6. Ranking & Advertisement Placement

Ranking & Advertisement Placement

You should have your campaign set up with appropriate text ads, AdGroups, and a huge list of keywords (by a huge list I mean tons of AdGroups each containing 10-100 keywords each). Now its time that you should completely understand how everything else works in Google so you begin to receive record breaking sales days.

For more information about Google’s Ad Ranking, I recommend you watch the following video by Google:

Rules

Google is very strict and serious about their advertising, this is one of the many reasons why Google AdWords has high conversion rates and is so popular. Here is a simple list of rules which every advertiser must follow, that is, if they want to continue advertising. These are some basic things everyone should know about Advertising in Google.

1. Almost always 8 Advertisements are shown per search page. Sometimes it can be as many as 10 advertisements per page. Don’t expect to have your ad appear on the first results page if its average rank is above 10.
2. Google gives each webpage one advertising slot per keyword. This means you can’t create another Google account and advertise the same webpage for the same keyword to get two Advertisements instead of one. The way Google determines this is by your Display URL and Target URL. They will never allow two advertisements with the same Display URL to be shown in the search results for the same keyword.
3. If a merchant is advertising for a certain keyword and you’re an affiliate for that merchant, Google will not show your Ad for that keyword unless your Quality Score is higher than your competitors.
4. Your text ad can not have any misspelled words, unless they are commonly misspelled words. If you break this rule Google will take your ad offline.
5. Your text ad can’t be all capitalized, but the first letter of each word can be capitalized.
6. If you are an affiliate, Google only allows one affiliate advertisement per website per search query. This also means that if you are a merchant and you want to advertise for a certain keyword, but one of your affiliates has an advertisement for that keyword, your advertisement will not be shown. You can override this rule if you bid higher than the other advertiser or if you have a higher Quality Score than the other advertiser.
7. Your destination URL cannot have a popup window on the page. Google defines a popup window as any window that opens up into a new browser window. This includes pop-under ads. They do not mention anything about dynamic or flash pop up windows.
8. Your destination URL cannot link to a webpage that is under construction.
9. If you state your price in your text ad, then you must show this price on your webpage within 1-2 pages of your destination page.
10. You cannot use superlatives (Best, Most, Top, etc) in your advertisement unless it is backed by a legitimate 3rd party support.
11. If you advertise a free offer in your text ad, it must be supported within 1-2 clicks of your destination page.

Tips

Increase Your Ad’s Position So it is On the Next Page

If you want to receive the most impressions and the most clicks, you will want your Ad to be displayed on the first page. If your ranking for a keyword is 8.0 or less, then your advertisement is definitely on the first search page. If your advertisements ranking is 8.1-10.0 then your advertisement may be on the first search page, but is most likely on the second search page. If your average ranking is 10.1 and up, then your text ad is not on the first search results page.

You may have heard that the first three ranking positions always receive the most traffic, and are therefore should be where you want your advertisement to be. This is not always true. Usually the first, second, and third advertising positions are very pricey, especially when compared to the fourth through eighth positions on the same page. I would not recommend increasing your bid(s) just to receive a 1st to 3rd ranking position. Doing this would cut into your profits. Instead I would recommend aiming just to receive a first page position. This way you will receive the same amount of impressions as all of the ads on the first page giving you the same chances that your text advertisement will be the one that is clicked.

What if you can’t afford to display your advertisement on the first search page?

If you can’t afford to put your Ad on the first search page you should bid what you can afford. Never bid too much for a keyword, especially a poorly performing keyword, because this will cause you to lose money.

How does Google Determine the Position of my Advertisement?

The way Google ranks their advertisements is probably one of the most confusing things to understand. They rate your website using a ranking formula, which they call a Quality Score. Unfortunately, they do not release much information about their Ad Ranking formula but they do say that it is something like this:

Ad Rank = Cost Per Click x Quality Score

It may not look too complicated, but Google uses a complex algorithm called the Quality Score to determine a lot of things about your advertisement. Don’t worry, if you’re confused, I explain more information about this later.

What is the Best Way to See if My Advertisements Being Displayed?

If you don’t trust the Google ad diagnostics tool and you want to make sure your advertisements being displayed do not search for it on Google.com.

