The Quality Score in Action.

[luke175]

So all my bids are at $5-$10. My site is PR5 and each ad group is relevant and I only use 3-8 keywords in each adgroup. No adsense or affiliate links.

So I'm totally shut out.

So who's in first place now for my biggest keywords? One of my affiliates selling my product. So apparently an affiliate is higher quality than the actual merchant.

Spot 2 is a total MFA site and spot 3 is "Buy KEYWORD on ebay"

Quality!

[venrooy]

for many the message is go away - you dont make the cut - but it is wrapped up in QS this and that and mumbo jumbo to keep you from getting your feelings hurt - no one likes to be told that their baby is ugly...

That's fine if they want to tell me my baby is ugly. The problem is when someone else shows up with my baby, and google suddenly thinks it's a beauty queen.

[ajwebmaster]

how many of you run campaigns using ONLY google search and not running the content network or the search network?

[venrooy]

sometimes I'm tempted to dump the search network. There are some really bad sites allowed to participate in the search network. However - There are some really good performing sites in the network as well. Some of them out perform google on a regular basis. It's too bad google doesn't allow you to choose the sites in your search network, like they do in the content network.

[ajwebmaster]

I found this an interesting read seems like this was brewing for a long time the problem is affiliate was never defined for many people

[webmasterworld.com...]

here is a shot at it:
affiliate - you buy traffic to one site(domain name) but your site links to a different site(domain name) for the actual transaction; you distribute advertising but not an actual product; you don't control the majority of the aspects of the products you market (shipping, quality, warranties, product liability etc)

[ajwebmaster]

google is a plug and play for the search and content partners right now.... that will change over time and they will sell you ads directly.... see industrybrains or quigo for examples... right now we are all dealing with a near monopoly for search and search ppc but that won't last too much longer -

nothing lasts in this space for a very long time except perhaps the OS dependencies :) (think about excite, hotbot, lycos, compuserve, aol, prodigy etc ....)

adwords makes you lazy - you can build 1 ad and magically distribute it across the world - very cool but you can do can get even better distro for ppc you just have to do more work

for the content partners and billions of adsense pages adwords is merely a middle man that will eventually be cut out by other technologies...

Google does search really well, but as their own training material points out, only 5% of traffic is search. The other 95% is not owned by google as google doesnt produce any true content they merely filter it (search results) or show ads (adwords/adsense)

adwords is the fastest, easiest way to advertise to the web masses - so if they dont want your ads then you have to go elsewhere - this is harder and takes more time but in the end you are diversified in your traffic sources