Something's off kilter

Well, boys, you and Google seem not quite in agreement.  I've had a CTR of 6.67 and 11.54 (stunning I think) the past two days with the Goggles telling me I only need 0.66% to be in the Great range.  I'm waiting patiently for my CPC to go down based on this outstanding success.  Not happening so far.

Here's a clue.  Google has altered what used to be minimum bids (I'm sure you know) and put up reams of pages of new analysis and tips.  Well, Google thinks I suck.  And they're giving me a poor score for my efforts.  They say nobody would be interested in clicking on my ads because I'm crappy at this.  Consequently they're keeping my CPC up and my average page position down.  I guess CTR's of 6.67 and 11.54 aren't even worth spitting on.

What's up?javascript:void(0);
Huh

[SOFTWARESAVER]

Interesting post,,,just shows how Google will do what they want and create what they like.
Its got nothing to do with your observation or the search users its simply google being google.

Point is Your ctr is what it is...if Google dont like things they don't like things
You could have god aspects all round regards your campaign and the page and site etc etc...BUT
it cold plain and simply be that your serving up an offer Google don't like, url Google don't like etc etc.

Your getting a reasonably good ctr but is it converting? and how far are you with your cpc below your break even on this
campaign?
Have you tried it on the other traffic sources? Yahoo MSN etc??

Software Saver.

Hi JLB,

From my observation goggles cannot take into account extraordinary conditions which seems to be what has happened to you. Perhaps I can relate my experience which may go some way in explaining your situation. I had a campaign running that was going ok, my CTR was around 5% and goggles was saying that my site would score great, which it was with google initially. I was suddenly slapped by google. I asked questions of google until I was blue in the face, and I was getting standard answers that the google employee was obviously reading from their own FAQ section of adwords - mate I cannot begin to tell you how frustrating that was! After doing some hunting around and also testing of the adwords campaign, and by testing I mean that instead of directing the campaign to my site that goggles was telling me should be ok, I directed it to a squidoo lens - I did not make any other changes, same ad copy, same keywords, same everything apart from the landing page. Low and behold my cost per click went back to the original price using a squidoo lens as a landing page.

With further testing I realized that google didn't like my domain name as it had the word 'cure' in it. I had read somewhere that google may have cracked down on the 'cure' niche, just like it was reported that it was cracking down on the water for gas niche.

I set up another site with mostly the same content - just a new domain name without the word cure in the domain name, and hey presto, touch wood - so far so good.

So getting back to your original problem, you may be in a niche that google has taken a sudden dislike to, or your domain name may be 'bad'. I don't think it will be possible for goggles to pick this up when it is checking your landing pages. Things like 'cure' lowering you quality score can only be programmed into goggles if google come out and tell everyone that it is going to slap domain names with the word cure in it etc.

Overall goggles seems to be very close and it is only those 'one off' situations that are always going to be impossible to cater for.


Regards,

Steve

I appreciate both your answers, although I'm such a newbie I don't necessarily understand you.   

For instance, how do I try it on 'other traffic sources'?  I don't know what that means.

I have a few dollars left in Adwords so what I did was take a page previously written, and test and retest it in the Goggles while making changes.  I learned alot by doing that and was quite pleased with the results - GREAT for 0.66%.  And then I made a campaign with it using one keyword and a very common misspelling of that word.  Then I made two other keywords with the word 'free' in front of the other two because that's also a fact of the landing page.  Google is giving me 4/10 - Poor on all four and telling me to delete the main keyword and try again.  I have no clue what I would use for another keyword.  There just isn't one.  By the way, this keyword in Niche Goggles has a score of almost 800. 

There's no particular conversion rate here because I'm not selling anything directly on that page, just bringing traffic to a website.  Like I said, it's just a test to see how all the various factors work.  Obviously I'm missing something really big because it doesn't make any sense. 

Google is charging me what they say the minimum is, but my hope is to get them to lower it because my CTR is high.  What they're doing instead is lowering the page position, charging me the max and telling me to delete my keyword and start over.  It says my keyword has no relevance to the landing page.  That's just ridiculous.

Anyway, I can't afford to continue running this ad unless the price drops to 10 cents or less.  So, it looks like a scrapper for unknown reasons although it has a high CTR and the Goggles think it's good to go.

Hi JLB,

My immediate reaction is that you are probably getting spanked by google for using the word free. With a lot of sites using the word free, it doesn't usually mean that something is free, and when you think about if from google's perspective if a person is paying for advertising and offering something for free, doesn't make a lot of sense. As marketers we realise that offering something free and then selling something to a list further down the track is very profitable, but google are looking to offer their searchers the best and most relevant experience that they can, so they dislike the word free.