Google realizes that people get excited and want to see their advertisement, but if you search for it on Google.com you can potentially hurt your advertisement’s performance. Here are two ways you can hurt your ad’s performance by searching for it on Google:

If you search for your advertisement and click on it, it is seen by Google as click fraud. People will try to click on their own advertisement to increase their CTR’s and Google knows when you do this. If you do this you can risk having your account banned.

• If you search for your advertisement you’re adding impressions to your ad and since you’re not going to click on it, you’re potentially hurting your quality score.

SoWhat’s the Best Way to Search for My Advertisements?

Good news! Google has a tool (or a website address) that lets you search for your advertisements. This is even better than searching for your advertisement on Google.com because this tool lets you choose the region where you want to search for your ads. Like if I only advertised in “New York City” I can specify that and it will tell Google to display the ads specified for “New York City” only. Likewise, I could see if my ads were being displayed in Australia, Ireland, France, USA, etc. Even better, this tool doesn’t hurt your account in anyway! If you accidentally click on your ad, nothing will happen and the impressions don’t count against you. To access this tool, simply go to the website listed below:

https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool

Google’s Quality Score

Google’s New Advertising Policy

Here is everything about the Quality Score you can know, unless you work directly for Google.

So what’s all of this talk about Google’s Quality Score and why is it so important? Google’s Quality Score is everything in Google AdWords. It’s a new thing Google introduced into AdWords in 2005 and it is the reason why people are complaining about AdWords.

Basically, Google’s Quality Score is a mathematical formula that Google keeps secret from everyone. The Quality Score was designed and created to help Google’s search results to only display the text advertisements that meet Google’s web surfers needs as best as possible.

Unfortunately, if Google doesn’t think your text ad, AdGroup, keywords, Campaign, etc. isn’t performing as well as it could be, you will experience things like poor advertising positions, high minimum bids, and of course “Required First Page Bids” for keywords.

Here are the important things that the Quality Score Determines:

• Your minimum required bid
• Your advertisement’s ranking
• Whether or not your keywords are displayed on the first results page or not

Here’s the actual formula for Google’s Quality Score:

Quality Score = (keyword’s CTR, ad text relevance, keyword relevance, landing page relevance)

Unfortunately, Google doesn’t give us too much information about the quality score. But I can tell you that the quality score formula looks more like this… which is a little bit more than what Google tells you:

Keyword CTR

+ Ad text relevance to keyword + Ad text relevance to landing page + Keyword relevance to landing page + Current max bid (max CPC) + Your ad’s performance history + Other unknown factors

+ Your account’s CTR history + Your accounts performance in the geographical region where your ads are displayed

_________________________
= Your Quality Score
Here are some of the factors that determine your overall Quality Score explained in a little bit more detail:

Your CPC The more you pay Google per click, the higher your advertisement’s position and the higher your Quality Score. Google sees your bid as the most important thing when determining your Quality Score.

Your CTR The higher your Click Through Rate, the better Google thinks your product(s) and service(s) are, therefore your ad position will increase as well as your Quality Score.

The Historical Performance of your Advertisement If your advertisement has been relevant to your website, has had a high CTR, and has performed well for a good bid of time, then your position and Quality Score will increase. Because of this you should NEVER Change the target URL of your Advertisement. If you do, your Quality Score will go to 0.0, and all of the progress you have made will disappear. In case you didn’t read what I said earlier about changing your quality score, here’s what would happen if you did change your target URL:

• Google would have to recheck your entire website and text ad for relevance.
• This would make almost all of your keywords as low quality.
• You will receive about 10% as many impressions as you did before.
• You will receive hardly any clicks.

If you do decide to change your target URL, you should pause the AdGroup which contains your old URL and create an entirely new AdGroup which contains your new target URL.

The Relevance of your Ad Text Is the overall theme of your advertisement the same as the overall theme of your website? If so then your position and Quality Score will go up.

Other Unknown Factors Google will not release these to the public.

Ad Text Relevance to your Keyword This means if you have your keyword in your text advertisement, Google will increase your quality score. This is why you should group your keywords into separate AdGroups by similarity.

Ad Text Relevance to Landing Page If your text advertisement contains words that are found on your text advertisement’s landing page, then Google will increase your quality score.

Keyword Relevance to Landing Page If your keywords in your AdGroup can be found in the text of your text ad’s landing page, then Google will increase your quality score.

