations of it in every other paragraph.

It’s also important to create section titles using html header tags with the target phrase (or a slight variation of it) in the article too. This adds structure. For example, in our case you’ll see that the main page title on the how to fix an xbox red ring of death page has variations of the target keyword in it.

To tie that into AdWords and PPC, I am running one Text Ad in an AdCampaign titled ‘Xbox Red Ring of Death Fix’ and in an AdGroup with only one keyword in it ‘how to fix red ring of death’:
100% Proven Xbox 360 Fix
Finally! Red Ring Fix That Takes
Just 30 Mins And Works Every Time
www.affiliatemusketeer.com/xbox360

My landing page title on the 10/10 quality score page is “How To Fix The Red Ring of Death on the XBOX 360″ whilst on the 8/10 score page it is “Why Am I Helping You Fix The Red Ring of Death on the XBOX 360?”.

You see how one is more targeted and specific? This is also a major contributing factor as to why one page outperforms another (at least in terms of AdWords Quality Score).

Summarise How To Increase Quality Score via Well Written Landing Pages:

• Write well targeted content (or get someone like Rob to do it for you!)
• Make sure you create very tightly targeted AdWords Campaigns, AdGroups and Ads with as tightly groups target keywords as possible
• Make sure you make use of the landing page title tag and keep it very closely linked to your target kewywords and AdWords factors (Campaign/AdGroup/TextAd)
• Structure your content well by using header tags (h1, h2, h3 etc) to groups paragraphs into ‘mini chapters’. You should use h1 only once on your page – at the very top is best, and then h2, h3, h4 etc for decreasingly important headers – but still a variant of the main page theme.

If you’d like more examples of some of my high quality score adwords landing pages then please feel free to drop me an email or post a comment on the blog.

• 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