I have a content based website, that is also an affiliate comparison site. I have been using Adwords for some of the landing pages that are there to compare offers etc as well provide some information to help the user.
Several months ago, most of my keywords got a poor QS after being high for a long time. The large majority of keywords have a QS of 1/10. Only one keyword actively displays adverts now, with a QS of 3/10.
Now, SOME of the pages I admit were not adhering to one or two of their guidelines, namely replicating the look and feel of a merchant's site, and not enough unique content.
So after querying this, I have made many changes to the landing pages I was using. They have unique content, an easy path for the user to investigate offers from a certain merchant, simple navigation.
Now having compared my main landing page with other competitors' landing pages - they have less unique content, more direct affiliate links, basically a straight comparison table. Whereas mine doesn't display this straightaway, it provides some information, and a direct link to page where you can compare offers.
I'm at a loss now. When I email Google, they just say to follow their guidelines. Last time they did say my site was under review when I had stopped all keywords, but after re-activating them, no change.
If anybody can provide any pointers to why my website is generally disliked by Google Adwords, that would be most appreciated. Maybe it's something not quite right in the basic website structure, but can't think what.
My website has the following:
- Good balance of target keywords
- Use of title tag, h1 and h2 etc
- Simple, easy to see text based navigation links at the top for the very main sections. An expansion of this at the bottom of the page.
- Enough unique content, including user guides, reviews etc
Sorry for the long email, and thanks for reading!
Cheers
M
@tangor When you say concentrate on everything else besides the quality score, what do you mean exactly?
Thanks
Manoj
I am in the process of optimising our campaigns and even though I haven't even got around to sorting out our landing pages yet I managed to improve our quality scores across the board by doing all the other stuff - restructuring into small really targetted ad groups each based around a single keyphrase, and getting rid of a whole load of keywords which had a low CTR or conversion rate.
sometimes i realized that AdWords campaigns, with a good CTR and an excellent quality score, suddenly are "penalized" -if we can use this term- and quality score sinks down to 1 or 2.
You try to delete the existing group, create a new one with good keywords and ads but quality score is again to 1 or 2.
In these cases I use an infamous trick I suggest you to try (before abandoning your Google AdWords account and creating a new).
I delete keywords with poor quality score.
I search in Google for the keyword I am interested to.
I take a page that rank well, with a high PageRank.. So a page hosted in what I think could be trusted domain.
I create an ad with URLs pointing to the trusted page.
Then I add keywords to the advertising group and usually I take a 7 or 8 value.
I finally I change again URLs in the ads.
Another final note: after this trick your ad group is frozen.
I mean you can't add anything, not keywords nor ads, otherwise your quality score sinks again.
Problem I have is that I pretty much have all the converting keywords that I want, but want to increase the quality score for them.
Thanks
How long does that approach last? I've tried it and it only lasted a day or less. It did initially work tho
I used this trick only few times in last months and worked well.
I didn't change anything in the group (nor keywords, nor ads) and all is working fine.
