I actually think the keyword loaded MFA sites will actually benefit from this, whilst conventional advertisers may get hurt over this. I'm assuming quality score of the landing page is determine by a number of factors: keyword usage on the page would most likely be the largest factor (and the total subjective opinion of whichever auditor ends up looking at your site, if that counts for much). Provided your site doesn't look like crap, you may actually do fairly well. By throwing magic sauce into the equation, it leaves room for exploitation and the ability to manipulate your quality score. This means savvy advertisers may actually get a good one-up over less knowledgeable ones in manipulating the quality score. Does anyone else see an opportunity here? Just follow the guidlines, and you may actually benefit!
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Nothing scientific to support it but it appears to me if you have affiliate links on a landing page (or use affiliate links for the destination url) you'll get hit the hardest. Just about all of my affiliate stuff has taken a hit. My non affiliate pages saw no changes in the required (or actual) CPC. Makes sense when you think about.
Hi GFC, I Promote about 30 CJ Affiliates using AdWords using aff links as destination urls: I noticed that only 2 affiliates went completely off (all keywords become deactivated with min bid = $5 and $10). I don't know yet if most of the other affiliates has suffered a bit with the the new policy due my entire account become deactivated a period last week due a Googles's billing mistake - but looks that most of the my affiliates has not been affected by this landing page stuff - only 2 of the 30. If you want to exchange info about this affiliates, just contact me and I can provide you more info - maybe is a quality page problem of the affiliates you're promoting regards
My campaigns that were hit the hardest tended to be the ones where I set up a landing page and loaded it down with affiliate links. I only have a handful of campaigns where I use an affiliate url as the destination url and a quick review shows they are doing ok. So maybe I'll back pedal a little on my earlier statement - maybe G' views that type of affiliate marketing as "good" since were sending people to the primary site that offers the product(s), and, they already only show 1 ad per site. Do you have any of your own affiliate pages that you promote via AdWords? If so did you notice keyword deactivation for the keywords used to promote those pages?
No, I don't have my own page. I just send then directly to the affiliate links. From the 2 that are inactive one of the affiliates is this that don't has too much content in the destination url - has some of the keywords there, but don't has any other links - just the lead form directly. I suspect that this new G Quality algorithm measure for level links as also for measuring the landing page quality - but I'm not sure yet.
My current theory is that the algorithm change has as much to do with the overall content of your entire domain as it does with the "quality" of your landing pages. I have been testing for a week now - and after adding content to the site as a whole, I seem to be getting some of my keywords listed. I'll post more as the results come in.
I've been testing with a new domain with NO backlinks, terrible internal linking structure and orphaned pages. Having enough content seems to prevent any interference from the new quality score algos, I havn't been hit at all on my new campaigns. Prices are often a little bit higher by a few cents (perhaps psychologically?) for terms not located on the actual landing page. Mispellings are performing fairly miserable at the moment however, so I'll try shifting them to adCenter. I was initially quite skeptical regarding AdWords' new policy, but it seems that they're killing off the sheer number of advertisers whilst jacking up the prices for all involved to compensate (or what we're witnessing is a self correcting system).
I doubt it has much to do with content on pages other than the landing page itself. That wouldn't really make much sense.
I'm a tocuh worried about the term quality. Surely quality would be determined by conversion. If conversion is good the bidder stays in the market and perhaps ups their bid. If conversion is poor, the bidder leaves the market.
To clarify, every other page on my experimental domain is absolutely devoid of content. There are only blank pages I'm using to show affiliate landing pages. It seems the quality score is related to -mostly- onsite factors. One thing's for sure - links don't seem to affect the score that much either. Additionally, I think a few very prominent AdWords users have also picked up on this, as they've started placing descriptions/glossaries/reviews on their landing pages. This is going to kill the Arbitrage MFAs but it'll increase spam (or force them to write/generate some articles).
I've made a few case studies. Here are some conclusions. (I'm not claiming these to be universal truths - just what I've found.) 1. The presence/non-presence of adsense on a page doesn't make a difference to price. Removing adsense from a page does not result in a lower keyword price from adwords. Adding adsense to a page does not result in a greater adwords price. 2. Once Adwords has decided on the price for a keyword leading to a page, or a site for that matter, it will not budge from that price. I set up a keyword to a new page. The page was only slightly relevant to the keyword. Google asked for 40c to activate the search. (It was a search that I knew had once cost only a few pennies.) I then took the same keyword and wrote a very targeted ad and pointed it at a page that was absolutely optimized for the ad. Adwords still wanted 40c to activate the search - despite the fact that there were no other ads appearing on Google Search for this keyword. 3. If Google asks for $x.00 to activate a keyword, it always takes $x.00 for a click on the search network, even if there are no other ads on the page. 4. It's taking ages to get new ads to run on the content network these days. Looks like the adwords employees have plenty of work on their hands.
Art, my response was aimed at richa65 and his/her statement: It would make zero sense to assign a quality score to a page based in part on other, unlinked and unrelated pages within that same domain. I manage 6 figures + in AdWords on a monthly basis and have seen no evidence that would support that theory.
I supported your statement with my own findings, and what you've just said has confirmed it. It seems this new quality score algo is only a minor hindrance if people are really intent on manipulating AdWords.
I think that Google is doing this to put the hurt on affiliates specifically. Then, when they launch their CPA advertising product, the advertisers will jump on that because AdWords isn't working well and their affiliate programs aren't doing as well. Also, "user experience" has very little to do with this because the real users of AdWords are the advertisers and frankly, the advertisers are going to be pissed off when they have to spend 5-10x as much per click. Graywolf has posted on his blog about this a lot recently and it's insane. His ads had great CTR and probably a great conversion rate for him, but now the prices have skyrocketed and his profits died. Why? Because he was promote affiliates using landing pages. Frankly, I think Google is being stupid here. A landing page is like a billboard ad. If someone likes it then they buy, if not, then they don't. It's not about having an encyclopedia of information about the product unless the advertiser wants there to be. Google is acting like it's God's gift to the internet and frankly, I hope this drives advertisers elsewhere.
I've read Graywolf's blog. He may have a had great ctr and great conversions (although "great" is a relative term) but at the end of the day his affiliate pages didn't bring any real value to the web or people searching in Google. The end user would be better served (or at least that's the argument) by being sent directly to the primary companies page, not an affiliate page promoting those same products. Some of my affiliate campaigns took it in the a** just like everyone else but I do understand, and to certain extent agree, with what Google is trying to do.
Well after reading a ton of forums threads and blogs about this - I tried to summarize the issue in a couple blogs. The 1st talks about how it seems G targeted affiliates to a large degree and why. The 2nd offers some solutions for getting your campaigns back online. Google AdWords Algo Change Targets Affiliates http://affiliate-blogs.5staraffiliateprograms.com/2006/07/19/google-adwords-targets-affiliates/ The Cure for Google Adwords Affiliate Landing Page Problems http://affiliate-blogs.5staraffiliateprograms.com/2006/07/21/adwords-affiliate-landing-page/ Hope this helps and best of luck!