Adwords Insider 101 - hearing it from the horse’s mouth.
A fellow colleague on the most excellent Forum connected with the Pay Per Click Formula 2.0 just sent the following information to me. His name is Amir and he owns http://www.xconversions.com/. I have been using his tool for a while together with other keyword tracking software including Prosper202, Hlola 2.0 and Affiliate Prophet…I will be doing an unbiased review asap but for now I just read of this absolute goldmine of insider information…
“I had written this report a little while ago, yet it’s still as relevant today as it was back then. I recently got slapped for one of my campaigns and redid the same thing that I describe below. Below, you’ll find the result of a simple experiment that I did with two identical landing pages.
In reality the two landing pages were identical except…they were using different domain names.
Here are the two landing pages:
landing page 1:
(min bids .04c to .20 cents)
http://www.thewebsherlock.com/PLFBonuses.html
http://www.xconversions.com/slap1.JPG
landing page 2:
(min bids .20 cents to $10)
http://www.xconversions.com/plfbonuses
http://www.xconversions.com/slap2.JPG
One of the more clever customers plugged the two domains in the
google suggestion tool and found that google thought one of the
domains (the one that didn’t get slapped) was more relevant for my
keywords, while the other was for some reason classified in a
different context although as you can see both domains:
(www.xconversions.com and www.thewebsherlock.com) are pretty much
geared towards affiliate marketing.
I’ve spoken to an inside source at google and gotten a better
understanding for how this whole thing works and it’s really funny
how things come together at the right time…(I’ll explain I mean
in just a min).
I had a long technical discussion with the inside source, which
shall remain anonymous. I’ll won’t bore you with the technical
details. I’ll just present you with a few facts that will shed
some light on this whole quality score and min bid procedure. And
trust me, it doesn’t get any better than hearing it from the
horse’s mouth.
The are a few filters that the ads go through, but we’ll keep this
simple.
1- (This was a big surprise to me.) The google algorithm for
ranking organic results has NOTHING to do with adwords as a whole.
In fact the organic ranking algorithm is highly secretive inside
of google itself and only those that work on it know how it works.
Other developers/employees have NO access to it whatsoever..not
anymore than anyone outside of google.
I always thought that if a site comes up in the organic listings,
it means that google thinks it’s relevant for those keywords and it
will automatically get a good quality score/low min bids.
WRONG!!!! The organic relevance algorithm and the landing page
relevance algorithm have NO relationship to each other
whatsoever!!! Interesting huh?
2- All google employees and developers are genuinely trying to
create an optimal experience for the user and the advertiser. They
are told time and time again that optimizing revenue is NOT the
goal. They also read most relevant feedback they receive.
————————-
HERE IS WHERE IT GETS INTERESTING
————————-
3- There are various factors that affect the Quality Score (QS) and
min bids. Some of these factors are more prominent than others.
The most prominent of all is machine learning algorithm that
uses a LOT of historical data, your ad, your account history and
comes up with a score.
That system is the major deciding factor for which ‘bucket’ in the
min bid spectrum you’re placed in.
That system is also EXTREMELY complex with hundreds of thousands of
possible combinations and conditions. It’s also a
NON-DETERMINISTIC EVER EVOLVING SYSTEM that’s being worked on by a
team of developers.
Here’s what that means…
It means that the same set of data from your side as the advertiser
(ie the same ad, landing page url, account history etc..) can yield
different results in different iterations of the system. So let me
repeat that in different words.
If you start a campaign and write an ad and select keywords to bid
on and hit submit, you will get a set of min bids for your keywords.
If you start a new campaign with the same ad and bid keywords that
you just did in the previous step, you may get different results.
Arguably the variance won’t be that much, but nonetheless, it’s an
important point to keep in mind.
Another significant factor that can cause major shifting of your
min bid status and override the results of the first algorithm is
the landing page relevance algorithm. The first algorithm doesn’t
consider any of your landing page content whatsoever.
4- Two separate pages that have the same identical content are looked
at as two different pages by google eventhough they have identical
content.
This technical discussion although didn’t add much that I didn’t
know practically speaking, was very enlightening on how I look at
the adwords system now.
The question is:How can these new insights help us create better campaigns?
1- Make sure that the ads are highly relevant to the keywords that
your bidding on. The main algorithm that decides your min bids
doesn’t look at your landing page, it only looks at your ads, bid
keyword, and a bunch of historical data.
2- Your account history is VERY important. If google sees that
you’re a ‘bad’ advertiser, they just won’t show your ads.
3- Make sure your overall domain is relevant to the theme of your
bid keywords
4- Make sure your landing page has relevant content to the bid
keywords
Now probably the more important factor in this list, generally speaking is the first one. The difficulty though with making ads that are highly relevant to keywords your bidding on is that it’s very tedious and time
consuming.”
-Naturally a few solutions were developed to solve this problem the solution that I use and highly recommend is Speed PPC by Jay Stackwell. I believe Speed PPC is the best solution on the market right now to accomplish this exact task. A cheaper version is available called Efficient PPC along with Adgrenade (which works well with Clickbank tracking.)
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