Your quality score is calculated for each individual keyword in your account, but at the same time Google looks at the overall historical performance of your account. So if you do have some poorly performing keywords in your account, they can affect the performance of your better performing keywords.

How to Find Your Quality Score

There are two ways to find your Quality Score.

The first way is to login to your Google Account and go to the AdGroup you want to find the Quality Score for. Remember, your quality score is determined by each keyword, so each keyword will have a different quality score. After you get into the AdGroup, click on the “Keywords” tab, and near the top of your keyword list you will see a text link titled “Customize Columns”. Click on this text link and a drop down menu will appear. From that drop down menu select “Quality Score”. Then wait for the page to load and you will see your quality score appear next to each keyword. You will want your quality score to say “Great” or “Good”. Anything else means you may need to work on it some. Here’s a picture of one of my account’s Quality Score:

The second way to find your quality score is to do the following:

• Look at the minimum bid for your keyword. The lower your minimum bid for your keyword, the better your quality score is for that keyword. In my opinion, any average bid below $0.05 is a very good Quality Score. Likewise the keywords which are low quality scores (anything below 5/10) are most likely irrelevant.
• If you don’t know how to see your minimum bids then simply create a custom report for minimum bids in the reports tab. You can search your entire account to find your minimum bids. Remember Google changes these daily, so you may want to search the past 7 days of history to get the keyword(s) average minimum bid.
• Look at the position estimates Google gives you for your keywords. The keywords with the lowest position estimates have the best quality scores.

How to Get A High Quality Score

There is no easy way to achieve an instantly high Quality Score. You can, however, do it rather quickly by optimizing your Search Campaigns the proper way. Here are some things you should consider when wanting a higher Quality Score:

1. Are you putting your related keywords into separate AdGroups and optimizing the ad text to be related to your keywords?
2. Are you putting your high performing keywords into the ad text’s title and/or description?
3. Are you deleting the text ads which are performing poorly and replacing them with new text ads so the majority of your advertisements have a high CTR?
4. Did you accidentally adjust your destination URL?
5. Are you increasing your keyword bids so the majority of your Advertisements are displayed on the first search page?
6. Is your daily budget high enough so you are receiving the most amount of traffic?
7. Are you removing the keywords from your AdGroup that have a poor quality score and putting the poor performing keywords in a new AdGroup of their own?

Now you know how AdWords advertisements are ranked, how to achieve a high ranking, and how to adjust the bids for your keywords to help give you more traffic.

Your keywords now should be generating a fairly decent amount of traffic. Of course this depends on how new your Google Account is. If your account is three days old or less, then you may have to wait a few days before Google approves your account. You will still receive some traffic, but you will only receive 100% of the traffic after your Google Account is approved by a Google employee. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t tell you if or when an employee will review your account, but it usually takes 1-3 business days.

You should begin to receive sales within a few days. If you don’t begin to receive sales, don’t worry. I know it would be a difficult thing to ignore but you need to make sure that it is the websites fault with the sales. Here’s a good way to determine this:

A good website will bring in about 1 sale for every 100 targeted visitors (targeted visitors means that the people were searching for your product, and didn’t just happen to click on it because they were bored). Now, this depends on many things, such as the price, the popularity, and the demand. But most good websites should average 1 sale for every 100-300 targeted visitors. If it takes more visitors than that, it will probably mean that you have spent more than you would have received in commission from a sale.

Make sure your bid prices are not too high. It is easier to determine this when you have more sales coming in, but don’t make your bids too high if you have few sales coming in.

The Quality Score Triangle

Occasionally when you know a lot about a subject, things come together and make sense. One of these things is the “Quality Score Triangle”. The Quality Score Triangle is a term I came up with, so you probably won’t find it on Google.

This will probably help explain why some of your keywords are inactive for search (if you’re a current AdWords advertiser) even though you think they may be very relevant to the website you’re advertising. Please note, this may be difficult to do if you’re a beginner with Google AdWords. If you are a beginner I don’t recommend attempting this yet.

If your keyword is relevant to the text in your advertisement as well as your landing page and vies versa, then you will have a very relevant text advertisement giving you a higher quality score.

So how can you make your text advertisement more relevant? This will be easier to explain in an example.

Let’s say you are selling televisions on Google. And you want the keyword “plasma TV for sale” to be very relevant (in Google’s eyes) to your webpage. The way to do this would be to put the phrase “plasma TV for sale” and all of the other keywords that contain all the words “plasma”, “tv”, and “sale” into an AdGroup titled “Plasma TV Sale”.

