Matthew Bredel
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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

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Matthew BredelMy name is Matthew Bredel and as of March, 2007, I am a full-time, work-at-home internet marketer. For close to 10 years, I worked for a defense company which was an OK job, but I was so uninspired in life and frankly, I needed some more money. That is when I first discovered internet marketing! Now I admit that I didn't start making thousands in my first couple of months (in fact, I lost my shirt!), but I finally saw the "internet light"...

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As you can see from the video, I am a little bit behind to release this, but I really wanted to do it right!

If you don’t remember, I was in Australia for most of the Christmas holiday season (about 4 weeks).  One of the best things about being an internet marketer is that it is quite easy to relocate your business and Australia was one of those opportunities.

Yes, I did do some work, but there was plenty of fun, too!  And then there was a mix of business and pleasure…

Business and Pleasure

If you don’t know who James Schramko is, you need to get to know him.  A few years ago, James and I first made contact and over time have become good allies.  But being an Australian as James is, most of our friendship was quite virtual.

But I knew James was a natural at internet marketing the minute we first started talking and his successes and his status as a bona-fide marketing guru are less than an exaggeration.  (Recently John Carlton wrote that James was the online entrepreneur of the year for 2009!).

2009?  Are you kidding?

I kept thinking “How could 2009 be a killer year for anyone?”  We’ve been seeing the industry in flux and many big players going down fast.  Yet, here is James prospering and growing at an exponential level.  Huh?

So while in Australia, it just so happened that we were staying about 2 miles away from James and graciously, he invited me and the entire family over for a traditional Aussie barbeque.  We ate steaks. My kids played on the trampoline, in the pool and did a  little bit of Playstation3.  The “adults” hung out and drank beers and wine.

After a few beers, I boldly just asked James straight out:

“HOW ARE YOU SUCCEEDING SO MUCH RIGHT NOW?”

He gave me a little James Schramko grin and said: “It’s actually EASIER right now than ever before, mate!” (he might not have said the “mate”, but to keep him sounding Aussie, I’m just adding it!)

“So, are you going to tell me the secret?”

This is when we started to casually talk about my businesses and he said:

“I KNOW WHAT’S WRONG, AND I CAN FIX IT” (mate)

I wanted to hear what he had to say and I know James is in high demand these days and commands quite high fees for his consultation time.  We worked out a deal and I returned the next day.

We spent well over 4 hours breaking down my business, finding the holes and coming up with solutions.

And the Solutions Where So Easy

We both agreed that afterward, we would share our conversion with our own clients.  We spent another couple of hours recording this consultation on video.

I’ve now put them all together and they are ready for you!  For current members of TruGuru, they are already in the portal ready to be watched.

For the rest of you, I debated awhile on what I wanted to do.  I think this is too good to keep closed to non-members. And these videos are important to both experienced marketers as well as “newbies”.

Here’s the deal…

If you want to watch the videos, too, they are available for purchase at BizBreakDown.com.  The price is ridiculously low, but then again, I am only opening this to the “public” for a limited number of buyers at this price.

To start with, watch James and I talk about what we did and learn more about getting BizBreakDown today!

bbdintro

Watch the video now

cheers…matt