Beating Quality Score BS?

[scottspfd82]

I had an idea for a unique angle on promoting a competitive niche(payday loans). After several hours playing with google's keyword tool, I have about 6k longtail keywords that where estimated to be priced around .05 a click for the 1-3 spots, and I think I have enough of them to drive plenty of traffic to my offer.

I'm still new to the PPC game, but I have researched this stuff until my eyes bleed. I decided to try linking directly to the merchants landing page to see if google would let me get away with it. Well, surprise surprise, the moment that I activate the campaign I'm getting slapped with .50-$1.00 minimum bids.

My keywords and ads are all relevant, so I would assume the issue is that google sees the landing page as a merchant instead of a content site, which would make sense.

So the obvious fix would be to build my own content oriented landing page, and have outgoing links to the offer. The problem is that I have a feeling this will kill my conversions. The search terms are all geared for people who want to fill out the lead form. They're not looking for info, they're looking to get a loan, and quick.

I'll probably be forced to figure out a way to make a "landing site" that can convert the offer.

But here's what I'm really wondering. When I was looking at my competitors sites, almost every one of them is a lead capture site, with nothing but a few paragraphs of text and a form, exactly like the site I want to promote. I seriously doubt these guys are paying $1 for clicks. It'd be impossible to run a profitable campaign paying that much. So, somehow they have to be getting around the quality score bs, which makes me think there's got to be a way to do it.

I read the thread "PPC direct to merchant....", although I don't completely understand how that concept works or if that's what I need to try to do. I'm really weary of doing anything that might get me into trouble with google at this point.

So, how the hell are these guys promoting obvious commercial sites and getting around the stupid fuckin' quality score?

I appreciate any feedback on this, I guess for now I'll work on slapping together my own page and see how that works out.

 

[beejeebers]

Heh, I wrote that direct to merchant thread, you missed the part where you have a real site with a real landing page to the real merchant, but anywho...

If your competition has just a landing page, they won't last long, so don't worry about them. YOu need to build a landing site for payday loans. Think of things related to payday loans, (ie. all other types of loans/mortgages/credit cards). Now make a loans page, a mortgage page, a credit card page, a payday loan page and make sure you have a privacy policy and hopefully a sitemap. Link all those pages together, and voila, you now have a landing site.

Now try pointing the ad to your payday loan page which is part of your "landing site".

Google likes this approach alot.

 

[RobJ]

Probably the main reason why you saw $1.00 per click requests is that a big part of the whole Quality Score thing has alot to do with the domain.

When google "slaps" someone, its not something they do to the AdWords account, its the domain...

There seems to be different levels of the slap/quality score/landing page thing...

The first level is the little quick bot that asses the landing url to make sure its fairly relavent... this is the one that you can fix by making some changes to your copy and such... not really the "slap"

The "Slap" seems to involve the entire domain getting assigned a negative mark... probably more human involvment on this one... I dont know...

So what you are seeing is the result of the affiliate domain now being in google's list of somewhat permanently slapped domains...

I was hit by the Nov6 slap and the domains that were affected have never recovered... and any new ads I create will automaitcally be hit with $5 per click if it points to those domains, even if I make a brand new page... if I change the landing url to another domain... poof 5 cent ads...

 

[thegrin]

i have a nice landing site, with the right content, the right links, ect.

my domain is (example) www.treatwintercold.com how is it possible that i get a $10.00 minimum for "treat winter cold" keyword while in another adgroup i have really similar keywords with no minimum??

 

[scottspfd82]

I'm obviously not an expert here. But I would guess this comes down to the keyword level quality score.

Does your ad copy have the words "treat winter cold" in it? Are the keywords "treat winter cold" included on your landing page?

Maybe someone can give you a better answer, but from what you're saying I think the problem would have to be at the keyword level.

 

[Aequitas]

i have a nice landing site, with the right content, the right links, ect.

my domain is (example) www.treatwintercold.com how is it possible that i get a $10.00 minimum for "treat winter cold" keyword while in another adgroup i have really similar keywords with no minimum??

First you should provide a link to the site so we can see where you wen't wrong, who knows maybe the keyword your bidding on is just really competitive I'm not going to get into this with ya because your hi-jacking scottspfd82 thread.

scottspfd82, beejeebers, RobJ,

From what I personally know and learned about QS means that your all right in your own ways but to simply sum it up.

scottspfd82,

I think you might have overlooked one small aspect and forgive me if I'm wrong but when you linked directly to the merchant did you use your affiliate URL?, (Example: http://makeme money.com?affiliateid=334234 and so on) if you used this kind of URL for your destination URL then that was your mistake.

Google knows all about affiliate URLs and since they are associated with doing business in a comercial environment you'll get hit with high priced clicks, no matter how much low priced keywords you've got.