Now that you have all your keywords grouped you will need to find some relevant text on the landing page you’re using. You will want to see the words “plasma”, “tv”, and “sale” in text somewhere on the landing page. If you can’t find any of these words on your landing page then this keyword isn’t going to be very relevant to your website. Ideally the most relevant websites would have this somewhere in the destination URL (like: websiteexample.com/plasma-tv-sale.html), the title of the website (in the title bar), and bolded. But this can’t be the case unless you’re designing your own website (which we will talk about later).

So now you have your keyword relevant to your website which is very good. All you have left to do is finish it by making your text advertisement relevant to both your website and your keyword.

The easiest way to do this is to include this keyword into your text advertisement. Doing this will let Google see that the keyword is relevant to your website as well as your text advertisement, which will give you a very high relevancy score, thus increasing your Quality Score.

Here’s an example of what this advertisement may look like below:

Online Plasma TV Sale Name Brand Plasma TVs for Sale Limited Quantity – Free Shipping

Now this text advertisement would be even more relevant if the webpage also contains the words “Online”, “name brand”, “limited quantity”, and “free shipping”. This is because your text advertisement would be even more relevant to your website.

You can easily replicate what I’ve done above on other websites and text ads. Just replace the “plasma TV sale” keywords with those of your own.

How to Beat Google’s New Policy Change

Most people didn’t know what to do about the policy change, and several advertisers profits fell dramatically. Here are four things advertisers did to fix their problem:

• 1. Wanting a “Quick Fix” most advertisers simply changed their URL, which activated their ads for a day or two until Google caught on (if you keep on doing this, you will agitate Google enough to where they will ban you from AdWords).
  2. Other advertisers increased their bids to what Google recommended (this isn’t a good decision either, because if Google didn’t think your site was desirable enough to start with, then they certainly aren’t going to suddenly think it’s going to be desirable when you increase your bid. Keep doing this and Google will keep increasing your required bid).
  3. Some people simply left Google AdWords completely.
  4. Those remaining were either unaffected by the policy change or knew exactly what to do to fix it.

So…How Do You Fix the Policy Change?

You can fix the policy change and completely reverse the negative results by giving Google exactly what they want out of a website. You give them both Quality and Content.

One Thing Everyone Needs to Remember

Although the new policy change makes it look like your account is not performing well at all by inactivating a large majority of your keywords, you can still receive massive amounts of traffic. Even though your keywords are Poor Quality, you will still receive traffic through Google’s Content (Contextual) Network. Remember, you can specify different bids for the content network and the search network, so if you’re having to increase your bids to $0.20 per click in the search network, you can still keep your bids at $0.10 per click for the contextual network. You can access this feature by going into your campaign settings and click on the check box that says “Specify Different Bids for Contextual Network”.

Easier Said Then Done…

You may think that doesn’t sound difficult to do, which if you think about it, it’s really not. But your idea of a content full and high quality website is probably very different from Google’s idea. Since this book is read by both Affiliates and Website owners, I’m going to tell each exactly what to do to begin receiving the highest amount of high converting traffic possible. The first section is for Affiliates only, and the second section is for Website owners (this include those of you who create your own landing page).

What Affiliates Need to Do to Beat Google’s New Policy

First off, you’re going to need to stop promoting the websites that Google hates. That means you should try to avoid the following:

• Websites with little or irrelevant text on their home page
• Websites that have AdSense advertisements on them
• Websites that are already being heavily advertised
• Websites with duplicate content on each page
• Websites that force you to sign up for an email news letter
• Websites without a privacy policy
• Websites that are confusing or tricky
• Websites that are borderline illegal
• Other factors you may want to avoid

Websites with little or irrelevant text on their homepage Don’t advertise for websites which have little text or irrelevant text on their landing page. This includes websites which place a large amount of text in their pictures. Here’s an easy way to figure out how much text is on a website: If you can’t highlight it, it means Google cannot read it. WebPages should have at least 150-250 words on their home page.

Below I show you how to use the following tool to tell you how many words are on the webpage, and how find how relevant the words on the page are to their product.

