Last week you probably saw all the big-name Internet gurus hawking a new ebook called Affiliate Rockstar Status. What’s the book about? It’s about making money by promoting ClickBank affiliate products. It’s mostly no different than any of a dozen well-hyped ebooks like Day Job Killer, AdWords Miracle, Beating AdWords, etc. etc. Unless you’re new to affiliate marketing, there’s probably not much in the book that will interest you. Except for one tantalizing thing: how to get cheap AdWords advertising. Now that sounds really great, and it’s the thing that everyone seems to be focusing on.

Here’s the kicker, though: the method that Affiliate Rockstar Status is promoting is the same method that was first described in the vastly under-promoted book AdWords180. I’ve mentioned this book here before, and I’ve used the techniques described in AdWords180 myself to make a bit of money. Not a lot, because I just haven’t had the time to focus on it, but unlike most of the other techniques I’ve tried out I was able to make a profit with the AdWords180 technique.

I knew it was just a matter of time before the technique started showing up in other books, of course. I’ve seen it mentioned in AdWords Killer, which was updated recently. I’m sure it will be a core method in any AdWords book from now on.

That said, I haven’t seen these other books describe the technique in as detailed a fashion as the original AdWords180 book. Because of this, AdWords180 is still the book I recommend to anyone seriously looking to reduce their AdWords advertising costs — and willing to use the elbow grease necessary to do so.

That’s the downfall of the AdWords180 method, though, and something that’s prevented me from doing much with it. The method depends on using AdWords site targeting and finding specific pages on the Web that meet certain criteria for traffic. Finding those pages is a real pain. What’s needed is a good tool to automate some of the tedious gruntwork.

I’ve had a lot of fun and some good response to the tools I’ve been building lately, so I’ve decided to go ahead and build a tool for the AdWords180 technique. No name for it yet, but I have the basic algorithms laid out and I can use code from my existing tools to get it quickly off the ground.

So here’s the deal I’m going to make with you. If you buy ANY AdWords book that describes the AdWords180 technique through my affiliate link, I’ll give you a free copy of the tool once I release it. Besides AdWords180, this includes AdWords Killer and Affiliate Rockstar Status.

Of the three, the cheapest and most detailed is the original AdWords180 because I made a special deal with the author a while back for my subscribers to let them buy a limited quantity of the book at $67. However, everyone’s needs are different and so it’s up to you to choose which book is best for you. Just make sure that the ClickBank payment screen says “[affiliate=egiguere]” at the bottom when you go to pay! Yes, the offer is retroactive: if you already bought one of these books through my link, I’ll be happy to include you in the offer.

I will also offer the tool for sale separately for those of you who already bought one of these books from someone else.

You don’t have to buy any of these books now, of course, because the tool isn’t ready. I will announce it when it is ready.

As with all my tools, this unnamed tool will work on Windows, Macintosh or Linux systems. I actually have three tools out right now, the first of which is completely free to download:

• SuperSuggester
• EDUBacklinkFinder
• EzineDominator

If you have any ideas for other tools, I’d love to hear them. I’ve been toying around with the idea of creating a membership site that gives you automatic access to all the tools I create, too, so watch for an announcement about that (if I decide to go ahead with it…)

Sponsored Link: For a complete set of AdSense best practices, read Uncommon AdSense — for serious AdSense publishers only!

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

More fun with AdWords! In Part 1 we dissected AdWords text ads and in Part 2 we looked at AdWords keywords. Today we look at the infamous AdWords quality score.

Note that we’re not yet talking about the cost of ads and how the bidding process works. Many people make the mistake of jumping into AdWords and spending a lot of money before figuring out there are other things they need to do first. So this approach may seem circuitous, but it will all make sense in the end.

The AdWords Quality Score

After many advertisers started abusing the system with spammy and often irrelevant ads, Google introduced the concept of a quality score in order to force advertisers to write better ads. The AdWords quality score (QS) really just extended the built-in dampening mechanism in the AdWords bidding process whereby ads with higher CTR (clickthrough rate) would over time dominate the ads with lower CTR, even if they were paying more. (Note that there is actually more than one quality score algorithm to consider, but usually the algorithm that interests advertisers is the one used to determine the minimum bid price of a keyword, as it directly affects their advertising costs. Unless told otherwise, then, you can assume that anytime someone says “quality score” that they’re talking about the minimum bid price quality score.)

