How (NOT) to ruin your AdWords account
April 21, 2008 by adpuma
Google makes it easy to permanently harm your AdWords account. The main result of doing so are higher costs of any future ad campaigns. Here’s what NOT to do:
- If you set low max CPCs for your keywords, your ads will appear on lower positions, making them less likely to receive clicks, making their CTR and Quality Score lower. Bonus: every time you ad is shown and not clicked your CTR drops. Next time, for the next auction, ads Quality Score is lower and the chances in the competition as well. Google AdWords compensates for lower CTR for lower positions, but only partially.
- If you choose keywords irrelevant to your landing page, your Quality Score I mentioned above will be lower. QS is a factor by which your max CPC is multiplied before entering the auction. It is a complex internal AdWords variable, and it is recalculated every time your ad is about to appear. Two known factors taken into the account are CTR and the landing page relevance. To be fair, AdWords wouldn’t let you use very bad keywords. You cannot advertise IceCreamDeliveryService.com in searches for kites and gliders.
- If you have a low-ranking destination site, you QS (and campaign performance, consequently) will suffer. Don’t hide your keywords from the Googlebot in images with non-descriptive tags. Don’t call your logo with company name img0001.jpg. Don’t explain what you do in flash animation. Spiders don’t recognize images, animation and JavaScript (at least yet). Actually, there is not much you can do to improve your PageRank beside site optimization, and many ways to ruin it surely and permanently.
- Another factor affecting QS is your account history. That’s right, if your used parakites and gliders campaign received no clicks, you will start your advertising icecream trucks and refrigerators from a (financial) pit.
- Bonus: if you really set out to muck up your relationship with Google forever, hire a backhat SEO. They can build you special landing pages artificially increasing your site relevance to the chosen keywords. If your site is marked as spam, its PageRank is set to 0. And if you ever register a new domain and start a new life, Google will remember your name and your spammer history. And, by the way, the rules defining spam change all the time. Paid links were OK two years ago, and now it is very blackhat technique.
Good news: Google AdWords has many special instruments making possible tracking and improving every detail of your campaign. I will return to them in my future posts.
Wow great tips I have yet to use Adwords yet but I am learning this came in the prefect time. Thank you so much.