How to Use the Keyword Density Tool

Click on the following link to access this tool:
http://tool.motoricerca.info/keyword-density.phtml

Below is a screenshot of the keyword density tool (mentioned above). Be sure to have the following settings applied:

Page URL Enter the website that you are planning to advertise here (include www).
Include page TITLE Should be checked
Include DESCRIPTION Meta tag Should be checked
Include KEYWORDS Meta tag Should be checked
ALT Contents “Include Always” should be selected

Now click the “Calculate keyword density” button to run this tool.

Here is what the results look like when I run this tool on www.GoogleMoneyPro.com:

Some things you should notice:

1. Look at the word count in the top left corner of the results. You will see something that says “Words: ###, Count: ###”. You will want the “Count” to be at least 150 250. In the example above, the count is 634 words.

1. Look at the phrase results. You will want the webpage to have at least 2-5% keyword density. To find this out, think of two words and three words that best describe the website. For GoogleMoneyPro.com, the main thing I offer is advertising with Google AdWords. Now I look for the phrases which closely match the short description I just came up with and look for their density. In the results I see the phrase “Advertising with Google” has a 4.84% density, and the phrase “Google AdWords” has a 2.94% density. These are both very good percentages and means that googlemoneypro.com contains relevant keywords (which Google rewards by increasing the quality score).

Websites that have AdSense advertisements on them AdSense advertisements look like the screenshot below this paragraph. Google doesn’t consider a website in AdWords high quality if it contains several AdSense advertisements. You should also avoid advertising for websites which display Yahoo’s advertisements. They look almost identical to Google’s, but say Yahoo instead.

Websites that are already being heavily advertised Don’t promote websites with tons of affiliates already promoting them. Chances are that these affiliates are already advertising on Google or have already tried to Advertise on Google. I personally avoid advertising websites with a gravity higher than 40.

Websites with duplicate content on each page Don’t promote websites that have very few pages or have duplicate content on each page. This means websites that have links to other pages and instead of going to a different page, re-direct you to the same page you are on. Also, try to find webpages with more than just 1 page. Google will give the webpage a higher content score if it has several pages.

Websites that force you to sign up for something This includes websites that force their visitors to give their email address before they can continue to another page. You can promote websites that ask the user to sign up for a mailing list, but don’t promote the websites that require it before continuing.

Websites without a Privacy Policy Google favors websites that have a Privacy Policy (or a Terms of Service). This link is usually near the bottom of the page and is a small text link. This isn’t too common for most webpages, so if the webpage doesn’t have this, don’t worry too much. But you should still look for it and favor websites that contain it.

Websites that are confusing or tricky If the website is confusing to you, then don’t promote it. Make sure the website has clear information and contains an easy way for you to navigate the website. This can either be by a site map, or if the website is small enough it can have links to each of the pages at the bottom of every page. Try to avoid webpages where the only way you can get to the previous page is to click the back button.

Websites that are Borderline Illegal
Don’t advertise for websites where you find yourself asking “Is this product legal?”. Some of these sites include cable descramblers, P2P sites or programs, and products that are rip offs. You will also want to avoid websites that allow you to download unlimited music, songs, videos, movies, games, etc. These sites are very popular, but Google doesn’t allow anyone to advertise these sites on AdWords.

Other factors you want to avoid This includes misspelled words, pictures that don’t appear, websites contradicting themselves, etc. Also, try to avoid websites that rely very heavily on Flash presentations. If you don’t know what this is, don’t worry about it because most affiliate pages don’t use heavy amounts of it.

Website Owners and Advertisers with Landing Pages

If you want your website to receive the highest amount of traffic, with the lowest possible keyword bids, you need to apply as much information in following list to your webpage as possible. All of the information in this list will increase the Content and Quality score of your website. If your website does all of the following then Google will recognize your site as being very important and informative and will not require you to increase your bids to a ridiculous amount.

Your Website Should:

Have at least 150-250 keywords on your landing page Have at least this amount, it is okay if you have more. If your website contains a large amount of keywords, make sure your keywords are relevant by using the keyword density tool.

Have a Privacy Policy Try to add a Privacy Policy or a Terms of Service page to your website. They don’t have to be extremely specific and detailed, just create a basic one. If you don’t know what a Privacy Policy is or if you don’t know how to create one, just do a search on Google for “Privacy Policy Example” and model yours after the example.

Don’t duplicate other websites Don’t simply copy the merchants HTML and put it on a different domain name. This will give you a low content and quality score. Instead try to make a unique landing page or review site linking to your affiliate hoplink.

