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Another Adwords Quality Score Update
It wouldn’t be Christmas without a nice gift for affiliate marketers from our friend Google.
This year, in a few events that have sent many affiliate marketers reeling, Google has instituted Quality Score ratings to their Adwords advertisers’ landing pages. Pages and sites with low scores were rewarded with through-the-roof minimum bids for keywords, effectively pricing them out of the market.
With the introduction of a policy nearly two years ago from Adwords that only one ad would show per display url, affiliate marketers turned to creating their own landing pages for advertising traffic. These landing pages, typically a short way-point on the way to the merchant destination, have become a target of these quality score updates.
Google has become increasingly concerned with user experience, and now consider any affiliate pages with the sole purpose of driving traffic to a merchant as low quality. There have been at least two updates this year (one in April and another in July) that sent many affiliate marketers back to the drawing boards (or worse) to recover the lost traffic and revenues.
Yesterday, google announced via their Inside Adwords blog that there is another update coming in the next few days. Not only have they updated the algorithm, but these quality scores will now affect what shows in their content network (Adsense).
In the next few days, we will be making two changes to how AdWords evaluates landing page quality. First, we’ll begin incorporating landing page quality into the Quality Score for your contextually-targeted ads, using the same evaluation process as we do for ads showing on Google.com and the search network. 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. Second, we’re improving our algorithm for evaluating landing page quality and incorporating landing page content retrieved by the AdWords system.
The bottom line, Google wants their advertisers to add value to the end user. They won’t say exactly what that means, but if there’s nothing to do on a landing page but click on an affiliate link, you can be sure that they’ll be coming down on that sooner or later.
What’s an affiliate marketer to do?
1. Link direct. as long as the merchant is ok with it, Google has no problem with affiliates advertising on behalf of merchants. Of course in doing so, you’re competing with merchants and other affiliates for the same spot in the search results.
2. Add Value. Google also has no problem with affiliate sites that offer something unique to visitors. If you’re going to drive traffic to your own website, do something that says, “this site has something to offer other than a link to a merchant.” Of course, since it’s all algorithm based, there are certainly things that help turn the dial toward “quality”. Privacy policies, contact information, unique content, and user signups are all things that have been mentioned in the past as things that smell like a “real” site and will raise quality score.
Personally, I aim higher and shoot for something that will pass the scrutiny of a human reviewer, hopefully passing the current quality score calculations and surviving any future updates. If I can do this successfully, I welcome the changes, not dread them.
Read Google’s landing page quality guidelines for some clues about what they’re looking for.
Listen for the screams. Like last time, if you’re lucky, sneaky, and/or smart enough to get through this next update, you’ll find some wide open search results as this holiday season ramps up.
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Good obsevations Scott. Hopefully we can call this Google page quality ranking move The Doorway Killer. That goes for all automated cookie stuffers trying to trick the Google Bot and merchants. Then seeing Google whack the “made for adsense’ click traps in both the content and search network partnerships.
That goes double for the domain parking registrar wanks who rotate 35 million non-sense domain names every 4-1/2 days before the bill come due. Many are just click trap targets for cybercriminals using Click BOTs on zombie networks.
Kick back and relax Scott as you have the ultimate weapon in mind. Building pages the address shoppers needs … not the need of SE alogo’s.
yeah it just felt like a shot in the foot when i logged into my adwords account and found that more tehn half of my campaigns were being narrowed down to impressions instead of clicks… i was a lil ticked off..