I bought my domain just yesterday and had a bunch of affiliate links there which I did not know I should have cloaked. I started an Adwords campaign right away, and when I checked it this morning the QS on all my keywords dropped from 7 to 3 or 6 to 2. When I start another campaign the QS for the same keywords are at 3 and 2 after being reviewed. Was I slapped? And if so, does that mean I won't be able to rank well in google and I won't be able to run an ad campaign? Should I dump the domain, or is there a way I can "reset" it? And what all does an affiliate website have to do to avoid slaps? edit: I've tried so many combinations of keywords and can't get a QS higher than 2 any more. What am I doing wrong? Where do I go from here? And, does Adwords give you lower QS if you have started like 20 campaigns/ad groups in a day?
if google slapped your account , you will never get any traffic at all...may be you can share your current ctr , numbers of impressions and conversion rate?
You were slapped. Now you have to determine why and fix it. So focus on what goes into Quality Score. First off it sounds like your landing page probably needs some work. A bunch of affiliate links and no content will get you pretty quick. Google wants content-rich and relevant sites. So build out your landing page. You probably shouldn't be promoting more then 1 affiliate per landing page anyways (unless your doing a review site - in which case you may really have a tough time using adwords. I've read Google pretty much hates these now. Just my opinion) You need a privacy page, a contact page, an about us page, etc. Build out an actual mini-site at the very least. Make sure your landing page is relevant to the keywords. Then work on good relevant ads for your keywords. Your account history, CTR's, etc. play a role in QS as well. So you will have to bid higher in the short term to get clicks but then if you can build come CTR history you can build back your account.
My stats were updated today and I had 2700 impressions with a 0.34% CTR. I can't get anything above a poor keyword relevance now.
If I started a new domain with new content, a new niche, and everything, would I have much better chances? I can't really afford higher CPCs just to get another shot. Any tips on having relevant ads? Thanks.
> had a bunch of affiliate links Read the Adwords policies. You cannot send traffic to a page with affiliate links. They call this a bridge page. If you check the details on the keywords, you'll see that you have a poor rating for your landing page quality, although you mention poor keyword relevancy which you also have to fix. Cloaking links will not help. Either change your site so links go to the affiliate's order page, not their sales page, or link ads directly to the affiliate's sales page. Nothing else you do will change the poor landing page quality or increase your QS.
I tried linking directly to clickbank, and my ad was disapproved for the destination URL but something else bothered me: I got poor keyword relevance for keywords I got from google's tool. This is same for all ads I've tried going to my own site. Is that because my entire adwords account was slapped, or my bids were too low/competition too high, or something else? It's too confusing. I've never seen a poor rating for my landing page quality, though I realise that's against Adwords' policy. Can I get links to go to the affiliate's sales page using clickbank? Or if not, which affiliate networks work for that?
Your display and destination URL must match. That is, your destination URL will be something like hoplink.com?affid=12345&merchant=67890 The domain name that shows up in the browser's address bar will be the merchant's such as superproduct.com and that's the domain that you must use in your ad. The reason you got poor keyword relevancy should be obvious. If you use the keyword "round plastic widget" and the landing page is selling square wooden thingamagigs, there is little relevancy. Doesn't matter what landing page you use. You're just using the wrong keywords for what the page talks about.
Yeah, I know that, but lately I've run the websites I'm linking through the google keyword tool and using only keywords suggested there. If keyword relevancy also refers to the actual ad text matching my keywords, which I never thought of, that might explain it, though I still think my ads are pretty relevant. I found out after browsing google's adword help forum that the keywords could have been trashed on my account (for some unknown reason), which is another possibility.
Actually this 'google slap' could explain how some of my keywords jumped from 5-7/10 all to 1/10, all in an entire ad group, and these keywords are DEFINITELY relevevant to the product for sale.
IMHO it's all about the affiliate links. I haven't found any way to use Adwords for a page with any affiliate links at all. Relevancy has zero to do with it. I've had entire sites, with articles built solidly around keywords, and bought Adwords ads for those keywords. Quality score 7+. Put on an affiliate link, cloaked to the teeth, and within a few weeks at most quality score 2 or less. No changes to the page. The ONLY time I've been able to use Adwords for a page with affiliate links is on a site that has a much longer history, and used Adwords for months before any affiliate ads or links were on the page. This site, however, uses Adsense to monetize, and if I use Adwords my Adsense revenues dive. So basically - Adwords and affiliate pages don't mix. That's why most of the successful affiliate marketers went to e-mail lists over the past year (which I know nothing about).