Provide information without requiring people to register Don’t force people to give their name and email address before continuing to another page. Instead make the email sign up an option, and give a link to the other page.

Give examples and demos of what you offer Google really likes it and thinks your website is professional if you show the visitors exactly what you offer in a proof or in an example.

Openly describe your business On the contact us page or on an About Us page, describe what your business is and what it does. List the goals and contact information of your business.

Tell your visitors how they can contact you Some people don’t list any form of contact at all. If you don’t want to offer your phone number and address, you should at lest tell them your name and give them an email address to contact you by.

Make your site easy to navigate You do not want to have a website that only has one link to get to each page. If you have a large website, add a site map to your webpage. If you have a small website, add the links to each webpage at the bottom of each page.

Watch out for Sponsored links Don’t put any sponsored links such as Google AdSense or Yahoo related advertisements on your landing page. If you do have sponsored links on your landing page make sure they are clearly marked as “Sponsored Links”.

Don’t display important information in images Use text instead of images to display important information. Google can’t read the text in images.

Make sure your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive Don’t use the same title for each page on your website. Make each title unique to the webpage. Also, make sure your important images (such as buttons, logos, etc) contain an ALT tag which further describes the image.

Avoid poor HTML and broken links This can quickly lower the quality of your site, so make sure your HTML is properly written and be certain that there are no broken links on your website.

Try not to use dynamic pages Dynamic pages are webpages that use the “?”or the “&id=” in the URL. Spiders have trouble following these pages, so try to only use Static pages.

Don’t put too many links on one page Don’t put more than 90 links on one page. If you have that many links, make a site map page and break it up into categories.

Search Spider viewing problems Remember that not all search spiders can view JavaScript, Cookies, DHTML, or Flash. Also, don’t try to track or block spiders on your webpage.

Make your webpage people friendly, not Spider friendly Don’t use cloaking techniques or other tricks that make spiders think your webpage is perfect. Remember, Google uses both Spiders and people to review websites.

Don’t participate with link programs Don’t use services from websites that will increase the number of links coming to your website.

Avoid Google management programs Don’t use computer programs that automatically submit your website(s) to Google search, and don’t use programs that find your position in Google. These violate Google’s Terms of Service.

Don’t hide text or links Don’t make your text the same color as your background color or hide it behind pictures. Do this and Google may think you are spamming. Also, don’t hide links behind pictures or tables.

Don’t re-direct visitors Don’t redirect people from your destination URL to a different landing page. If you must redirect information, use a 301 redirect.

Don’t mention irrelevant things on your landing page This can confuse the Search Spider, which lowers your content and quality rating. An example of this would be people who use personal stories to sell their product.

Make your images unique Don’t name your pictures confusing things like “img903848023_b.gif”. Instead name the image “download_button_large.gif”.

Use ALT tags for images Make an ALT tag for your important images to further help the Spider to understand the meaning of the image.

Make the text in your website descriptive Use descriptive words and phrases in your webpage. Don’t use the same words over and over. If a keyword has too high of a density level, then Google may think you are trying to spam.

Use the keyword density tool Try to get your important keywords or key phrases to have a density level of 2-5% in your landing page.

If you want to go all out, and have the best possible quality score and content rating for your website then I recommend that you do the following, as both will increase the importance of your webpage to Google.

Make unique landing pages that contain the keyword in the URL In this guide I mention how you should put similar keywords into different AdGroups, so that you can include the keyword(s) in your text advertisement to receive the highest CTR possible. For this you will first need to go to one of your AdGroups (or think of a new AdGroup) and get a common keyword that fits almost every keyword in the AdGroup. Lets say the AdGroup is HP Printer Cartridges. If that’s the case, then do the following:

Make a unique landing page that contains that phrase in the URL. So if your original landing page was “index.htm” make your new landing page “hp-printer-cartridges-index.htm”.

Now, you can either use that URL for the AdGroup “HP Printer Cartridges” or you can make your URL even more targeted.

To make your URL even more targeted, make a new directory (new folder) and name it the phrase you came up with above. So for the example, I will name this folder “hp-printer-cartridges”. Now, you should move your new landing page and any images associated with your landing page into this folder. When you are done, you should upload the whole folder and its contents to your web host. Now your new destination URL should look like “http://www.examplewebpage.com/hp-printer-cartridges/hp-printer-cartridges-index.htm”.

