The Google Quality Score Fiasco

Google just made sweeping changes to their "Quality Score" for keywords. A lot of people (including me) woke up Wednesday morning to discover that hundreds or thousands of 5 and 10 cent keywords were inactivated and now Google's system is asking for $5.00 or $10.00.

Today I'm going to give you the latest intelligence I have on this - and also solicit your input if you have valuable data to share. There are a lot of serious advertisers in the coaching programs and Renaissance Club and all of us together will crack the code on this.

Judging by the individual conversations I've had and from discussion boards, for thousands of legitimate advertisers this change has shifted Google from friend to adversary. When you have a very successful website that is monetizing cheap keywords (i.e. ones that other people obviously have a hard time monetizing) and Google suddenly jacks YOUR bid prices up 100X - BUT crappy, low-quality, irrelevant ads from Ebay, Amazon, Shop.com and other large advertisers are still showing ---- for example

St Peter
Whatever you're looking for
you can get it on eBay.
www.eBay.com

...when ads THAT dumb are running, and you get whacked for having a site that your prospects and customers actually like, that really sucks.

I'm not suggesting a victim mentality, not suggesting that you just take your toys and go home. I'm gonna give you some serious input on this today. However I would say that the 'Google Honeymoon' is over. Google wants its advertisers to put out, and Google doesn't feel particularly inclined to explain what makes Google happy. If Google's been a 'free ride' for you for the last couple of years I suggest you get your butt in gear and structure your business so it's not dependent on anybody giving you a free ride.

You'd better make sure you've got 3-4 major ways of acquring customers, not just one, and you'd better sure you're getting customers to come back again and again, not just one time.

Competition on the Internet is only going to get thicker with time. If you're not sharpening your saw, if you're not keeping up with the changes - and most importantly if you're not exercising Kaizen continuous improvement to make your conversion rates better and better, you're in for tough sledding. If this update has been a wakeup call for you, then don't miss the lesson.

Onward with some strategies to get you over the hump.

First, here's what I've seen:

-Low priced keywords appear to have been hit the hardest, especially below 25 cents, although there are certainly people who've been inactivated even with 50 cent and $1.00 keywords.

-Content syndication is not affected by this quality score. They'll still run your ads on other people's sites, even if they don't run on Google. (But - important - you also have to make sure you bid on content separately, so IF you do raise your bids on any of your keywords for search, that you don't also pay extra for content.)

-I have some students (Sunny Hills for example, who has quite a few AdWords campaign management clients, AND buys a lot of 3, 4 and 5 cent traffic for his own projects) who have NOT been affected by this AT ALL.

-I have other students who have been hit very hard, often losing 3/4ths of their Google traffic. The thing most of these people have in common is 1-page websites and squeeze pages with very little other content.

-My own campaigns have been a mix of both - most not being affected in the slightest, one burning down like a forest fire came through. Since I don't have any secrets I'm terribly concerned about hiding, let me tell you about those. I'll give you a few examples.

Almost nothing I'm doing for PerryMarshall.com was affected.

Let me tell you about three side projects and some experimentation I did with them. These are all campaigns based more or less on 5 cent clicks. (This is especially relevant because the people hit hardest by this seem to be people using a 'long tail' strategy to scoop up cheap keywords overlooked by others.)

I have a bare-bones, 1-page website www.CoffeeHouseTheology.com which was hit very hard. Almost all the keywords were inactivated and went from 5 cents a click to 5 and 10 dollars a click literally overnight.

I have a website www.CosmicFingerprints.com which, on the surface looks about the same - one page squeeze page, you either opt in or you leave - but it's got some Non-Obvious links on the bottom, to other pages on the site. There's actually a TON of content on this site. This site was not affected AT ALL.

I have a website www.RandomMutation.com which is a 2-page website, and the 2nd page has a modest amount of content and a few links going elsewhere. Not affected at all.

Now here's what's interesting:

I took the Squeeze Page from CoffeeHouseTheology and put a copy of it on CosmicFingerprints. I created a new Google campaign with the same ad and the same keywords, but pointed it to the new page on CosmicFingerprints instead, and - Viola! - Got my 5 cent clicks back.