Google does not disclose exactly how the quality score is calculated. They do admit that it considers a number of factors:

• The CTR rate for the keyword involved (both on a historical basis across Google and within your own AdWords account)
• The relevance of the keyword to the ad group it’s in (i.e., the other keywords and the ad text)
• The quality score of the landing page
• Other undisclosed factors

You can’t actually control all these factors, but there are some things you can influence:

• Which keywords you bid on.
• How you group the keywords.
• The ad titles, text and display URLs.
• The landing pages.

Let’s look at each of these factors.

Factor 1: Keyword Selection

Many marketers spend most of their time trying to find the right keywords for their campaigns, in many cases too much time. I’m actually not going to cover this topic because it’s discussed extensively elsewhere and there are various tools you can use (free and paid) to generate lists of relevant keywords. Keyword selection is as much an art as it is science: think outside the box and pass a critical eye over each and every keyword you add to your list. Gone are the days when you generate thousands and thousands of keywords to throw into one or two ad groups to “see what sticks”.

Factor 2: Keyword Grouping

The rule of thumb for grouping keywords is very simple: all keywords in an AdWords ad group should be thematically related. Google understands keyword relationships very well, don’t forget that they’ve developed extensive technology in this area via the AdSense program. The simplest way to create a good-quality ad group is to ensure that each phrase in the group uses a common word or subphrase.

The ultimate ad group, however, consists of a single keyword or phrase, with up to three separate matching options for that keyword. (There may, however, be an unlimited number of negative keywords to ensure that the right queries will trigger the ad group.) This is a tightly focused ad group that ultimately delivers the best results as long as the ads and the landing pages also focus on the same keyword. You can also do very fine-grained tracking and split testing.

The downside of the single-keyword ad group is that it requires a lot more work to create and maintain all those groups, ads and landing pages. That’s why many marketers start with broader groups of thematically-related keywords and then split those groups down into smaller groups once it becomes apparent that some of the keywords in the larger group are converting better than others.

Factor 3: The Ads

Writing a good AdWords ad is hard. It’s a little bit like writing a haiku, since the limited line lengths and the editorial guidelines really constrain what you can do. And being able to tap into human psychology and getting users to click the ads in the first place is truly an art: this is why advertising copywriters exist.

That said, Google’s algorithms don’t actually understand or react to the ads like humans do. They look for things that a computer can determine, like whether the ad group keywords appear in the ad. Whether there are obvious “call to action” phrases. Whether the display URL somehow relates to the keywords. The more relevant the ads are to the keywords in the ad group, the better.

Factor 4: The Landing Pages

Google caused many advertisers a lot of grief when it added landing page quality to the QS calculation. This is what many advertisers referred to as the “Google slap”: if you had a (in Google’s view) poor landing page, you were “slapped” with (often much) higher minimum bid prices for your ads. It wasn’t unusual to see minimum bid prices jump from 25 cents to over $10 per click because of this.

The best way to understand how landing page quality affects your quality score is to read Google’s advice on how to create a quality landing page. Here are the general principles, however:

• A landing page must directly relate to the ads and the keywords in the ad groups that refer to it. Standard AdSense ad targeting techniques work well here.
• The more related content that the user can browse when they get to the site, the better.
• Include privacy policies, disclaimers, copyright information, contact details (especially phone numbers and postal addresses!), logos/seals, etc. on the landing page, either directly or indirectly via links to other pages.
• Make sure the user can easily navigate from the page to other related pages.

Creating landing pages that follow these guidelines takes substantially more work than just slapping up a single-page sales page, as many affiliates do.

That’s all for this installment. Next, we’ll look at a site design strategy based on what we’ve learned so far about AdWords.

Sponsored Link: Purchase the EzineArticles Domination reports and get a free tool I wrote as a bonus.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

Let’s continue with our Google AdWords case study. In Part 1 we dissected AdWords text ads. Today we take a look at keywords and how they’re linked with the text ads.

