From Great Quality Score to Slap in 3 months

[tbp]

Hi Lee,

Have you actually put your price up to 50p per click? This is the first step in my own experience, if you agree to raise the CPC to 50p in a couple of hours it will change to £2.50. If you raise it to £2.50 (which I did briefly to see what would happen, praying I wouldn't get any clicks ), it then goes up to £5!

[jd77]

Noticed this myself. When starting a campaign I get a great quality score and then a couple of days later I'm 'poor'. I'm not a big PPC expert by any means but I don't understand the logic behind it all.

[tbp]

I don't understand the logic behind it all

I wouldn't even try!

From what i`ve seen recently, there is absolutely no logic behind some of the actions taken. It's certainly not based on the quality of the sites, as some really good ones have been slapped, but i`ve seen other sites continue that have 1 page with 4 affiliate links and nothing else left alone.

The lack of logic is the most frustrating thing, as it means there is nothing you can do to stop being slapped.

[Leeky]

Nah, didn't bother increasing the bids, i just deleted those keywords they wanted 50p a click for... not made a sale since though on the remaining keywords.

The funny thing is the page im promoting has been rock solid on page 1 for its main keywords in the organic results for the last 6 month, now ive started PPC on it, its nowhere to be found... and i know this is an old boring myth but it has happened and did happen to me when i did ppc years ago on most pages i promoted, but all those who pay ppc and stay in good organic positions will disagree (obviously), all im saying it seems to happen to me most of the time.

Now im getting no sales from ppc or via organic listings for that product.

Lee

[tbp]

I had exactly the same thing Lee, my site was at number 1 in the natural results for 6 months, but got slapped as being "poor quality" for PPC. Didn't make sense to me that its good quality for natural search, and poor quality for PPC.

Thankfully though, although it got slapped for PPC it hasn't dropped from natural search.

The other stupid thing is that i`m not using PPC with it under a different domain. So the landing page is exactly the same, was good quality first, then poor quality, and now good quality on a different domain.

Demonstrates that the quality score is essentially completely random!

[Leeky]

Yeah, random in every sense of the word, i think google are playing about trying different things irrelevant of what the sites quality is.

Ill have another go with PPC but im certainly going to design a new pge which is not already ranked in google just to be on the safe side, i still think ppc and organic listings are not linked in any way but im not going to risk it again because who knows what they are upto behind the scenes.

Good rankings in the natural listings are a bonus but doesn't seem to fetch in the type of money you can get with PPC (judging by what you hear about 'super affiliates' earnings)

Its hard enough trying to make money doing affiliate marketing trying to follow googles rules, but when the rules are random then what can you do?

Years ago before this qaulity score came in i did ok using PPC, now I can't seem to get started doing the exact same thing as when I made good money via PPC.

If the quality of the landing page is poor now then how come it converted fine before google said it was poor?

At the moment my advise would be not to waste your affiliate commissions made via organic searches on trying to make more money via ppc.

Lee

[gallito89]

Google is really cracking down on affiliates, frankly I've moved away from PPC completely. Organic traffic only now

[tbp]

frankly I've moved away from PPC completely. Organic traffic only now

I do agree, but unfortunately PPC makes more.

I have a site at number 1 in google for it's keyphrase, and also number 1 on adwords as well, and the adwords ad converts much better (with both going to the same page).

I`d like to drop PPC, but I`d lose money if I did.

[99MWD99]

Hi,

I have been reading this thread with great interest.

I too have had a few sites get hung, drawn and quartered by google.

Then after alot of research I thought finally I had cracked the quality score secret, it seemed to have worked but over the weekend I got hit minimum bids of 30-60c instead of the magic 5c which is what this particular campaign was running on.

Then the more ad groups I made the higher the bids I needed to trigger the ads showing.
As you guys know there is nothing more depressing than seeing your profitable google adword campaign go up in smoke.

But today I set up yet another ad group and everything is back to normal again with "great" quality score and 5c bids....how weird is that?

I starting to think it has something to do with the big boy advertisers taking preference and then if they don't use adwords google will let anyone bid for keywords as long as they hit some kind of minimum QS.

[amisuggests]

The answer to all this is multiple streams of traffic and multiple streams of income

Affiliate marketing and Google are not synonymous, remember that. Google is just a medium in which we do business