PPC and Quality Score + Content

[mickn88]

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Hi Guys,

I have read now in a few places that 100% quality score is very important if you want to make it in the affiliate world via ppc.

What I have been doing so far is this (not a lot):

1) Buy a niche domain
2) Set up an adwords campaign. Very narrow keywords, closely related to the domain keyword.
3) Write up 4 pages of content loaded with keywords that I am using in my ad campaign.
4) Put the content and site live.

As it turns out, this gets me a 9/10 quality score for 80% of the keywords the majority of the time. So happy enough with that, and bit of fiddling with the actual ads to improve CTR has nailed me a 10/10 score in cases.

I have also managed to rank well organically using this method (thanks to smigle and his thread as well).

Ranking well organically is great, but what I would rather do is forget organic initially.
My thinking is that if I focus on ppc, and if the sites converts well via ppc, I can then crack on with the organic lark. On the otherhand, if the site is a ppc disaster, and simply doesn't convert, I won't have wasted any time on organic work and content creation.

The big time pss off with organic stuff is actually creating the content.

Forgetting ethical issues and copyright for the moment:
Will google get the hump if I create a webite (solely geared for ppc) by just pasting and copying from a manufactures website? (maybe stick a small link back to manufacture to acknowledge my thieving ways)

Or will google not give me a good quality score becasue I have copied content on my site?

That way, I should get a very good quality score and not spend 3 hours creating the content.
Then if the site converts via ppc, I can spend the 3 hours creating the unique content for organice purposes.

Sorry for the long post.

Thanks

Mike

[mikey_gee]

I have just started PPC literally the other day and was wondering the exact same thing that i was about to come on here and post that question. However im getting slightly different results - the term i have click on has 50k+ searches a month, no other ads (therefore 3p clicks when i started) however my quality score to start with was 7 (ridiculously low i thought considering my site has been setup using Affi guide) and has since dropped to 5/10 quality score (and my CPC is up to 15p). The only thing is my click thru is 0.5% is this what brings QS down? As i did wonder whether it was to do with the copied manufacturer content and Google was marking me down on this or will a click through of 3% say give me i higher QS. Whats your click through rate Mike?

MG.

[mickn88]

I have just started PPC literally the other day and was wondering the exact same thing that i was about to come on here and post that question. However im getting slightly different results - the term i have click on has 50k+ searches a month, no other ads (therefore 3p clicks when i started) however my quality score to start with was 7 (ridiculously low i thought considering my site has been setup using Affi guide) and has since dropped to 5/10 quality score (and my CPC is up to 15p). The only thing is my click thru is 0.5% is this what brings QS down? As i did wonder whether it was to do with the copied manufacturer content and Google was marking me down on this or will a click through of 3% say give me i higher QS. Whats your click through rate Mike?

MG.

Only done 2 sites so far (2 more going live tomoz), but I guess I got a bit jammy on these 2..my ctr on one site is 6% and the other site just under 10%.

[Stavros]

Hi Guys,

I have read now in a few places that 100% quality score is very important if you want to make it in the affiliate world via ppc.

What I have been doing so far is this (not a lot):

1) Buy a niche domain
2) Set up an adwords campaign. Very narrow keywords, closely related to the domain keyword.
3) Write up 4 pages of content loaded with keywords that I am using in my ad campaign.
4) Put the content and site live.

As it turns out, this gets me a 9/10 quality score for 80% of the keywords the majority of the time. So happy enough with that, and bit of fiddling with the actual ads to improve CTR has nailed me a 10/10 score in cases.

I have also managed to rank well organically using this method (thanks to smigle and his thread as well).

Ranking well organically is great, but what I would rather do is forget organic initially.
My thinking is that if I focus on ppc, and if the sites converts well via ppc, I can then crack on with the organic lark. On the otherhand, if the site is a ppc disaster, and simply doesn't convert, I won't have wasted any time on organic work and content creation.

The big time pss off with organic stuff is actually creating the content.

Forgetting ethical issues and copyright for the moment:
Will google get the hump if I create a webite (solely geared for ppc) by just pasting and copying from a manufactures website? (maybe stick a small link back to manufacture to acknowledge my thieving ways)

Or will google not give me a good quality score becasue I have copied content on my site?

That way, I should get a very good quality score and not spend 3 hours creating the content.
Then if the site converts via ppc, I can spend the 3 hours creating the unique content for organice purposes.

Sorry for the long post.

Thanks

Mike

Sup Mike, you're doing exactly the right thing. Don't screw it up by copying content.

I don't know the ins and outs of how Google assesses adwords quality score in terms of duplicate content but I do know that adwords closely follows the rules that the organic results abide by and common sense would tell you that no one wants to see duplicate content, whether it be in the PPC results or organic results. So in my mind Google will penalise you.

