Google: It’s not all smiles and sunshine – especially when it comes to Adwords
I’m going to talk about the intersection of two facets of many comprehensive online advertising strategies: Google Adwords, and Long-Tail Keyword Strategies. And most interesting, the obscure and unpredictable outcomes that can occur when trying to put the two together.
So as almost everyone who has ever done *any* on-line advertising knows, Google Adwords is where you start. With roughly 70% of the on-line search audience, anyone buying paid search impressions starts with Google, and their Adwords program. Once upon a time, this was a simple bidding system, where paying more got you more impressions.
However, now that their monopoly status is undisputable, the advertising elite at Google have decided that they’re not just cyber-lackeys who deliver ads to the public at the market price . No, they’ve decided that Google has an ethical duty to try to deliver quality content; and to that end Google Adwords currently rates your campaign based on the quality of the content that you provide. Advertising campaigns that offer higher quality content (according to Google’s monolithic standards) pay less for their ads. Those who deliver junk content may unexpectedly see themselves hit with “penalty pricing”, where they see their minimum bids jump to either $5 or $10 per click -- effectively killing the campaign.
The wisdom of this approach is debated endlessly, and I’m not going to tackle it here. However, it does raise one very significant question: what makes quality content, and how do you discriminate? And most importantly, what do you do if you and Google disagree? Well, the short version is, it really doesn't matter what you think, it matters what Google thinks. As far as this church goes, Google hands down the scripture and the rest of us just read it. You have to run your campaign by their rules.
I’m going to ask you to table the discussion on Adwords Quality Score for a minute while we talk about Long Tail Keyword advertising (can we just say LTKW?). The basic concept of this technique is well described in this article by Matt Baily http://www.searchengineguide.com/matt-bailey/keyword-strategies-the-long-tail.php. Here’s my one-sentence summary: “Rather than trying to find keyword phrases that will appeal to many people, you find hundreds or thousands of oddball phrases that may appeal to just a handful of customers.” So when you use a Long-Tail Keywords campaign, you pick up customers by putting together vast lists of keywords which you hope will attract some of the more unusual search phrases. You then create a Google Adwords campaign where you bid on thousands of these unusual keywords, hoping that your list is long and comprehensive enough to catch and convert customers. Now, precisely because you’re not going after the common search terms, many of the terms might appear less relevant to the content of your landing page. Or hell, they might really be irrelevant! But that’s okay – you’re only trying to capture the stragglers, not the body of the searchers.
However, here comes the rub: When you put together the strategy of advertising using obscure keywords along with a system that enforces relevance, you’ve got a problem. Many advertisers found that LTKW strategies that were exceptionally successful for them – until the Adwords Quality Scoring system decided that the Long Tail Keywords were not relevant enough to the content, and -zing! - the penalty pricing shut it all down. Once your campaign has been tagged by Google as “low quality”, it can be difficult to impossible to recover. You may simply have to junk the domain, and start building a new website and new campaign from scratch.
What’s the solution? Knowledge, Research, Testing (do we have a mantra here?) You can successfully using a LTKW strategy with Adwords. But it requires that you have a much more intimate understanding of how Google ranks your campaign, what the rules are, and how to give them what they want to see. Which would be much easier if they actually told you what the rules are, but that’s the monopolists’ prerogative. However, the LTKW strategy can be enormously successful, and even with the extra work, it can be a highly profitable approach.
For a recent project, the team I was working with was experimenting with different keyword strategies, opened a new AdWords account, and created an 8000 keyword campaign. Within hours all keywords jumped to a $10 minimum bid, effectively shutting it down. We couldn't even create a single-keyword campaign which used the company's name -- which is also the URL! Google won't say how to fix it, but we know it's a combination of account history (new in this case), click through rate (low here), keyword density (again low, we didn't use enough uniquely matched landing pages) and relevance, bounce rate (high), and in some cases, the categorization of the target site. I've built some best practices around LTKW strategies and Adwords, but am still learning. If you'd like to share, please drop me a note.
In my research, I’ve found the following articles, which provide a more in-depth introduction to the field. They talk about the Google Quality Score, and techniques on improving your quality score and recovering from penalty pricing. I recommend reading through them before implementing any campaign.
Can You Recover from a $10.00 Quality Score?
