Thanks Google, thanks for March Madness. For those of you not hit, or slapped, by the mighty G this month with elevated, outrageous $10+ minimum bids for your precious keywords, you can stop reading. If you know what I’m talking about, good luck.

Every so often Google updates their Adwords quality score algorithm and in doing so crushes the campaigns of many an affiliate marketer by finding fault in their method, and forcing them to pay 10 to 20 times their current bid to remain active.

Unfortunately, looks like The G ran another such update last week wiping out a few of my campaigns in the process. Campaigns that were working, that enjoyed good click-thru-rates and that were profitable.

But The G doesn’t care about that. Were my campaigns for the greater good of society, probably not. Most were your basic affiliate marketing PPC venture we see all the time: Click the ad, go to landing page, sell the product, etc.

And to be honest, I get what The G is doing, but when they also slap my good, non-affiliate site with the same QS that’s where it gets frustrating.

We’ll never really know what The G is doing but we do know why they are doing it, and that’s to make money. Google stock price has nearly been cut in half and the reality of the company is is that they are largely a one trick pony; that is they rely on ad clicks to make a buck.

The more they charge per ad click, the more they make. Obviously there’s an economic balance in there as well, but Google makes their money off people clicking those text ads you see after you enter a search or that you see on many websites, this one included.

And with this latest sweep it appears they are trying to target the little affiliate guy who really can’t afford to meet the ridiculous minimum bids due to profit margins or the sheer stupidity of agreeing to do it.

However, the algorithm change likely hit the merchants as well. As with most updates, The G hands out the “slap” or the “pat”, the pat being the “Nice job, but to stay active you’ll need to raise just little bit. I’m sure you can afford it.”

So the merchant themselves, who also (and importantly) may not have the PPC savvy as the little affiliate guy, got the “pat” and probably won’t mind paying an extra few dimes and quarters to keep their ads afloat. And to the merchant such an ask will cut into their profit but it shouldn’t cripple their campaigns.

At the end of the day, G cleans up the PPC ad market a little, and those that remain, the higher quality merchants and the remaining PPC affiliate marketers, are asked to pay a little more which likely offsets revenue lost by those that got the boot.

So if you got slapped and you think Google’s going to take it on the chin financially, think again. It’s a bottom line move. in attempt to increase their revenue. Fair enough.
But what do we PPC marketers do to overcome this?

First, spare me the “You need to make your site legit” garbage, because that’s not totally true. As I said, in addition to my affiliate sites getting whacked, so too did a real site that’s several years old with unique content and thousands on well-index pages, loads fine and fast, etc. Luckily for me it’s no big loss.

That said, you can try to make your site adhere to the Adwords guidelines, which basically means don’t make your site/landing page look like an affiliate site. Get backlinks, get unique content, keep it spam-free, privacy policy, terms, outbound links, etc. Although many people who did just that with their site – myself included – still got the slap, so there’s no guarantee it will work.

But if you have an aged e-commerce site that’s branded and gets decent organic traffic this may be your only option. Again, do everything possible to not make it look like an affiliate site and see what happens when the next Adwords update rolls around a month or two from now. It’s quite a wait, but baybe you’ll be back in Google’s good graces.

If, on the other hand, only your landing page got hit, then my best advice is to grab a new domain and switch your campaigns and your landing page design to the new one. Create a new campaign in adwords directed at the new site and in a few days you should be back up and running to some degree, that’s what I’ve done and i’m back to my old bids and QS. And in the meantime you can go back to your old site, do some tweaking give it until the next update.

Other options…

I don’t think it’s a Adwords account ban as some might say. As i said I put up a new domain and it’s running fine. However, I did try to switch my slapped domain for a aged one, one that had never been used for PPC before, but got no luck. So my guess is is that The G long before labled certain sites in its index as “spammy” and unworthy of Adwords even if they have never been used for an Adwords campaign. Your mileage may very, but that’s just what I’m seeing.

You can look into the content network, and give that a try. But be careful, it’s nothing like the search network.

Also, check out the ads currently running in your niche, the ones that were unscathed in the latest update. See what they are doing, maybe you can get some tips, tricks and insight as to how they avoided the slap. Send them a friendly email! Ha. Of course you can always email Google, but you’re probably wasting your time.

And if you really want to stick to Google, short their stock. Then again, if you can’t beat em, join em, and buy their stock, which happens to be up 20 points right now as a write. Hell, if they are going to profit from dumping you, you might as well too! Good luck!

Related Posts on This Topic:
Google Unleashes Another Round of Adwords Slaps
Google Wants to Get to Know You
Yahoo Search Marketing UK Ad Quality Score System Update This Week
Creating a Google Sitemap, a Worthwhile Endeavor?
The Google Grace Period for New Websites

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 2:36 pm and is filed under Adwords, Affiliate Marketing, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.