How to Get Your Google Adwords Campaign Ranked 'Great'

As webmaster of Internet Video Site www.directvutv.com, I've run many pay per click campaigns resulting in hundreds of millions of impressions. I often find it humerous how there is such an uproar in the SEO community over Google Adwords and why it is 'unfair' to advertisers.

Over the last several years, enough blogs and posts complaining about the 'google slap' have been written to make Sir Richard Branson's trip to Mars a reality. We could simply stretch out all the comments and walk over them. If you don't know anything about the 'Google Slap', just Google - google slap.

Google's mission is simple, they just want the user to get the best experience so that they continue to use the website. They want the user to believe that Google will always come up with the best results.

So, when a Google searcher enters -- Buy Bitem Dog Toy Houston, the ads that come up will be perfectly related to the search and the searcher will be able to immediately buy the Bitem Dog Toy from a store in Houston.

So, if the manufacturer of Bitem Dog Toys (Sales 21 Billion last year) is has a Google Adwords campaign competing with Dog World Toys of Houston, (sales $3.50 for fiscal 2008), Dog World Toys will win, so long as the Dog World Toys site makes it easy for someone in Houston to buy a Bitem Dog Toy.

The searcher asked, and the searcher got.

Google calls this the 'Quality Score' and the score is directly related to the keywords used and the content on the web site.

When you create an adwords campaign, Google will look at the 'landing page' you designate for the keyword and grade the ad group against the lowest score of keyword to landing page. This is important - If you have 5 great keywords and 1 poor one, the ad group will score low. So, only have great keywords, and don't have ANY off-target ones.

So, you keywords and ad group will be ranked Poor, Good or Great. If it's poor they will make your minimum bid something like $2.00 per click and suggest you improve it. If it's good, they might charge you only a minimum bid of $0.10 to $0.20. If it's Great, you will have a minium bid of as little as $0.01 per click, but more importantly, you are going to show more often and higher up on the results than more expensive HIGHER good keywords.

On their website, Google uses the example of Green Beans saying that people who enter Green Beans want to see Green Bean recipies and if presented with Green Jelly Beans, they would have a 'bad experience' and would be disappointed with Google.

So I took this example and twisted it a little. I put together the following web page on one of the sites I manage, finfa.info, a clickbank e-book reseller.

The page is the Best Green Jellybean Web page and can be found at Best Green Jellybean
web page.

I didn't use any style sheets or style directives to prove that Google doesn't care what your page looks like. All they look at are the following. And, it's pretty much the order laid out here.

1. Title Tag


2. Meta Description


3. Meta Keywords - Google says they don't look at this except when your page has no other content, but it only takes a minute and MSN, Yahoo and other search engines do use these tags.


4. H1 Headline


5. H2 Sub Head


6. H3 Sub Head


7. Paragraphs containing Text


8. B Bold Tags


9. I Italic Tags


10. U Underline Tags


11. LI List Items


12. a Anchor Text


The content of the page is nonsense but uses all these tags and keywords to make it clear to the robot scanning the page that the page is definately about Green Jelly beans and that you can buy green jellybeans on the page.

So, once I posted the page on the finfa.info web site, I created the following Google Ad Campaign

Best Green Jellybean Site
Get Your Green Jellybeans from the
Only Green Jellybean site online.
www.Finfa.Info

Google Recommends that you put a 'call to action' in your ad copy. While they don't let you put words like 'click here' in an ad or exclamation points, they do suggest affirmative copy - Get Your Green Jellybeans - meets that criteria.

So, what happened. Google ranked the campaign as Great - You can see my page capture here.



paulmcp is the webmaster of video search engine http://www.directvutv.com