I am SO FRUSTRATED With AdWords I Want to Scream.

[The Oilman]

I was once a whiz at google adwords, always getting great Quality Scores and conversions

Then google 'slapped' people, and I was always able to beat it.


BUt now, I CANT beat it. I get "OK" quality scores, and then some of the terms shoot up to poor.

I have completely targeted content, keyword based ads that exactly match the content, tailored landing pages, tiny ad groups, Privacy policy, contact us, and everyting esle that everyone says to have.

THe ONLY thing that I can think could be causing my problems is the fact that I didn't have ton of inbound links to my sites before I started.


I have one site that has thrived thru all of this, and always gets GREAT on everything. But its because it has history with google.



I assume it IS about the inbond links. Google may be sick of people using adwords to test-market the conversion probability of their sites?

I REALLY need some help here.. can anyone give a man a hand?

[SirKhan]

First time I hear about this setup: most of your ads are doing extremely poor but one still in good shape. Hm, I too would like to see an answer to this!

[Nathan Hangen]

I'm struggling too. I have some brand new campaigns, that should be killing it, and I can't get past 3 or 4 QS. In the past, I've been able to get 7+ easily. The only thing I can think is that Google doesn't like squeeze pages or sales pages. It seems that you need inbound or outbound links on your page. Maybe throwing them in the footer might work?

I'm going to try it on my opt-ins with blended text so that it doesn't get clicked.

[garyv]

I'm finding that sometimes it's the account itself. The account somehow weighs into their algorithm. I'll have an ad and website that will score a lousy quality score in one account, then move it to another account and the same ad and website will score well.

[Nathan Hangen]

Of course, I've sent 2 emails to support and the only reply I received was a textbook answer. They obviously didn't even look at my account. That kind of pissed me off, considering every new campaign gets an auto 1/10 QS.

[enderZ]

Considering you did all the "regular" stuff properly, what u describe is probably due to bad history.

Bad history of your account, or bad history of your domain.

You can test it easily, change the domain name and see if QS changes, if not open a new account, and it should work.

[cncbuss]

Maybe the reason I'm having so much difficulty getting off the ground. I've heard that adwords penalizes the poor marketer and rewards the goods ones. But now it sounds more and more like they are trying to make it as difficult as possible for 'the average joe' to advertise successfully. I mean, If you were attaining success last month, why shouldn't you be able to do the same this month?
Has anyone here bought, studied and put into practice Perry Marshall's definitive guide to Google Adwords program? Would that be a helpful resource or am I wise to asume that I'll never really make it on Google?
By the way, what is the second best (and third and fourth for that matter) web site to ue for advertising on a CPC basis? I know there's Yahoo and MSN, but which is better? Which is a proven easy to follow marketplace?
Thanks for your input.

[jamesviago]

in our business we have experienced the symptoms you describe, but so far we been able to find the problems and fix them.

i don't think we've ever had to add more links though - about us, privacy, contact and buy now are nearly all we use, and generally the only inbound links are the adwords ads themselves.

it's almost always a relevance problem OR breaking one of those vague, incomprehensible "hints" buried in the AdWords help system. but so far, we've always found a logical reason, and been able to fix it.

some are weird. for example, we've learned to be very shy of certain words - the obvious ones like "sale", "free" and "cheap" always drive up the price, but there are plenty more to watch out for.

here's a story that might help.

the target subject was "manufacturing business performance" and we had 34 adgroups. so far so good.

one adgroup was tightly niched on measurement and key performance indicators.

we split that group to separate 'measurement' from 'performance indicators' and suddenly it all went haywire. now, we did not know it had gone haywire. we thought we were way cool and clever for targeting niches more tightly, because impressions and clicks shot up significantly overnight.

