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

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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

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

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…

Ok, so what exactly does Quality Score: 10/10 mean?

Well, from the horse’s (Google’s) mouth, “The Quality Score detail gives added insight to each keyword’s Quality Score by rating it on a 1-10 scale. On this scale, 1 is the lowest rating, while 10 is the highest. 1-4 corresponds with Poor, 5-7 with OK, and 8-10 with Great.” A blog post by Reena Shohet over at PayPerClickSearchengines.com cites one advantage of having a higher quality score as, “Account Quality Score has a say in what your minimum bids are when you introduce new search terms where there is little historical data. The better your Account Quality Score, the more grace you get from Google.”

In a nutshell, what this means is that you will receive more benefits from Google’s AdRanking system if you have a higher quality score, which will contribute towards appearing higher in the Sponsored Ads listing.  The major benefit of having a higher quality score will be that your ad will rank higher than competing ads if their quality score is less than yours and you’re both paying the same CPC. Ultimately, higher positions for less cost, although that is a simplified view of things.

How One of My Ads Received A Quality Score: 10/10

The keyword in question was exact match ‘car rentals in san jose costa rica’ with a CTR of 25% in a tightly knitted ‘Costa Rica San Jose’ AdGroup.  The split/tested Ad Text for the ad was/is as follows:

Rent A Car From San Jose
San Jose Costa Rica Car Rentals
Instant Online Reservations
www.vamos4x4.com/san-jose-costa

And the landing page is www.vamos4x4.com.  This is not the only keyword that has a quality score of 10/10 in my campaign but it serves to illustrate how it was achieved (at least for this particular keyword).  Some information which I believe is key to understanding this is the information that appears within the title tag of the html code:

<title>Costa Rica Car Rental | Car Rental San Jose Costa Rica | Vamos Rent-a-Car </title>

You will also find the following in the meta keywords/description tags:

<meta content=“costa rica, car rental, san jose, cheap, discount, 4×4″ name=“keywords”>
<meta content=“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.” name=“description”>

You can see from the code that ‘keyword’ related terms appear frequently (but not spammy) in the page source but what you will also notice, perhaps quite surprisingly, is that the major keyword behind the campaign does NOT actually appear in the body text of the landing page at all but a variation of it (with a spelling mistake no less!) appears within a <h2> tag in the page footer.

Now for all intents and purposes, I would not describe this page as a 10/10 but clearly, there are factors at work here that are slightly out of logical thinking – at least to my little mind.

Be Aware of False Quality Scores!

I have achieved a 10/10 quality score many more times but this was achieved with a brand new campaign in a well setup AdGroup with a historically well performing CTR but it was a ‘temporary’ quality score until Google had a more in depth snoop around, at which time I have seen scores drop minimally to 9/10 and in a few cases substantially to 3/10  (this was an affiliate link which google nailed within an hour of launching), so you need to be aware that when you set up new keywords in relatively new adgroups, you can be given a flase 10/10 score whilst Google figures you out.  The thing to take away form this is that if you do receive a QS of 10/10, even if G doesn’t like you, it does suggest to me that somewhere in its algorithms, it does appreciate what you’ve done but that it has overruled it with an iron fist.  In short, I guess it means you’re nearly there, but it doesn’t like something.

How I Achieved a Quality Score of 10/10 – Summary:

• A CTR of 25%
• Exact matching keyword
• Keyword also present in source code title, meta keywords and meta description tags
• Tightly grouped Keywords in tightly knitted AdGroups
• Keywords in AdText but not exactly the same keywords as the actual keyword you are targeting
• Keyword did not appea rin body text of page but did appear in a <h2> tag in the landing page footer

I believe there are a few ways to achieve the almighty 10 out of 10 but I hope that this post helps you to apply its contents to your own campaigns and hopefully get that all important 10/10 Great!

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.