The other point is that you may never get .10 bids because if there are 10 other people that are willing to bid .25 for the same keyword and have the same or better quality score than you, then you can whistle until the cows come home but you will still pay upwards of 0.25. Having said that it may not be strickly true if you have a ad that is getting a much better click thru rate than you competitors, but it is probably more likely than not that you will pay about what other advertisers are willing to pay as a minimum.

Normally you would not drop from .25 to .10 in a few days - it is more likely to take weeks, if it were to happen at all. If you need to have bids of less than .1 you may want to look at the content network and placement bids. This was traditionally thought of as junk traffic, but goggle have got much better at targeting your ads to the relevant searchers and it may work for you.

Regards,

Steve

I thought it was perhaps the same thing - the word 'free'.  In this case though it's actually true.  I do run affiliate ads amongst my content, but purchasing anything is as optional as it can get.  It's not a 'hook' type of thing where you think it's free but really the bottom line is a sales pitch.  It's simply free content and about three hundred pages of it.  Another sign of a newbie I guess. 

I've had serious health problems for years and feeling more year after year like I was of no use to anybody, just taking up space on the planet, so I started my website as a way to feel 'useful'. That might sound pretty odd to people who spend their time wondering how they can get a bigger piece of the 8 billion dollars being spent on line every year, but it's surprising what can happen to your mind when you think you're on your death bed.  It's time to start giving it all away.  I did not start my website with the intention of making money, just kind of hoped I would by putting affiliate ads relevant to what I was writing about, but no pressure at all to purchase anything.  I didn't even know what internet advertising was until a company approached me about advertising their product for them.  I've made a few sales although keeping up on all the advertiser's email that arrives daily has been a challenge.  I've gotten quite tired of it because I'm more of a writer than a business person.

So I've been working 15 hour days for two years making about $1 a day on average, i.e. 7 cents an hour, and feeling like I could do things better and keep up on my medical bills if I knew how, so when the Goggles came along I thought perhaps this is my doorway to being able to do both, writing which I enjoy and getting paid for it.  I don't have anything against making a living, just don't know how.

I have a Forum so bringing more people to the website through Adwords might bring more user-generated content to the Forum so there are spin-off benefits to advertising my website, without specifically advertising a product for sale, although there are things for sale dotted around my website.

Anyway, like I said, I was just running this as a test ad so I could learn my way around the Goggles and Adwords a bit, before I get into trying to create landing pages for specific products and risk losing my shirt because I really don't have a shirt to lose.

JLB I am hearing you on a number of fronts.

Firstly the free thing - unfortuately for those that are genuinely trying to help by offering something for free are lumped into the same category as those who offer 10% for free and you pay for the other 90%, and not that I would ever try and justify a company who's name starts with G and ends in oogle but it is impossible for them to differentiate between the 'good' and the 'bad'. Maybe you could advertise it differently - like 'no cost membership' or 'take a 1 month no cost trial' or something that gets around the free word.

I also agree there is more to life than making money, especially if you have been 'standing on the shore looking at the other side'  but unfortuately we all need money and so it is perhaps where on the scale of importance that we put money that is the important thing. Reading that back it sounds a bit harsh but what I mean is probably exactly what you were alluding to - one realizes that health, family, friends, mental and spirtual wellbeing are all more important than having lots of money. The key is to have a combination of them all.

I think maybe you have a fantastic opportunity, especially if you have advertisers trying to advertise on your website, forum etc. Maybe you could charge them for advertising space, much like what google are doing to you with adwords. Maybe you could charge them a set monthly fee to display a banner, which would give you some stability in the form of knowing how much income you will receive every month. I know of forums where the admins make a tidy income from advertisers purchasing advertising space on their forum pages. An example would be the forum ROLclub, which although I don't necessarily agree with what they promote, they are making a decent living from the advertising on their forum, along with a few scams they have run along the way, but that is another story.

Regards,

Steve

I understand that too.  There's no way of distinguishing between free and free.  It all looks the same to G and nobody could be expected to understand my personal motivations.  There's nothing on my site to be a 'member of'.  It's just alot of pages of information.  I thought the word 'free' being true would be a draw to people searching which it apparently is (hence the high CTR) but I can see what you mean about the big G not giving a darn about that.

I would love to make a living doing what I'm doing.  It's been an attractive idea ever since I woke up to affiliate advertising but I haven't mastered the techniques obviously.

Advertisers are not 'trying' to advertise on my site.  That was just a one time thing at the beginning.  And I had one request later to write a review of a product and get paid for it in the form of a free copy of their product.  Those are the only two instances of being approached.  The rest I've pursued myself and gotten in too deep with too many companies and can't do justice to any of them. 

I've just deleted one person's advertising footer off my Forum as I don't want it looking like the a mini-Mall there and people feeling they have to wade through all that to see the Forum.  Once again, trying to stay above board and make the Forum an attractive and unbiased place for people to interact. 