BUT

CTR went south. we did not notice - i mean, 0.89% slips to 0.72%... so what right? and total clicks were rising fast because impressions were rising, so woohoo!

but, it was a false win. next thing you know, QS starts to slide (7, 6, 5)... CPC starts to rise ($0.30, $0.50, $1.00...)... keywords start getting the 'min bid' message... average position crashes and impressions suffer... all this in less than 48 hours.

if we had left it even 2-3 more days, i guarantee it would have reeked of "slap" - because it's a fast downward spiral towards QS 3, 2, 1, especially if we're talking 10,000+ impressions per day on the search network causing rapid trending in QS.

then impressions collapse completely and it looks unrecoverable.

well, we spotted the slide in time. and we fixed it before the inevitable "slap" had time to take hold.

here's how.

first, assume that this rapid downward spiral is a RELEVANCE problem. somehow, rightly or wrongly, adwords has become confused about the subject matter. so, you must find out what's causing the confusion.

aside: remember, adwords is sophisticated but stupid. it does not 'understand' our language and it does not 'know' what we are talking about. it simply infers the context by word-association... based on users search behaviour. so it's incredibly accurate a lot of the time, and horribly inaccurate under certain conditions.

the process we use to reverse a downward slide to slapville is this: we hunt with the keyword tool for terms that adwords thinks is relevant, but we know for sure that they are way off-topic. then we surf using google search to see what we find. then we get rid of any obvious relevance conflicts using negative keywords.

in our story, we found that a magazine called "Performance Cars", plus some more obvious things, seemed to confuse the adwords keyword relevance algorithm rather badly...

here are the negative keywords that sorted out the relevance problem:

-anxiety
-automotive
-bicycle
-bicycles
-bike
-bikes
-car
-cars
-chips
-enhancement
-exhaust
-hemi
-java
-motorbike
-motorbikes
-motorcycle
-motorcycles
-sex
-sexual
-torque
-tuning
-vehicle
-viagra
-vista
-wheel
-wheels

instantly the trend reversed: bogus impressions were stopped, QS rises... CPC falls... keywords stop getting the 'min bid' message... average position improves and relevant impressions increase.

this also explains how a previously ok group suddenly dies: if a new search trend occurs (like performance cars magazine suddenly gets a lot of twitter buzz and people start searching for it in the geography your ads are targeting), then your adgroup, that you haven't touched, suddenly gets belted for poor relevance.

not your fault that it happened, but it's up to you to figure out why and sort it out.

hopefully this helps someone, anyone, with these slapping issues. i know the advice is often "get a new acount"... but that is a real nuisance and you'll probably just get slapped again once the grace period wears off.

we must try to help each other dodge these slaps in the first place.

old hands: please keep adding to this thread - given all the slapping complaints here i'm dreading the day we'll get one we cannot figure out, and i'm dead keen to avoid that if at all possible. every word of experience is potential gold on this subject.

cheers,
james

[The Oilman]

Interesting James.

I'll have to read that again in the morning.



I think the biggest factor (in my case) is inbound links.

I think maybe google is trying to cut down on people using adwords to test market. So they now reward people whoa re more established and SEO'd with many inbound links.

Because I have one site that I've set up recently that is doing ok. But it did have a nice chunk of inbound links.. and it ranks in the top 10 for some of its main terms...



To you guys who said to set up a different account: How can I do this without Big G getting mad at me?

[The Oilman]

James
Just re-read your thing

Very wise.

Use googles tools to find neg words.


I've also heard its wise to look at wikipedia and the other top sites with your keywords and extract some of their keywords and phrases...

[Web Dummie]

negative keywords are not used enough in peoples campaigns. Another fix to a similar problem was removing the broad match entirely, leaving only the phrase and exact match. Sometimes just the exact to avoid any possibility of confusion.

A good book to read about adwords is Googles TOS. They explain what there looking for. They want a real site with relevant, fresh content.

[Giannii01]

ah good old google if only we knew how their algorithms worked we would all be superstars. I can't seem to get it either i have pages totally dedicated to certain topics and get ok quality scores with those keywords and then with other keywords get great quality scores with the keyword having 50% relevance. Go figure

[BigVin]

If anything Google helps the little guy and penalizes the big guys because they don't get any advantage.

How targeted are the keywords you guys are using?

[spires]

Google also take your bounce rate and time spent on your website in to consideration.
So it might be worth checking those out as well.

Good Luck

[The Oilman]

Anyone know how to set up multiple adwords accounts?

[viajesyexito]

Just Buy a new .info Domain (Similar to your real domain), Use Lpgen and speddppc and then redirect to the sales page.

Google slapped me 4 times. The cost of fix this everytime is only 0.99 Cents in Goddady.

Is like a bad marriage, you try to escape but she pays the rent and your beers.

Regards,

cpatt