So double check what you used as our destination URL and if its your affiliate link, which I'm sure it probably is then get rid of it and create a landing site like beejeebers was talking about, the trick with a landing site is simple, create 5 to 10 relevant pages on one domain name, each of those pages should be their own type of landing site, from there link them together and do some cloacking (redirects) of your affiliate links and now Google will think your just a guy trying to promote an informational website instead of trying to make a buck.

 

[scottspfd82]

Thanks for the replies everyone.

Aequitas, yeah, you're right, I used my affiliate link as the destination. I've done this before, probably a month ago, with no quality score issues, I'm certain that's the problem though.

I've already bought the domain for my landing site, for some reason gaydaddy is taking all day to get the domain pointed at my server, so I'm going to get that built at some point today.

I have a question regarding the redirects and cloaking. This may sound newbish, so I'm sorry.

When you talk about the redirects, are you suggesting sending the traffic to your landing site, and just have the affiliate links cloaked, or are you suggesting to have the landing site built, show it as your display URL, but have the page automagically redirect the visitor directly to the merchant page?

If it's the former, I can handle it. If it's having it redirect, is that against googles TOS? If not, is there an easy way to do this? I would assume it's a PHP redirect of some kind. I've tried googling to figure out how to do this, I don't know PHP and can't seem to find a whole lot on the topic. Any advice here?

Thanks again for the help.

 

[skylark]

Here's a solid reference: http://www.wickedfire.com/affiliate-marketing/8126-affliate-link-cloaking-tutorial.html

Thanks for the replies everyone.

Aequitas, yeah, you're right, I used my affiliate link as the destination. I've done this before, probably a month ago, with no quality score issues, I'm certain that's the problem though.

I've already bought the domain for my landing site, for some reason gaydaddy is taking all day to get the domain pointed at my server, so I'm going to get that built at some point today.

I have a question regarding the redirects and cloaking. This may sound newbish, so I'm sorry.

When you talk about the redirects, are you suggesting sending the traffic to your landing site, and just have the affiliate links cloaked, or are you suggesting to have the landing site built, show it as your display URL, but have the page automagically redirect the visitor directly to the merchant page?

If it's the former, I can handle it. If it's having it redirect, is that against googles TOS? If not, is there an easy way to do this? I would assume it's a PHP redirect of some kind. I've tried googling to figure out how to do this, I don't know PHP and can't seem to find a whole lot on the topic. Any advice here?

Thanks again for the help.

 

[engaged]

come on, QS is cake... if you get f'd on a domain though, just need to try new stuff on a new domain

 

[scottspfd82]

come on, QS is cake... if you get f'd on a domain though, just need to try new stuff on a new domain

So far I've experimented with about 6 different PPC campaigns. I've done direct linking before, along with my own landing pages, and this is the first time I've had an immediate issue with QS.

I'm guessing it's the domain.

Thanks for the tutorial skylark, very helpful.

So, I've got a domain for this and set up a wordpress blog with an article about avoiding payday loan scams.

I want to make sure I'm understanding this right. With the redirects, are we talking about setting up a campaign with the destination and display URL www mysite.com, and then immediately redirecting the traffic to the merchants offer? Or are we just doing this so google doesn't automatically tag our page as an affiliate landing page?

 

[scottspfd82]

Now they're just trying to piss me off.

I've got my landing site built. I went to the first ad group, re-wrote the ad, changed the URL's, and viola, QS is great, getting 5 cent clicks.

I can't get any of my other adgroups working though. I've changed the URL's, and tried re-writing the ads several times. The ads are all relevant to the keywords, and the keywords are all relevant to the offer and my landing page.

I've got one adgroup working fine, so I don't think the landing page is a problem. I would try to jack up my bids, but I'm getting $1-$5 minimum bids. Any suggestions?

Thanks.

-Scott

 

[bitsdawg]

If I knew how to make google easy, I'd be sitting on a beach somewhere. Of course, there's this ebook..... LOL.

yeah, I've started a new campaign on a new domain, and it runs well for awhile and then BLAM - either competitors get to me or G slides in and raises bids. Who knows?

I know that when I do get some Google love it converts like a dream.

 

[scottspfd82]

Well, this may be common sense for most of you, but I figure I'll post it in case someone else searches the forum looking for the same info.

I fixed the problem. Instead of just editing the existing adgroups, I had to go back and delete them. Then I re-wrote the ads, and stuck the same keywords back in. Not sure why it worked, maybe rebuilding them triggered another review process, but as of right now all of my adgroups are performing nicely and QS is not an issue. Thanks for the advice on this guys.

 

[pxco]

google doesn't like .info's as much.. i've had the exact same landing site, with the exact same keywords, on the exact same domains except for the TLD.. the .info required higher bids, while the .org had lower bids..

 

[wrstroud]

is there any way to entirely cloak your site from the adwords bot. so for example, you may target certain low priced keywords for a particular niche and then have a redirect to the advertisers landing page, but only show google a keyword rich, nice, and user-friendly site?