poor quality score - what does google really want???

Hello,
I'm promotiong a single affiliate page in an affiliate website,
selling a specific product, which falls into the category that the whole affiliate website is about.

There is no problem with my keyword relevance,

but I'm getting a poor score due to a "not hightly relevant page".

In my P.O.V, the page couldn't be more relevant,
as it gives info about the product, and in the end offers an affiliate link to buy it.

I have about 12% CTR which I believe is fine,
I'm ranking at number 2 or 3 all time, as there is not much competition for that product,

yet google wanted yesterday $0.40 per click, and today already wants $0.50.
This is really annoying as about 2 years ago when I started using adwords,
I would be able to get click for even $0.20, and me and google would be all making profit.

checking with prchecker.info,
The PR of my domain is a nice "0" and of my product page is "N/A"

This is very frustrating, what possibly can I do?
As a last resort, I don't mind register a new domain, and sell the product there, in the same format, as I can't think of any change to make in the content of the page itself,
though that wouldn't be worthy, if within a few days,
adwords would screw up that page as well...

 

There are ppc experts like ppc coach that focus on affiliates that might have additional insights... I focus on lead gen and software products primarily...anyway..if your page duplicates the main site its not relevant..create some unique content around the product with a unique offer and things should change.

 

ppc coach is a member of this forum? if so i guess I'll wait for his opinion,

My content is not a %100 duplicate at all,
It is a mixture of text basically describing the product, taken from different sources...

 

i think google move to "smart pricing" does affect adwords publisher also. Or maybe there are many competitors in your niche. what are you selling?

 

no there are hardly any competitors.
I'm selling some houseware product.
and what is "smart pricing"?

 

I think you mentioned "page" instead of "site". What I mean is they want a whole landing site now. They want you to make it look like a real web site, like in their organic listings. They want this so that their surfers dont' clue in as to which are paid ads and which are organic listings, (believe it or not, most cannot tell the difference.)

So, make a full site about your product, have some internal links and external links and make sure you've got a privacy policy, about us and contact us page.

That will help your quality score and help reduce your bids.

 

Thanks, why would google care so much about it?
do you think that anyway google's algo recognize affiliate codes in websites, and that could cause the problem, so there isn't much to do?

Basically your'e saying that if I want to sell *any* product and have good bids,
each time I'd need to make *a whole website* about the product?

that's a little rough... especially if I have a product that I can't estimate yet if it would do good in sales,
and have to take the risk of dedicating time to make a whole website about it... isn't there an easier solution?

also would it be acceptable to include the product's name in the domain? or is it considered illegal?

and what kind of internal and external links would you recommened having?
how many and where to place them?
I'm afraid that if I don't do even one thing "by the book" (althought that's quiet a mystery book),
all my efforts would go down the drain...

and if i do create this kind of website, would the starting bids be low from the start? or do I have to wait for it to receive a good PR from google, if it would ever will....

I know that's a lot of questions but they are pretty vital ones

 

Just check your keyword density on the landing page. If you are saying your CTR is 12% it is good. AS PPC coach suggested, get privacy policy, about us and contact us page.

 

Ok I've just added these three pages,
I wonder if I'm really supposed to see any change in the min. bidding rate, and when...

 

Ok, the new bid rate is $1.00!!!!!

the campaign has a total of 9% CTR, after about3 days of min bid rate of $0.5...

this is just gettin wores...

 

any ideas?

 

Just shift the entire content in different domain & see you will get different min cpc, QS.

 

can google ban me though if this would cause a situation where I'm having a duplicate content? even if I remove the content from the first website, it would still be cached for a few months at google...

also, should I also change a host in that case? do you know whether google is also checking whether the two domains have the same IP?

thanks

 

Google gives a Quality Score as Poor, which means the keyword is not relevant to the Ad and to the landing pages.... despite the CTR being high the Quality score is low means the CPC will rise and therfore it is best to change the Ad and landning page or put them in a new Targeted Agroup

 

If you can't find relevant keywords yourself, use the Keyword tool to find keywords on the landing page

 

its definitely not a keyword or ad text issue, it couldn't be more relevant then what it is now.

 

Why is this so crucial? What does Google care if we have an "about us" page? When you are selling as an affiliate, nobody cares who the owner of the Clickbank affiliate code is, they only care who is ending up with their money (the original provider).

 

if your landing page has lots of sponsored ads.. then be rest assured your CPC could go high

 

It has something to do with 0 PR I believe. I have a general term like online widget store as my domain. I have a landing page about blue widgets and other general categories related to the widget on this landing page. And I had 10$ min bid for all keywords. I even tried my domain name as keyword and it was 10$ too, go figure.

OTH I had a landing page for another product on a completely unrelated domain with again pr0 and had 10$ bids. I took the SAME page put it on a pr3 domain which is again completely unrelated and guess what.. Great QS with 5-15 cents bids. SO much for quality, it is the same content and landing page..I'll try a bit more on this widget page and if it doesn't work out I'll go advertise on other ppc engines much much more and leave google alone.

 

I know this thread is old, but if anyone else has this issue, I thought I'd post my experience. I had the same issue and it ended up that the "not highly relevant landing page" was actually referring to the quality score of the "visible URL" ...something they don't tell you about. I wrote all about what it is, what happened to me, and how to fix the problem here: http://paulpedersen.com/blog/2008/01/adwords-account-jacked-it-may-not-be-your-fault/