Note that the first few articles in this series are pretty basic, as I need to make sure we’re all on the same page when it comes to understanding AdWords. I’ve found that not everyone actually understands some of these concepts, though.

Keyword Targeting vs. Site Targeting

An AdWords ad campaign is a high-level grouping of ads. All ads within the campaign (which are further grouped into ad groups, which we’ll discuss shortly) share a number of characteristics: which geographies and languages they’re for, the total ad spend for the day, whether the ads are targeted at the search network (Google) and/or the content network (AdSense). Most of these things you can change at any time, but one of the things you have to decide straight off the bat is whether you’re using keyword targeting or site targeting for your campaign.

Keyword targeted ads are ads that are associated with specific search keywords. Essentially you’re telling Google to show a particular ad (or set of ads) whenever a Google user enters a search term that involves that keyword or keyphrase.

Site targeted ads, on the other hand, are targeted at specific sites that are in Google’s content network. Site targeting is the backbone of the AdWords180 technique (now being discussed in other AdWords books to some extent, including the just-released Affiliate Rockstar Status). It is not, however, the focus of most AdWords ad campaigns.

I just wanted to make the distinction clear, because this case study only deals with keyword targeted ads.

AdWords Ad Groups

Each AdWords ad campaign contains one or more ad groups. Within a keyword targeted campaign, an ad group consists of one or more keywords and one or more text ads. Using ad groups lets you manage large lists of keywords and the ads that go with them.

When one of the keywords within an ad group matches a search that a user is making, Google displays one of the ads in the ad group on a search results page. You have no real control over which ad gets shown other than to tell Google that you want all ads shown evenly (if there are N ads that are to be shown T times, each ad is shown T/N times) or that the ads that are clicked on more often (i.e. they have better ad copy) are to be favored over the others. Each ad group typically only has a few ads that vary only slightly from each other for split testing purposes.

Although it’s possible to create ad groups with thousands of keywords, in general it’s a bad idea to do so. The best ad groups have a small number of thematically-related keywords — we’ll see why this is important when we discuss quality scores.

Keywords

Finally we get to the keyword themselves. In AdWords terminology, a “keyword” is a phrase of one or more words. Each keyword has a matching option associated with it. The matching option controls how the keyword is associated with the searches that users are performing on Google:

• Broad matching means that Google should consider synonyms, misspellings, word order changes, and other criteria when matching keywords. With broad matching, football equipment would match soccer equipment because in Europe football is the common term for soccer.
• Phrase matching means that the order of the words within the phrase is important. Thus the search queries best soccer equipment and soccer equipment reviews are phrase matches for soccer equipment but not phrase matches for equipment soccer.
• Exact matching means that queries must exactly match the given keyword — with no additional search terms. Thus best soccer equipment does NOT exactly match soccer equipment.

There’s actually a fourth matching option called negative matching that modifies the other three options. Negative matching excludes search queries that contain the given keyword/phrase.

Broad matching is the default matching option: just the keyword/phrase by itself. For phrase matching you surround the keyword/phrase with quotation marks. For exact matching, place the phrase in square brackets. Here are some examples:

    soccer equipment               broad match
   "soccer equipment"              phrase match
   [soccer equipment]              exact match

The negative options for these are:

    -soccer equipment               negative broad match
   -"soccer equipment"              negative phrase match
   -[soccer equipment]              negative exact match

See the AdWords help pages for more details on negative matching.

Why all these matching options? There are two reasons. The first is that they allow you fairly precise control over which specific search queries you want to target, including which ones you want excluded. The second reason is that you can bid separately on each variation of a keyword: you might be willing to pay more for someone who is doing an exact search for a product you’re promoting than someone who’s just search for broader information about the product category.

Creating the matching options is a pain to do by hand, though, because normally all you have is a list of keywords. Keyword Elite has an option to transform a list of keywords to include broad and/or exact match versions of keywords. Or you can use the free online AdWords Wrapper tool.

That’s it for today. Next time we’re going to look at the AdWords quality score and how keywords, text ads and landing pages are all related.

Sponsored Link: Purchase the EzineArticles Domination reports and get a free tool I wrote as a bonus.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.