The Scenario…

You write an ad for Google’s AdWords system. The ad copy starts with a decent or even good Quality Score (QS) and then no more. The QS starts decent or high and trails off…

Initial Quality Score

Your ad’s initial quality score is determined by an algorithm that calculates the relevance of your ad and landing page (LP) to the keyword in question. If you optimize your ad copy and your LP tor the specific keyword then you should receive a good initial quality score.

Your ad copy consists of the following:

• Headline
• Description Line #1
• Description Line #2
• Display URL
• Destination URL

Optimizing your ads

Optimizing your ad is usually as simple as including the keyword you are advertising on in as many of the ad copy components as possible. If the search term (keyword) you are advertising on is 3 words, 4, or more then sometimes the ad will only make sense (to a human) when you use 1 or 2 of the words in your longer search term.

It’s also a good idea to have the keyword in the url of your landing page, which puts it in the destination url. In addition, you can put the keyword somewhere in your display url, since it won’t affect the destination url.

Optimizing your Landing Page

Optimizing your LP for AdWords is the same as optimizing it for SEO purposes. Use the keyword in the page name or path. For example, if your keyword is “women’s tennis” name your page “womens-tennis.php” or “womens-tennis.htm”. Google will recognize your keywords in the URL.

On the page SEO factors also apply. All of these factors are important when for both AdWords and SEO:

• Use the keyword in the page title, keyword and description meta tags
• Use the search term inside heading (“h1″, “h2″, “h3″, …) html tags on the page
• Use the keyword throughout the content of your page

On Site, but Off Page Factors

Google likes to know you are a legitimate business that will stand behind your product and not just some fly by night operation. As a result links to the Privacy Policy, Disclaimers and Contact Us are important QS factors for your landing page. Also, include a link to your Sitemap – they like to know you are more than just a silo site with a sales page and a few other pages scraped from the web.

Quality Score factors after the ad has run for a while

The most important QS factor (after your initial score) are your ads’ Click-Through-Rate (CTR). Almost immediately Google begins calculating your CTR and using for QS adjustments. The necessary CTR for a good quality score is dependent on your competition’s CTR. I’ve seen estimates of 0.5% CTR being a good CTR benchmark for most campaigns. My own experience has been that some keywords are good with 0.5% CTR while others, again depending on the competition, require 2% or better.

If your ad is inactive it’s usually because…

An inactive ad has either an initial quality score that was poor and this made it all but impossible to ever run and it went inactive. Or, the CTR for a good initial quality score is poor and it damaged the quality score to the point where the ad went inactive.

You have 3 options to fix the problem

1. Delete the keyword. This is often a good solution because the poor quality of the keyword stops becoming a drag on the quality score of your entire campaign. Campaigns have a quality score based on all the keywords, so a poor keyword can damage the quality of other keywords.
2. Improve the QS. Generally this means improving the CTR by rewriting the ad copy.
3. Increase your maximum CPC bid – but do this as a last resort

A recent Google slap…

One of the forums I monitor made reference to a recent Google slap to a lot of affiliate marketers. Essentially, well performing campaigns with high QS and CTR were slapped and literally got a QS of 1 out of 10 overnight.

It is speculated that silo style affiliate marketing sites – a site you use to push someone else’s product without much additional content – are being targeted. Google has never liked silo style sites (even though it fooled the algorithm). And iFramed sites are explicitly against the AdWords terms of service.

The net effect is that many people with profitable sites have been slapped. Google will send little or no traffic to these sites no matter what changes they make because, it is believed, the domain has been added to a black list.

If I’ve been slapped, what can I do?

Very little I’m afraid. If you haven’t been slapped you can try to cloak your affiliate URLs; several people report having their site with cloaked links survive the initial slap. If you’ve been slapped you might try buying a new domain, putting your silo style site on it, and cloaking your affiliate links.

Your best bet is to simply ad real content to your domain. I imagine some of this can be scraped, some should be your own content or at least your own modification of scraped content.