I know where you're coming from though. When I started out I realised I was going to have to farm out the time consuming jobs like content writing to someone who can do it quickly and to a good standard. Uni students and new graduates are a great place to start (desperate for the money). These days we pay content writers about £20 per 1,250 words. Trust me this is the best possible way forward. You get unique content that is actually adding to the user experience and Google will also love you for it, be it organic or PPC. Plus £20 is a drop in the ocean, especially when you hit a niche that earns a couple of hundred pounds a day :tup

[Stavros]

I have just started PPC literally the other day and was wondering the exact same thing that i was about to come on here and post that question. However im getting slightly different results - the term i have click on has 50k+ searches a month, no other ads (therefore 3p clicks when i started) however my quality score to start with was 7 (ridiculously low i thought considering my site has been setup using Affi guide) and has since dropped to 5/10 quality score (and my CPC is up to 15p). The only thing is my click thru is 0.5% is this what brings QS down? As i did wonder whether it was to do with the copied manufacturer content and Google was marking me down on this or will a click through of 3% say give me i higher QS. Whats your click through rate Mike?

MG.

Did you copy the content word for word? It's possible this has killed your QS, as I said above I've never dabbled with copied content so couldn't tell you for sure.
From my experience though you can run campaigns with low CTR and still achieve a good QS, obviously it's not ideal. I have a new campaign that we've been testing for about a month which has 0.9-2.2% overall CTR (fluctuates daily) but QS is 9/10.

What you'll find with a higher CTR is that your cost per click begins to fall which in turn starts pushing your ads up the sponsored results. For this reason we usually start a new campaign by bidding high to pull in a good CTR.

[mikey_gee]

Thanks for your opinion Stavros, my CTR is 0.5% so very low, which may be killing the QS. I guess the best test here is to rewrite the text so its all unique and see what happens to the QS, unless someone knows here for sure the copied content (manufacturer descriptions nothing copyright) kills QS?

[aotagain]

0.5% ctr says to google that either your advert is unattractive to searchers OR that you have bid on something that is generating a lot of impressions that you don't want (which is the same as the first aspect ie. searchers are not interested because your ad. is appearing way off relevance to their search).

Content and landing page, whether duplicate or not is nothing to do with CTR.
They just cannot affect the CTR for a given bid and position.
The users determine the CTR and they CANNOT see your content before they click !

Make sure you separate in your mind the actual science that you can apply and the supposition that you believe or are told might be the case.

Also before you take any comments on duplicate content affecting PPC, look for the research to show that it really does affect it, or do the testing yourself.

As with many things in SEO and PPC, 80% is hearsay and repeated stuff off forums and noone is going to publish the 20% except by saying that in their experience such-and-such is the case. There is no way that the people who actually have data on this stuff are going to publish it.

I have some which has taken 6 months to accumulate and I'm not even going to tell you which market area its in. Hitwise charge you 20,000 just to get data on website visitors so heck why should anyone give away anything except the occasional opinion ?

Suppose a PPC area has 5 retailers all with the same or very similar, short product descriptions for a particular toy (this is quite common). Do you see those retailers missing from the front page of Google or from the PPC results. NO.

I have duplicate content on 3 sites for some products with 9/10, around 5% ctr at 8p, bidding on different keywords to send different people to the 3 websites.

You just have to try it.
But tackle the 0.5% first, its either your keyword selection or advert text.

[TomSmith]

A couple of weeks ago, Google's Chief Economist gave a presentation on how quality score is calculated. He broke it down into three areas:

User feedback - basically click through rate, which makes up well over 50% of the quality score.
- Relevancy - The relevance of the keyword to the ad. So make sure your account is architetually sound (keywords grouped by theme. This makes up about 25% to 30% of the quality score
- Landing page quality - Unbelievably only makes up about 5% of the quality score, however it takes into account load times, content originality, navigation etc.

The video should be on Youtube somewhere (sorry don't have a link).

Anyway, don't read into it all too much. Just use common sense and put the effort in, and you'll do well.

[MattSweet]

The 50% on CTR makes sense as I have had QS go from 6 or 7 (on a new campaign on broad match terms) to 9 or 10 after they have been live for a while and got some nice CTR.

It could work the other way on all those broad terms you just want live on page 2 at 3p CPC though... But I suppose that is the idea behind it.

[Stavros]

The 50% on CTR makes sense as I have had QS go from 6 or 7 (on a new campaign on broad match terms) to 9 or 10 after they have been live for a while and got some nice CTR.

It could work the other way on all those broad terms you just want live on page 2 at 3p CPC though... But I suppose that is the idea behind it.

Bear in mind that if you're on page 2 you'll also get fewer impressions. Both impressions and clicks will scale down proportionally so you can still achieve a great CTR on page 2, you'll just get lower volume.