CPAM Series - Quality Score Rd 2 - Adwords Account And Quality Scores
Google Semantically Related Words & Latent Semantic Indexing Technology
How To Check Your AdWords Quality Score and Reduce Click Prices
10 Ways To Increase Your Adwords Quality Score - A Mini Case Study
How to Beat the Google Slap with 5 Simple Steps…
Keyword Research
HitTail: What Is It?
Competitors Use Long Tail Keywords To Hurt Yahoo Search Advertisers
So as almost everyone who has ever done *any* on-line advertising knows, Google Adwords is where you start. With roughly 70% of the on-line search audience, anyone buying paid search impressions starts with Google, and their Adwords program. Once upon a time, this was a simple bidding system, where paying more got you more impressions.
However, now that their monopoly status is undisputable, the advertising elite at Google have decided that they’re not just cyber-lackeys who deliver ads to the public at the market price . No, they’ve decided that Google has an ethical duty to try to deliver quality content; and to that end Google Adwords currently rates your campaign based on the quality of the content that you provide. Advertising campaigns that offer higher quality content (according to Google’s monolithic standards) pay less for their ads. Those who deliver junk content may unexpectedly see themselves hit with “penalty pricing”, where they see their minimum bids jump to either $5 or $10 per click -- effectively killing the campaign.
The wisdom of this approach is debated endlessly, and I’m not going to tackle it here. However, it does raise one very significant question: what makes quality content, and how do you discriminate? And most importantly, what do you do if you and Google disagree? Well, the short version is, it really doesn't matter what you think, it matters what Google thinks. As far as this church goes, Google hands down the scripture and the rest of us just read it. You have to run your campaign by their rules.
I’m going to ask you to table the discussion on Adwords Quality Score for a minute while we talk about Long Tail Keyword advertising (can we just say LTKW?). The basic concept of this technique is well described in this article by Matt Baily http://www.searchengineguide.com/matt-bailey/keyword-strategies-the-long-tail.php. Here’s my one-sentence summary: “Rather than trying to find keyword phrases that will appeal to many people, you find hundreds or thousands of oddball phrases that may appeal to just a handful of customers.” So when you use a Long-Tail Keywords campaign, you pick up customers by putting together vast lists of keywords which you hope will attract some of the more unusual search phrases. You then create a Google Adwords campaign where you bid on thousands of these unusual keywords, hoping that your list is long and comprehensive enough to catch and convert customers. Now, precisely because you’re not going after the common search terms, many of the terms might appear less relevant to the content of your landing page. Or hell, they might really be irrelevant! But that’s okay – you’re only trying to capture the stragglers, not the body of the searchers.
However, here comes the rub: When you put together the strategy of advertising using obscure keywords along with a system that enforces relevance, you’ve got a problem. Many advertisers found that LTKW strategies that were exceptionally successful for them – until the Adwords Quality Scoring system decided that the Long Tail Keywords were not relevant enough to the content, and -zing! - the penalty pricing shut it all down. Once your campaign has been tagged by Google as “low quality”, it can be difficult to impossible to recover. You may simply have to junk the domain, and start building a new website and new campaign from scratch.
What’s the solution? Knowledge, Research, Testing (do we have a mantra here?) You can successfully using a LTKW strategy with Adwords. But it requires that you have a much more intimate understanding of how Google ranks your campaign, what the rules are, and how to give them what they want to see. Which would be much easier if they actually told you what the rules are, but that’s the monopolists’ prerogative. However, the LTKW strategy can be enormously successful, and even with the extra work, it can be a highly profitable approach.
For a recent project, the team I was working with was experimenting with different keyword strategies, opened a new AdWords account, and created an 8000 keyword campaign. Within hours all keywords jumped to a $10 minimum bid, effectively shutting it down. We couldn't even create a single-keyword campaign which used the company's name -- which is also the URL! Google won't say how to fix it, but we know it's a combination of account history (new in this case), click through rate (low here), keyword density (again low, we didn't use enough uniquely matched landing pages) and relevance, bounce rate (high), and in some cases, the categorization of the target site. I've built some best practices around LTKW strategies and Adwords, but am still learning. If you'd like to share, please drop me a note.
In my research, I’ve found the following articles, which provide a more in-depth introduction to the field. They talk about the Google Quality Score, and techniques on improving your quality score and recovering from penalty pricing. I recommend reading through them before implementing any campaign.
Labels: adwords, google slap, keywords, long tail, marketing, seo
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