Finally, something that actually did help me to increase my CTR

We’ve all been there, in that place where the wall looks so inviting to bang your head against because your damn AdWords PPC Campaign has just screwed you over again…15,000 impressions and only 167 clicks, another great day of a 1.1% CTR – bang there goes my quality score which I’ve been working so bloody hard to sort out!

I use PPC to drive traffic to a number of CJ affiliate sites and my CTR was suffering hugely and because of that, my whole campaign was running at a loss.  I had read all of the ‘how to optimize my adwords campaign’ posts on various internet marketing forums around the net and I got the philosophy.  I understood themed adgroups, related keywords, relevant ad text but I couldn’t help but feel like there was something missing.  Some dark secret that all the super-affiliates understand and I just missed.

I needed an action plan and I wanted to know, for definite:

• How I should really set up a Google AdWords campaign (by actually seeing one working)
• How to find high converting keywords that can make me, like it does for so many other AdWords Gurus,  thousands per day
• How to write relevant, really catchy Ads to achieve that holy grail of double digit clickthroughs
• How to stop wasting all my PPC budget every day and turn losing campaigns into winning ones
• How to immitate this success in another niche once I have a winning campaign and leverage that too for max profits
• How to protect my profit-making campaign from competitorswho spend more time researching my campaign than they do promoting their own!

And so I thought that the time for forum trolling and lurking was over and I needed to take real action and actually go somewhere to learn something for sure.  I scoured the net and tried a few software programs, books and other products that could potentially help me:

Google Massacre
A Step-by-Step, Very Aggressive AdWords Technique That Actually Works:
This guide to adwords levels the playing field once and for all, wiping out the big dogs overnight and massacring the adwords fat cats who’ve been sitting pretty on there multi-million dollar a year campaigns for way too long now.

Rating: 4/5 Well Worth The Investment
Learn More About Google Massacre

Ad Infiltration
A Method For Milking Targeted Clicks From Tough Industries For Pennies:
Because while every other PPC marketer is either blowing huge wads of cash bidding on competitive keywords or frustrated that they’re getting a measly two clicks per day, I’m stomping my way through highly competitive markets, easily funneling thousands of visitors a day to my affiliate offers for pennies per click.

Rating: 3/5 You Will Learn A Little Known Technique That Reduces Your CPC
Learn More About Ad Infiltration

Project: PPC
‘Leaked’ Document Containing Some Inner AdWords Secrets:
With Project PPC, you will be given unrestricted access to the ever-revealing document about Google AdWords PPC that will show you exactly what to do, when to do it and how to do it at the lowest cost possible yet with the highest possible results.

Rating: 2/5 Not As Informative or ‘Secret’ As I Would Have Liked
Learn More About Project:PPC

If you have the spare cash, all of these tools, except maybe Project:PPC, are worth having on your hard drive, but if you have to choose just one of them to kickstart your campaign and get those CTRs rising, you need to buy this one.  I found the holy grail of increasing CTR with Double Digit CTR, a succession of easy-to -understand tutorials, videos, soundfiles and pdfs that really made a difference to my PPC efforts. I can’t recommend this product high enough!

Finally, something that actually did help me to increase my AdWords CTR

Double Digit CTR
A Fool-Proof Set Of Tutorials And Tips For Sending Your CTR Skyrocketing:
The Double Digit CTR course is delivered via nine punchy videos with PDF Cheat Sheet and MP3 recordings. You will race through this course fast because it passes the same knowledge to you that allowed the writer to quit his day job. You don’t need to get bogged down with hours of boring ebooks or old methods to start getting the results.

Rating: 5/5 This is the fastest and most effective one-time-investment PPC enhancement course on the market.
Learn More About Double Digit CTR

All of these products are great tools for actually learning how to do, rather than just lurking around forums trying to pick it all up.  This, as I found out, can take years and sometimes, its just better to jump right into something that you know will give you proven results and any of these products will give you access to knowledge that you never even knew existed.

What these products teach are the bits that just seemed to elude me before I started really digging into it…Don’t make my mistake!