Why should you do this?

If you do this, then Google will look and see that “HP Printer Cartridges” is mentioned twice in the URL, and that the phrase “hp printer cartridges” is included in many of the keywords in your AdGroup. So Google will look at both of these factors and will think that your website is dealing strictly with HP Printer Cartridges. This will give your website a very high quality score and content rating.

Including the keyword in your title So now to take it one step further, you will completely convince Google that your website is relevant. You can do this by adding that phrase into the title of your landing page. So if your title was “Cheap online printing ink”, you should now make it “HP Printer Cartridges Printing Ink”.

This is as far as you can go when you are increasing the content of your webpage. If you do what I mentioned above, then you will have zero keywords that are marked “Not Being Displayed on First Search Results Page”.

Wow, that’s a lot of things I need to do
I am sure that is what almost all of you are thinking. In fact you were probably thinking “He just wants us to create a perfect webpage”, which is exactly what Google is looking for. If you follow even 80-90% of what I mentioned above, you will have 80-90% less poor quality keywords and your bids will be dropped dramatically.

I recommend watching the following video from Google that explains how to optimize your website for Google AdWords.

Selecting Keywords

Some of you may be wondering “is there a shortcut to find keywords that are going to be active for search without me forcing them to have a high relevancy?”. If you have asked yourself that, then I have some good news because there is an easy way for you to find relevant keywords for your website without having to change your website at all. This technique is great for website owners but it is perfect for affiliates that don’t own a webpage of their own.

We all know that Google has a certain way that they determine what keywords are relevant or not relevant for your website, so why not just have Google tell you what keywords to use.

You may have not realized it, but Google will tell you what keywords to use and those keywords will not be Poor Quality for search. Here’s how you find these keywords.

1. Go to Google’s Keyword Research Tool and click on the “Website Content” section.
2. Now enter the main address of the website you’re advertising for (this would be the address you have in your display URL in your advertisements).
3. Click on the “Get Keywords” button
4. All of the keywords listed below are keywords Google has found to be extremely relevant to your website and these keywords will have a lower bid and almost all of these keywords will be active for search.

Want more keywords because this list was too small? No problem! Just do the following:

Take the first keyword that was in the list Google gave you and click on the link titled “Keyword Variation” in Google’s Keyword Tool. Enter this keyword into the text box titled “Enter one keyword or phrase per line” and then hit the “Get More Keywords” button. Add all of the relevant keywords to your keyword list on the right side of the page. Repeat this with the second keyword in your keyword list, then your third keyword, and so on until you have a very large keyword list.

Want even more keywords? Just do the following:

Do the exact same thing mentioned above, but this time only enter the keywords you haven’t researched yet (use the keyword you found in the step before this one). Then add these keywords to your list and keep doing this until you’re satisfied with the number of keywords you have.

So why should you find keywords this way? Well since Google is looking for relevant keywords for your website, it is best that you start your keyword list by using only keywords Google thinks are relevant to your website. Then to find more relevant keywords, do keyword research on the already relevant keywords to find similar keywords for your list.

When you are done simply download the list and save it to your computer before you add these keywords to your AdGroups. Remember to try to group these keywords as well as possible.

Writing a Well Targeted Text Ad

Yes, Google also wants you to have a well targeted and relevant text ad. If you have this then Google will raise your quality score. Here’s how to get a relevant text ad:

1. Google looks at three things to determine relevance and these three things are your keyword, text ad, and landing page. If all of these are relevant to each other then you will have a good relevancy score, which increases your quality score.
2. To get your keyword and your text ad relevant to each other, simply include the keyword in your text advertisement.
3. To get your keyword and your landing page relevant to each other, see if the keyword appears in the landing page’s text. If it does then your keyword will be relevant to your landing page and since your text ad also contains the keyword your text ad will be relevant to your landing page.

If your keyword is not found in your landing page you will need to have some type of connection between your landing page and your text ad. To do this, do the following:

1. Use the keyword density tool mentioned earlier in this guide to find and list all of the keywords that are found on the landing page.
2. Find a keyword or keyphrase that has a high density and put this somewhere in the description of your text ad.

Doing this will allow Google to find a connection between your landing page and your text ad.

