the PPC Book|Pay Per Click Blog | Long Tail Thoughts in a Short Tail World

Well, until today, I had no clients under my management that were adversely effected by the quality score changes. My previous thought was that only arbitrage and straight affiliate sites were being targeted. That no longer appears to be the case. No, I’m not going to over dramatize this as most bloggers have in the industry. I’m just going to show you what happened to my client.

The one reason I want to highlight this is that it is a real business with a storefront and real human operators. It’s a service oriented company. It’s not arbitrage or affiliate related. They spend more than a couple thousand a month with an IP targeted campaign and conversion tracking. Once the quality score algo changed last week, I noticed a massive drop in traffic. Here’s why. Some of their best keywords had been disabled. In fact, 75% of their keywords were disabled. This is not a junk campaign with one adgroup and 2000 keywords. Each adgroup is carefully crafted with about 20-25 keywords. 7 adgroups. 5 ad copies per. Here’s an example of the performance I was getting and you tell me why it’s shut down. Notice, the CTR is ok, and the conversion rate is good (relative to the call to action)…

Here’s another example…

This isn’t an example from a huge client, and that’s why I chose it. This demonstrates the potential effect to your everyday advertiser who runs a legitimate business, with legitimate ads, who’s trying to use this platform to generate business.

I think, as with so many Google innovations in the last 2 years, that the intention is good, but the execution is extremely poor. The intention here is to devalue sites that don’t offer value to the searching public. They are after arbitrage sites, thin affiliate sites, and MFA’s. What it appears they are catching is some of the baby with the bathwater. The small, medium, and large sized advertisers who are doing things the right way.

This isn’t a disaster by any means. I know exactly what can be done to get this campaign back on track. I believe Google will get better at discerning the MFA’s from the ‘real’ websites, and at the same time, we as marketers have to get better at telling Google what our site is about.

Again, at the end of the day, I see more and more that Pay Per Click and SEO optimzation are becoming one in the same. In order to have a successful Adwords campaign you now have to optimize your site just as you would for SEO.