Error Forum Blog

Here’s a pretty good list of Top 10 Adwords Mistakes.

1. creating a long list of less than targeted keywords
2. failing to identify unique aspects of your product or service
3. a lack of keywords in your ad text
4. directing users solely to your home page
5. creating single ad groups
6. utilizing single campaigns
7. using broad match only
8. failing to optimize ad serving for your ads
9. failing to track results
10. entering the content network without modifying bids

Like all lists, take these rules with a grain of salt. For me, number nine is the most important. It doesn’t really matter how people approach Adwords, so long as the results are positive.

However, I think the most important factor has been left out - know who the audience is, and what they want. The marketing side of PPC is often down-played or omitted, but it is the make-or-break factor for search marketing campaigns. Without that knowledge, PPC campaigns can quickly become very expensive.

You can run profitable campaigns by knowing your market better than the other guy. Here’s the Wikipedia entry on market segmentation. The most important aspects as far as SEM is concerned are the readiness-to-buy stage (especially important for affiliate marketing) and sales effectiveness (i.e. focus resources on prospects most likely to buy your product).

According to this post, Google are going to make two changes:

1. “….incorporating landing page quality into the Quality Score for your contextually-targeted ads, using the same evaluation process as we do for search. Advertisers who may be providing a poor experience on their site will notice that their traffic across the content network decreases as a result of this change�
2. “..Second, we’re improving our algorithm for evaluating landing page quality and incorporating landing page content retrieved by the AdWords system�.

What do Google consider to be a high quality landing page?

That’s a secret.

“…we don’t provide more specific recommendations because there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to best create landing pages. We therefore encourage you to focus on building landing pages that are best for your users…�

Oh, FOR THE LOVE OF….

What if users really, really want to click on more contextual ads? My guess is that is they very thing Google is trying to prevent. So the inevitable result amongst the webmaster community is probably going to be “huh�?

If it’s any help, Google suggest the following:

• Link to the page on your site that provides the most useful and accurate information about the product or service in your ad.
• If your site displays advertising, distinguish sponsored links from the rest of your site content.
• Try to provide information without requiring users to register. Or, provide a preview of what users will get by registering.
• In general, build pages that provide substantial and useful information to the end-user. If your landing page consists of mostly ads or general search results (such as a directory or catalog page), you should provide as much information as you can beyond what your ad describes. For example, if your ad mentions <'Free travel information,' your landing page should feature free travel information (versus links to other sites that do).
• You should have unique content (should not be similar or nearly identical in appearance to another site).

Since Google continue to be vague about what exactly they mean by “page quality� in relation to PPC advertising landing pages, I thought I’d have a stab:

The Unofficial Guidelines To Page Quality

• Stop sending people to pages with yet more PPC advertisments on them.
• Stop sending people to pages with all your affiliate links on them.
• Why can’t everybody just play nice, like…Disney? Or the Portal Of Evil?
• If it makes us look good, and makes us more money, we’re all for it.
• If it makes us look bad, and makes us less money, you’re for it.
• No, Larry doesn’t find your bidding on his name funny.
• Neither does Sergey.
• You may have bidded on the term “knockersâ€? but that picture you’re displaying certainly isn’t related to door fixtures!
• If in doubt, look up Wikipedia.
• We don’t care how high quality your gay porn is, the answer is still no!

And the updated guidelines, a few weeks later…

• Ok wise guys - Stop cloaking! Please.
• And stop cloaking your links as well.