Recent AdWords Changes

Hello there,
I have been running AdWords for clients for quite some time.
Up to last year i was able to setup landing pages with a starting quality score of 9-10.

The last 6 months i am watching strange things.

I have setup a campaign on my account
(an old account i used to do experiments but now want to start using it for my projects)
Did the landing pages corectly (tags, titles, descriptions and text all ok) and get from 5-7 quality score.

What has changed ?

I am not promoting affiliate products anywhere on the site.
Furthermore, i have heard some of the changes were that if you didn't include a terms of use and a privacy policy you had a penalty, i added those.

The missing points (3-5) can all come from the past history of not good ctr?
What can I test in order to fix that and could all those points get away from something else i don't currently know?

Waiting on your thoughts, thank you very much.
Angel

 

anyone with any thoughts on the issue?

 

What has changed is google. They are becoming very picky about the type of sites they allow. If its too simple, or appears spammy, it might get through the filter, but if a human reviews it, as they occasionally do, you're likely to get your QS lowered significantly.

 

Have a read over this for some advice.

I've been working on a campaign for the past year that was recently slapped. Same as you it was non-affiliate landing pages but yet the bids were rising and quality score lowering.

Thankfully though I've been managing to get the campaign back to normal.

 

> They are becoming very picky about the type of sites they allow.

Cormac's link explains why. Like that article, I understand why Google is doing this. This is part 2 of the one-site, one-ad rule that came into effect a few years back. Google saw there was too many advertisers with pages that all in effect talked about the same thing and linking to the same merchant. They saw it was not a good end-user experience.

All the complaints the last few months seem to be coming from affiliate marketers sending their clicks to their own site. Never directly to the merchant. My suggestion is to stop advertising using PPC to your site with links to the merchant. Try SEO techniques instead (although I feel that eventually Google will change their algo so that the SERPs don't all show sites with links to the same merchants). Then, use PPC to link directly to the merchant.

 

I think the article linked to above is a LITTLE over-the-top in saying that "Google hates affiliates" but it's food for thought. I don't think Google are going to weed out ALL affiliate marketers using AdWords overnight or ever (after all, even Amazon acts as a sort of affiliate/drop-shipper with many of "its" third-party products!) - I think there's a little TOO much revenue at stake there! Anyway, they could easily introduce a rule saying, "no affiliate links on landing pages" and that would be that.

But Google wouldn't be where they were now if they hadn't had a fanatical insistence on the quality of their search results from day one, and it makes sense that they want to ensure even paid clicks are taking visitors to quality sites. So I guess in the medium term affiliate PPC marketers are at the least going to have to work a lot harder to provide value, rather than just slapping together generic landing pages which tell the visitor nothing they couldn't have found out with a regular search anyway. I will be watching quality scores pretty carefully too see where this is going...

 

> they could easily introduce a rule saying, "no affiliate links on landing pages"

I think that's what indeed has happened.

I don't thing Google hates affiliates, I think they just hate sending traffic to sites which turn around and send the visitor to an affiliate and there's 20 others doing the same, all sending to the same affiliate.

 

It means that they still have a lot of advertisers, suppose they don't have many advertisers, they might come to your house and ask you to advertise.....