Yesterday and today I am hosting my Renaissance Club Roundtable meeting in Chicago (an exclusive mastermind group, membership costs ten grand a year), and the members of this group have been comparing notes. One member whose ads got inactivated (and who does have a decent amount of content on his site) pointed his ads to a competitor's website (a Very popular site with tons of content) and Google accepted the 5 cent bids immediately.

This and other experiments tell me that Google's Quality Score for landing pages is NOT so much a guage of how well the landing page matches the keywords and whatnot. (In fact I can show you lots of examples where there's hardly any match at all between keyword and site, and the bids are still 5 cents). Rather, it is a measure of how much content Google thinks that site has.

Bottom Line: There are some sites that Google judges as having "enough content" or "lots of content" and other sites Google judges as having "poor content" or "no content." If they think you've got no content, Sorry Pardner - You Lose. You pay ten bucks a click for 5 cent keywords.

An obvious workaround is to take whatever you've got that's been working and move it to a site that has "enough content" or "lots of content." At this moment in time it doesn't appear that the new page and the old site have to even be about the same topic. In the short term at least, this does work.

Let me add that it's as important as ever before, and probably more important, that you structure your Google campaigns properly, that you use narrow bands of tightly matched keywords in any one group, that you don't dump thousands of basically unrelated keywords into one group. You can't be sloppy about this. Do what the Definitive Guide tells you.

And as of late: make sure you've got content on your site and Google's spider knows about it.

Alternate Strategy: One of my Roundtable Members managed to get all his keywords re-activated by moving his landing pages to a different domain (which BTW did NOT have much content on it to begin with), creating a separate landing page for each ad group, and changing all of his "short bullet" copy to complete paragraphs.

In his words: But for the moment, I think the conclusion is "separate ad group = separate landing page", ... with at least a few paragraphs of hyper relevant, keyword dense, REAL ENGLISH that draws people in right away.

Here's what I don't know yet: I don't know how long it takes for Google to re-evaluate your site's "content score." I would like to get feedback from Renaissance Club members about this. If you add 20 pages of content to your site, and put links to it, when do they forgive you? Same day? 3 weeks later? We'd like to hear back.

Also I know that some advertisers are getting a manual override from their account rep. Can't hurt to call Google, though most people get non-answers from the AdWords staff. Would be interested in hearing from someone who got a real answer.

Oh, and since I was ranting about Ebay and Amazon, note once again that what seems to matter is not relevance of the ads and the content, but just the fact that they have lots of content.

(Oh, and I'm sure they're getting an override from their account rep, too.)

Strategy Tip: Ken Giddens, whose focus was always more on the SEO side, had a great content strategy. If he was selling a book or ebook, he'd slice it up into 100 pieces and use those pieces to make content pages for his site. Great, original, keyword-rich content. And he said it never hurt sales, it just got him more visitors. You might wanna do that too, if you're a publisher (or even if you're not.)

General Observation: A lot of people are speculating that Google is trying to get rid of "Made For AdWords" pages, maybe that's true. Maybe they're trying to get rid of 1 page websites and Squeeze Pages. It's possible they get complaints about those. In any case what I do see is that they're trying to make the right side of their pages more like the left side. Content is King on the free side and they're trying to manually force advertisers to do the same thing on the right side.

Now in some sense I disagree with this because if the advertiser has to pay for the spot then the advertiser has to let his audience tell him what pays, not let a Google bot decide based on some arbitrary formula. However, we don't get to make up the rules, Google does, and they wield their power by not telling you what's going on.

It's my job, of course, to shed light on these things.

If you've got data and experimentation that sheds light on some of these questions, you can email Bryan Todd {bryan} {at} {perrymarshall dot com} and our next update will be even better.

Meanwhile - do everything you can to make your business NOT dependent on the whims of Google.

Perry Marshall

P.S. If you'd like to schedule a 30 minute Google ad campaign consultation with Bryan, who is staying on top of all this stuff, you can do that at http://adwordscoaching.com/

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