Within that fraction of time the surfer see your ad and makes a conscious decision to click or not to click. So when he clicks, he is taken to your landing page (let’s talk affiliate for a bit) and then he converts or presses back. Now most would tell you that you must always be optimizing your landing pages (which is true) and that you want as many clicks as possible… which is semi-true.

Since the competition has risen is virtually every vertical of CPC advertising you can’t just get all the click in the world, you have to target them more efficiently. One way is negative keywords, which most of us use. For example lets I’m running a campaign for a Free T-Shirt offer that has a shipping cost. I would want to add negative keywords for popular terms that don’t relate or are contrary to my add, like “Free T-Shirt Designer” and “100% Free T-Shirt” if I am broad matching. The second way you can have more targeted clicks is by fixing your adcopy, something often overlooked. So lets say my simple ad is…

Get a Free T-Shirt

Limited Time offer! Tons of Designs to Choose From.

Ok, ok… I know shitty adcopy but anyways, this is going to attract lots of clicks from people wanting a free t-shirt… FREE. Now this offer is for a free t-shirt with a shipping charge, so what are surfers going to do once the see a shipping charge? I’d say 90% will leave feeling emotionally violated and robbed of their innocence… ok maybe not that bad . So we are going to waste a ton of money and get few conversions… So let’s adjust this adcopy.

Get a {Keyword:Default_text} T-Shirt, Free

Limited Time Offer! Tons of Designs, only $4.99 Shipping!

This is a much better ad that will attract more relevant clicks because a keyword your targeting will appear in the headline and more importantly it mentions the $4.99 shipping charge. This way when users click the ad they won’t feel violated that there is a shipping charge involved and people that just don’t want to pay anything won’t bother to click. TaDa! Improved conversions and lower spending! (now just expand your keyword list to offset the possible loss of traffic)

Just be straight forward and honest! Bait and Switch don’t work here!

Affiliate Policy

• We allow affiliates to use AdWords advertising. Please note that we’ll only display one ad for affiliates and parent companies sharing the same Display URL per search query. We also monitor and don’t allow the following:
  • Redirect URLs: Ads that contain Display URLs that automatically redirect to the parent company.
  • Bridge Pages: Ads for webpages that act as an intermediary, whose sole purpose is to link or redirect traffic to the parent company.
  • Framing: Ads for webpages that replicate the look and feel of a parent site.

  https://adwords.google.com/select/guidelines.html

Why does Google try so hard to kill off affiliates? Honestly 95% of the ringtone affiliate landing pages out there are in violation of this policy, and it’s not just ringtones! Insurance, Dating, Heath, and just about any other affiliate program has affiliates sole purpose is to drive traffic to the their affiliate link. Quality score is another issue where they were after MFA (made for ads) sites but ended up hurting affiliate marketers in the process as well. Google says they are always trying to provide a positive user experience, so why do they target aff’s when our entire business model revolves around driving extremely targeted traffic and providing a very positive user experience? More so why are other type of sites like shopping.com not getting stung by Adwords so much? Shopping comparison is essentially the same thing.

I guess I’m just tired of Google walking on affiliates…

In a conversation I had yesterday with the affiliate marketing guru master he reiterated the basic of quality score to me, plus a little more I didn’t know.

Google says…

“…your keyword’s Quality Score considers the clickthrough rate (CTR) and relevance of the keyword, your ad text, and your landing page”

So essentially it consists of 3 things

1. Click through Rate of your Ad
2. Relevance of Keywords and Ad Text
3. Your landing Page

Nothing new here at all, but I was told a couple more things. In relation to your landing page Google first looks at the content to see if it’s relevant, then looks at it’s trust rank/ page rank, then tries to decide if it’s commercial or non-commercial, and finally assigns the landing page value. The biggest thing I didn’t know about was the Commercial/Non-Commercial part of the equation. Since Google is focused on a good user experience they probably see a non-commercial site being more focused on providing information vs. just coaxing someone into buying a product. They will [edit: in my opinion] obviously also assign a lower minimum bid to a non-commercial site because of probability of less funding.

So next, How do you design a landing page to look more informational? I would definitely say get rid of all words “Buy, Sign Up, Sale” or action words related to buying in the text. Also I would plant more information based words in <h2> tags such as “Info, Learn, How To, Information”.

I’ll start doing some split testing of two landing pages soon, one aimed at commercial one non-commercial, and see if the minimum bid is adjusted.

Also thanks to Ken Savage for his consulting on the matter.

(p.s. If you don’t know how to check the quality score of your landing page, go to your Ad Group, click the “keywords” tab, and the click the “Customize columns” and add the Quality Score tab)