A Valuable Google Adwords Lesson

SKinney has been raging at doing the affiliate marketing thing - I swear the dude could make holding a ketchup Popsicle look like a great idea to a lady wearing white gloves!

My affiliate marketing is more of the slow and steady revenue stream - but hey, it makes money and I like it. I tend to stick to products I have used or know someone that has and natural health or self improvement products are my faves to promote.

So, my latest endeavor was a home remedy guide on Clickbank for bacterial vaginosis. I did the usual thing and built the review site, created a few articles and posted them around linking back and did the social marker thing and I made about $200 a week average and I was spending a big $5 a day on Adwords to drive traffic to my site.

Then… the people stopped coming overnight and my ads weren’t showing. SKinney took one look at my stats of death and said, “Bet your ad quality score sucks”… but my ads were rockin’!

So I logged into my Adwords account and suddenly my keywords weren’t showing any longer for searches ” Quality Score: Poor (1/10) ” How the heck did I go from thousands of impressions a day to NONE?????
(How the heck did SKinney know that would happen and why didn’t he tell me?????).

I was annoyed and although I didn’t think so at the time, it was actually a great thing that happened to me because I learned a lot - I learned how to make my pages super relevant, have better quality Adwords and on top of it all, having more relevance lowers your PPC. More hits and less money? You bet!

Here’s what I did and if you’re spending too much on Adwords or you want to lower your PPC and get more targeted hits, hopefully this will help you out too:

1- Organized My Keywords
yeah okay, I’m terrible about that - I add big lists of targeted keywords and I know better - this made me take each group of keywords and put them together in related lists and I had 5 groups of about 15-20 keywords each. If you don’t already utilize the Adwords Editor - I HIGHLY recommend it for making tasks like this super, duper easy.

2- Kill Your Ads and ONLY Show Relevant Ads
Now take the keywords in each group and make a relevant ad.  By relevant, I mean make your ad have the keywords you’re gunning for. I put natural home remedies for BV together and signs and symptoms together and created ad copy that addressed those keywords specifically within each group. This will make my ad groups really go with the keywords they are representing and that way raises the relevance to Google.

3- Do a Little Testing
Also, take the time to see which ads perform the best and kill the rest - you should have a great idea if you run 2 weeks worth of ads and see which ones get the click throughs and sales. Another reason having smaller adgroups and targeted ad copy really works to find out what types of ads are really selling for you.

4- Exercise Your Keyword Matching  Options
When someone searches for a keyword phrase, you don’t want to spend valuable $$ on curiosity clicks. It’s a good idea to not even use broad matching keywords for most Adwords campaigns. I use only “phrase” and [exact]. Usually I will put both keyword phrases that I am targeting in parenthesis as well as brackets to harness both phrase and exact matches and help target my audience a little more.
ALSO - under negative keywords put this keyword  in -free. It will eliminate clicks from people searching online for “free this” and “free that” and if they are searching for free stuff they obviously don’t wanna spend any money on a product.

5. Rev Up your Product Page
A mere review page with links to an affiliate products isn’t considered very relevant so you still need to do all the important SEO things for your product. PLR articles for relevant information, deep link building, use the most relevant keywords on your pages. And speaking of pages, for greatest relevance, Google says on its own pages what it wants to see most and considers essential site pages : privacy policy, about us page, terms and conditions page, contact us page are all considered very important. Make sure they are accessible from the main page and a newsletter page or blog page is a great idea too.

And in a nutshell, that’s what I did to hop up the relevance of my affiliate page. It took a little time, but it paid off in just 4 days.  My ads were considered more relevant, I was getting far better placements and best of all, my budget was even lower.