Google's Made Me Their Bitch

M

mereo

New member
Feb 5, 2009
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Alright, I feel like I'm starting to get the hang of PPC - I've actually managed PPC campaigns for a mid-sized e-commerce site in the past, so I know PPC, I've just been learning the ropes with affiliate marketing for a while now.

However, Google's slapped me so many freaking times at this point, I'm just about ready to give up (either on PPC or Google).

I've gotten to a decent point - June was my best month yet, with my best day (unfortunately, only 4 or 5 days got even close to this point before Google really started f'ing with me) hitting $1k revenue/commissions against about $450 spend. I also had some crap days where I ended up in the hole $100 ~ $200 at the end of the day.

Then, Google started slapping me. QS of 1/10 - specifically, the QS details show "Relevance: No Problems", "Landing Page: Poor", "Landing Page Performance: No Problems". Min front page bids of $10.

The first time it happened, they slapped one campaign, I setup a new domain/site/campaign and it ran for 5-6 days before it got slapped. Now, it seems like I can't run a campaign for more than 2-3 days before it gets slapped. The amazing thing is, I have 2 older campaigns that probably SHOULD be slapped and they haven't been. Still running.

I setup a new account, decided to setup a whole new LP (yeah, my LP's probably weren't what Google wanted to see - I had some content, contact us/terms/about/etc. pages, but they were a fairly common style lander that a lot of affiliates are using right now). Decided this time I'd do it legit - I built out a huge site using Wordpress and tons of content. Totally different style of LP, and since I am promoting rebills I decided to see if disclosing the terms any bolder would help appease the Google overlords. So, content, all the requiste pages, a fairly big notice to the user about the negative option rebill.

The campaign ran for 7 days, then Google slapped the entire domain (given all the content on the domain, I decided to use it for 2 different campaigns, it fit with the style of site I had put together).

The only thing I can figure was that it was my CTR - various adgroups in the campaign had different CTR's, ranging from 0.69% to 2.26%. Google probably isn't a fan of the sub-1% CTR's, but if that's the case, wouldn't the QS details say "Relavance: Poor"? That, or Google just hates affiliates and is going to slap me no matter what I do.

I'm working on a few longer-term SEO projects and I keep telling myself that I want to focus on SEO over PPC, but I'm addicted to PPC - it's such a numbers game, it's really interesting to me, I just keep getting frustrated because Google keeps wrecking my numbers - it's impossible to get a good grip on the numbers when Google can just randomly shut down all my traffic at any given time.

Any tips? I know I should just ditch Google, but Microsoft has apparently banned my credit card (I found a $500 voucher code that I should have known was too good to me true, and sure enough, it was) and so far, I just can't get Yahoo traffic to convert like Google does.

Thanks, all - it's been good to vent, and I look forward to hearing what y'all suggest and even other newbies bitching about how hard Google can make it these days.
 


pickledegg said:
Just what the fuck is Googles problem? Biggest bunch of haters on the planet.
Click to expand...

LOL, I just read your 'quick rant about recent posts' thread over in shooting the shit, so when I saw you had responded to this thread I was a bit concerned you were going off on me. Glad to see you know exactly how I feel! I was talking to a friend of mine about all the problems I'm having, and she even brought up the fact that Google's stock price, their revenues, their whole damn company have all been supported almost entirely by their advertising revenue, and affiliates spend a hell of a lot of money with Google. Seems pretty shitty of them to take our money and then pull this sort of crap.

I know most of us don't want much attention on our landing pages, but seriously, if they're going to slap me and shut down yet another one of my campaigns/domains, would it be that hard for them to send me an email and say "Hey, we don't like rebills" or "Hey, we don't like [whatever the niche of the month is this month] offers". Or even "Hey, we don't want your money, you damn affiliate". Give me a freaking reason, something I can correct and then move on when I launch my next campaign, instead of just having to randomly guess at what you don't like.

Bastards.
 
If you have relevant content, not using just a bridge page and are promoting legit products you shouldn't have any problems.

If you are trying to promote the shady biz-opp offers then it's a different story.
 
pocketrockets said:
If you have relevant content, not using just a bridge page and are promoting legit products you shouldn't have any problems.

If you are trying to promote the shady biz-opp offers then it's a different story.
Click to expand...

Not biz-opp; but another niche that 'everyone' seems to be jumping on right now, like biz-opp. I was actually in it before it was the offer everyone decided to rape this month, and now that I think about it, I didn't have these sort of problems before the niche became hot. Maybe I should move on to another niche. Just hard to walk away from what made me more money than any other niche I've run thus far.

I have some SEO projects in the works that are focused more on products and less on rebills and the other sort of offers most networks seem to really push, but for my PPC efforts I'm focusing primarily on the sort of offers you'd find on one of the big CPA networks, and there just doesn't seem to be many that fall into the 'legit product' category that offer decent payoffs so that the numbers work (i.e., my cost per click and cost per conversion versus the payout I get per conversion).
 
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