Fixing Poor Quality Keywords

How exactly do you use the information in this guide to fix your poor quality keywords?

Fixing Low Quality Keywords if You’re an Affiliate

If you’re an affiliate without a webpage it will be a little bit more difficult for you to have a perfect keyword list where none of the keywords are marked Low Quality. But here’s what to do to make sure a large majority of your keywords have good quality scores.

• Use the Finding Keyword’s techniques I mentioned above to find the keywords that will most likely be active for search.
• Make sure you don’t over bid on your keywords. I never bid more than $0.20 per click 95% of the time. I set all of my bids to $0.05 per click and then I gradually raise them until I reach the most I’m willing to pay which is usually $0.15-$0.20 per click.
• Try to have a high CTR. If you’re having trouble, then I recommend using Dynamic Keyword Insertion.
• If you do find that you’re having to use high bids for your search network keywords, then change your Campaign Settings to allow different bids for content network and the search network. This way you can lower your bids on the Content Network so you’re not begin charged large bid prices for both the search and content networks.
• Don’t forget to read the section in this guide titled “My Keywords Are Inactive for Search”.

Fixing Low Quality Keywords if You Own A Website or if You’re an Affiliate that Owns a Website

If you own the website you’re advertising on then you have a little bit more of an advantage because you can simply create new landing pages for each AdGroup that is relevant to that AdGroup. This lets you choose the keywords you want because you can simply make them relevant. To do this use the techniques in the section of the guide titled “What Website Owners & Landing Pages Need to Do”.

Don’t forget to also use these same techniques:

• Use the Finding Keyword’s techniques I mentioned above to find the keywords that will most likely be active for search.
• Make sure you don’t over bid on your keywords. I never bid more than $0.20 per click 95% of the time. I set all of my bids to $0.05 per click and then I gradually raise them until I reach the most I’m willing to pay which is usually $0.15-$0.20 per click.
• Try to have a high CTR. If you’re having trouble, then I recommend using Dynamic Keyword Insertion.
• If you do find that you’re having to use high bids for your search network keywords, then change your Campaign Settings to allow different bids for content network and the search network. This way you can lower your bids on the Content Network so you’re not begin charged large bid prices for both the search and content networks.
• Again, don’t forget to look at the section in this guide titled “My Keywords Are Inactive for Search”.

Quality Score Types

There are three different types of quality scores that affect your advertising, positioning, min bid, and generally your overall return on investment. These three different types of quality scores are Account, AdGroup, and Keyword Quality scores.

Account Quality Score

Your account quality score is basically an average quality score based on everything that happens within your account. Your account quality score is determined by your account’s average click through rate on the search network, your account’s performance history (more importance is placed on most recent history), your advertisement’s relevance, and other relevancy factors which include things that you don’t control like average stay on site, IP targeting, etc. The other relevancy factors have very little effect on your quality score so don’t worry about them.

Your account quality score is used to determine the minimum bids for the keywords you add to your account that receive very little traffic. This is why I recommend adding keywords that receive traffic first and then add the keywords that don’t receive much traffic a week later because your Account Quality Score will be higher. So a good Account Quality Score will help keep you new keyword minimum bids lower.

AdGroup Quality Score

Your AdGroup Quality Score is based on the average performance of each of your AdGroups and each AdGroup has its own unique quality score. Your AdGroup quality score is based on your AdGroup’s sponsored search click through rate, landing page(s), account quality score, advertisement’s relevance, AdGroup history (more importance placed on most recent history), and of course other relevancy factors.

Your AdGroup Quality Score is used to determine your Content Advertising ranking, placement, and bid. If you have a high AdGroup Quality Score you will receive more quality traffic on the content network at a lower cost.

Keyword Quality Score

Your keyword quality score is more advanced and each keyword has its own unique quality score. Your keyword quality score is determined by the historical CTR of that keyword on the search network, keyword’s relevance to your text ads, your landing page quality, account history (measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account), historical CTR of the display URL’s in the AdGroup, and other relevancy factors.

Your Keyword Quality Score determines the minimum bid, position, and ranking for your keyword on the search network (Google.com).

How your Advertisements Rank is Determined

Here’s the current formula Google uses to find your advertisement’s rank.

Ad Rank = (Your Max Bid) x (Quality Score)

Here’s an example of this in the table below:

Please keep in mind that this is a crude example, I’m just using it to help illustrate how it works.