Classic Google Slap

QUESTION: For awhile, I have been running a Google Adwords campaign that has brought a lot of impressions but a few clicks per day (1-2). I changed around my bids a little bit to find that my minimum bid has raised to $10 per click. What happened?

Well, it sounds like a classic Google Slap to me. A few things are happening here…

1) If you were getting a lot of impressions before and few clicks, you CTR was probably pretty bad. Because of that, you were probably getting bad placements resulting in the poor CTR (catch-22, right?).

2) Google is completely automated so everything depends on when the bots want to visit your site. When you initially bid, its rules were probably different and when you changed your bid, Google will automatically (again) spider your site for quality. Now the rule is probably stating that the landing page is of low quality.

3) About quality score… The index title on your website has good keywords in it, but it might flag as “too much”. The rest of the page has some text (as well as the website) but not tons. The link titles on the page don’t re-inforce the terms you are trying to bid for (as well as some of the backlinks to your page). Again, try to be a “robot” in your mind, not a person. If there is any reason why it thinks you are doing something not right or not adding any value to the internet (or a correlation to the keywords you bid on), it will slap you. Writing a few articles about some of the tasks (like what you have written in the SERVICES section) and then putting anchor text rich on the footer of the page may help a lot. Also, if you are bidding on a term, you might send them specifically to a page on that topic.

4) About your keyword selection. First, this is a very competitive niche. If you are trying to get rank high for these terms, you may need to have higher bids (assuming no Slap). Also, you said that you set your daily limit low (to about $25/day). This will not only suppress the number of impressions, but it will also rank you lower. For terms like this, you need to be doing a LOT of ad text testing to increase your CTR. Again, all of this is kind of a catch-22 (spend more to get higher rankings so you can pay less!?). Just a warning, too…beware of bidding on terms that are too broad. In TruGuru, I call these Broad Tier keywords. They usually have a lot of volume but little traffic. Look into some Focus and Money Tier keywords. This will lower your bid (and volume, of course), but if you can achieve higher CTR’s with these words, you can slowly start dripping in some broader terms (which can be a root of the focus or money keywords) and in many times, these will leverage off of the rest of the campaign resulting in lower prices and better positions for these hypercompetitive terms.

My suggestion: Work on the landing a page and website a little bit more…Add a bit more content, like articles with some keyword-rich anchor texts from at least the homepage (possibly footer!). Don’t optimize too much (like you may have done on the index title). Do a little more keyword research focusing more on the Focus and Money tier keywords (and in this case, you probably can get away with a lower daily budget). At this point, you may want to create first a new campaign and try again…if you get slapped about, you probably want to create a new account. But I think if you beef-up the landing page and choose less competitive keywords, you will probably be fine (just create a new campaign at least).

Tell me how it goes and good luck!

Cheers…matt