I don't want to knock out all my possibilities here for making a living, although I can see I'm sounding like that.  There's a certain level of artistic balance - is that the right phrase? - and making things as easy and comfortable for readers as possible that I'm not willing to compromise by sticking ads here, there and everywhere on all my pages.  People have written me that they come to my website for 'relief' and relaxation.

OK, so just trying to convey where I come from and where I'm trying to go.  When I purchased the Goggles I thought I would be able to simply put up ads on the search engines going straight to products, completely bypassing my website.  Then I got the impression from this Forum that no, that was not a good idea, I should be creating landing pages in sub-domains of my website. So I had to get out of my ISP basement webspace, purchase a domain name and web hosting, and bring traffic directly to my website.  So, that's taken me a week or two.  Now I know what sub-domains are and am working on creating some landing pages.  The ones I've started working on are high-priced and low profitability so I need to start over and come up with a product niche that I can somehow tie into the theme of my present website.  Haven't so far figured out what. 

I do not have the energy to start a new website right now, so I'm using the Goggles to 'upgrade' some of my pre-existing pages.  As explained my first attempt went bad.  Over the word 'free' probably.  I suspect you're right about that. I could try rewriting an ad without it, although I suspect without 'free' the interest will not be so much and then I'm battling a lower CTR and don't want to make that part of my G history that will cause me trouble with other attempts at advertising.

But what are we doing anyway except experimenting and hoping we find something that hits the right spot?

I took out 'free' and watched 700 impressions go by with no clicks, so I've shut it down.  Back to the drawing board and some new plans.  Fortunately, the Goggles investment is not a waste as I can still use it to optimize existing pages, and see if I can learn something about Hexatrack as well.  Thanks for your time and attention to this newbie.

Unfortuately it looks like you have to let that campaign go and move on to the next one. It has taken me a long time to be able to let a campaign go as every campaign I have ever started is going to be the next big thing!!

Softwaresaver had some good advice recently when he advised that you should set up 2 new campaigns a day and let them go until they have received x amount of clicks (most people work on 100 clicks) and then you will quickly work out which niches are worth building a site around. He was talking about setting up an Iframe which allows you to direct clicks straight to an affiliates landing page without the need for your own landing page, and although it sounds kinda daunting to a newbie it is in fact quite easy and quick to do. The reason you cannot keep the Iframe in place is that eventually the big G will come and visit your site and notice that an Iframe is in place, and they will not only slap you, there might be a bit of a spanking in there as well.

Larry has a video on the site about setting up Iframes and how to go about it, which explains exactly what you have to do.

AS you said, we are experimenting and hoping that we find something that hits the spot. Iframes make the experimenting part of it much easier.

Letting go isn't too hard, as I think the idea is to know ahead of spending money what will succeed and what won't.  If the Goggles say it's good and G says it isn't, then it's toast.  Experimenting can get pretty expensive at 2 campaigns a day and 100 clicks each.  The idea, as I see it, is to build an advertising budget out of successes, however modest, and gradually expand into larger territory. Otherwise it's as risky as the horse-races. Where do I go for Iframe lessons?

Amish has a video on the hexatrack blog that explains iframes, it has the title of 'this will really piss of goggle' or something similar.

Moral of the story: Don't build a business that relies on Google.

I guess, for whatever reason, you couldn't resist a swipe at Google.  But the Goggles are called Google Goggles, not MSN Goggles or Yahoo Goggles, so obviously what we've purchased has something to do with Google.

[then]

I guess, for whatever reason, you couldn't resist a swipe at Google.  But the Goggles are called Google Goggles, not MSN Goggles or Yahoo Goggles, so obviously what we've purchased has something to do with Google.

No, my point was: By relying on Google to build your business, you are giving someone else control over your business. This thread was about why Google wouldn't give a Great Quality Score though everything was (supposedly) being done right. The fact that there's no way to tell and that Google can change and make up rules that directly affect your bottom line, you up the risk of your business failing exponentially.

It doesn't matter what technique or Goggle or whatever you use, there is simply no way to get an accurate picture of what their algorithm does or requires. Less than a week after Google Goggles was released, the algorithm for Quality Score was changed. Amish and Larry are sharp guys but the Goggles were built on testing what worked then. They have their work cut out for them if they plan to keep that software up to date.

One thing that software will never be able to account for and control (legitimately) is "length of visit" or how long someone stays on your site before using the back button and goes back to click a different search/adwords listing. This is a key part of Quality Score and the Search algorithm. The entire index is shifting to a behavioral model so unless someone can come up with some great software that can make people want to stay on your site, none of these things will work eventually.

Shouldn't really matter though, there are so many other ways to get 1000x more traffic outside of Google.