Watch it:

Important Change to URL Policy Enforcement
Starting in April, display URLs for new ads will be required to match their destination / landing page URLs, without exception. Please adjust your URLs accordingly when creating new ads.

What does this mean… Well it means no more url faking… Some Example Ads that won’t fly anymore…

DVD Rental at BLOCKBUSTER
DVD Rental Movies with BLOCKBUSTER.
Over 80,000 Titles. Learn More Now!
BlockbusterDeal.com

When they are sent to www.blockbuster.com.  Ultimately it means is the Url shown has to be the page the user ultimately lands on. People would show various urls like www-.blocbuster.com  or www_blockbuster.com  or even some would show blockbusterdeal.com as their url but send them to the www.blockbuster.com signup page. Google says no more to this.  Good news is they still are allowing you to use tracking urls. Below info is taken from their Learn more page on the issue:

Tracking URLs

Your ads will be approved if the URL of your landing page domain matches that of your display URL domain.

For example, the following would be acceptable:

• Display URL: www.google.com/adwords
• Destination URL: www.trackingurl.com/google123
• Landing page URL: www.google.com

However, this example would be unacceptable:

• Display URL: www.google.com/adwords
• Destination URL: www.trackingurl.com/google123
• Landing page URL: www.trackingurl.com

Sub-Domains

The use of sub-domains and additional text within the display will continue to be acceptable, provided the top-level domain matches the URL of your landing page.

For example, the display URLs below would be acceptable for the landing page URL of http://sub.google.com/miscellaneous, as the top-level domains match:

• sub.google.com
• google.com/extratext
• www.google.com/extratext

So there you have it. No more shooting from the hip with Google Adwords, no more throwing up a quick url to fake Google out. You will have to build a landing page or site or send them directly to the deal page and show it.  In the past this change would have effected me but i moved away from this method a long time ago so bring it on G!

1)I rank number 1 on Natural Search Engine Rank for my niche, but should i still use AdWords?

If you have natural search engine rank for any terms that get searches daily props to you. Especially in a high volume market. Should you use adwords?  YES!!!!  On all my natural ranking sites that i make money off of and i am not capturing the whole audience I use adwords.

a. You can capture more of your audience, as i doubt you are getting 100% of the traffic that is searching.

b.  Make a custom ad towards the search engine visitors, and you can change it often to see what works.

c. Due to you ranking #1 most likely (not guaranteed) you will get good Quality Score which will mean cheap bids.

2)Do colors really make a difference in sales?

 I am assuming you meant on landing and sales pages. Yes they can make a difference. Anything from color to placement to the signup or sale process can make a drastic difference in the amount of sales or leads. The best way is to test different colors or layouts with your main sales or landing page and keep which one converts the best. In the short term you may lose a little but in the long term you will gain more profits.

If you have a question you would like me to answer use the contact form or leave a comment. Sometimes I answer via my blog and others in private. Hope everyone had a happy fourth of July!

While i didn’t have any drastic differences take place like going from great to poor, I did notice a few of my keywords that were great go to just ok. But I am not surprised on some of them as they aren’t really targeted. My heavily targeted words stayed dead on the off beat ones had some minor changes but nothing to get up in arms about.

Now on to the big issue if you did get hit by the change… Well here are two Great posts to read that should help, CPA Mini Landing Page Sites and Building a Landing Page.

Whats your take? Did your bids get hit?

When running campaigns on adwords I sometimes notice that I have a quality score
of ok or better for all my keywords however only 1 or 2 of them get any real
amount of impressions. I know these keywords have a good search volume as they
are either quality keywords or I can verify it through google/wordtracker/yahoo.
Is their a way to tell adwords to give all my keywords equal impressions?

Right now I have a campaign with about 200 keywords for the finance market. Out of
all of them only one is showing any real amount of impressions and its probably the
most obscure one out of my list. I’d love to get more impressions out of the others
to see which ones can convert.

First off congrats on getting Good or Great Quality score many people have trouble even accomlishing that. I noticed you said you have a campaign that is in the finance market. Well the finance market can be pricey which is why even though you have Good Quality Score you are not getting any impressions especially if you are bidding the bear minimum to keep the keyword active. This would make perfect sense as to why your obscure phrase is getting impressions as many people are probably not bidding on that single phrase. The solution to get more impressions is bid more, just because google gives you a good quality score and says your minimum bid can be .05 that doesnt mean that bid you will get impressions. OR try to gather up more obscure keywords and bid directly on them for cheaper. This all depends on how much your spend VS return formula comes out as you don’t want to bid so much that you are not making a profit. I will say this though, many times i have had to bid a little more knowing that over time (not always but usually if your CTR is good and QS is good)  you payout per click will decrease even though your bid is higher as Googles system starts recognizing your site for those searches as a better match than other bidders.

Lastly, don’t limit yourself to just Google Adwords look to other sources of Search Engine Traffic. Even though most people stick with the top 3; MSN, Yahoo, and Google, you can get return from other search engines out there.

This is VERY simple thing to do but you would be surprised how many new people contact me saying they burnt their budget in an hour. I know, I know where is the rocket science post that tells you how to make millions… well this isn’t it but if this post helps one newb not to blow their budget within hours on a new campaign and lose money this post is worth it.

Here is a second tip free of charge. Double Check your URLS!!!! About a year ago i was helping a friend over aim getting a campaign going in a high volume market and he had accidentally made a typo in his urls and was sending traffic to someone elses site the good news is he had only wasted 50 bucks before he noticed it.

Tell us about a mistake you made in PPC or CPA promotions by leaving a comment.

Remember my PPC bids are from information and ROI statistics from this past year of promoting ringtones. So I know for each target audience I got after what my return is and what I should bid. People should not be asking what is your highest or even lowest bid is they should look at their own campaigns and their ad placement.

I have found the sweet spots to be in top 3 or bottom 3 with the middle spots giving the lowest return. It is as if they do not even see them or the people that do are just clickers and not a buyer. Note this may not be true for ALL campaigns but I have found this to be true on 97% of my campaigns.

So take the time and look at your placements as I have had some campaigns I was sitting in position 6 and was getting poor returns but did not want to up my bid, as the jump was drastic so I lowered my bid. The results were great, I was showing at position 10 and the ROI was way up. The great thing is I was getting the same amount of clicks as when I was in 6 position but paying less and getting an increased return.

So next time you go to cancel your PPC campaign try lowering your bids and see what the results will bring. They may just surprise you!

I am glad for the update mainly because it knocked out some of my competition. This change has been coming and those just standing by and praying they don’t get hit by the QS system have noticed the system isn’t swayed by prayer. So in turn it has knocked out some of my competition, but I am sure some will be back with keyword stuffing, redirects and probably even some black hat methods to get back up in PPC.

I am frustrated by the update because in the past I have had target sites or landing pages providing people with what they were searching for and it got hit by the QS system. I mean if someone wants to buy a blue widget and I send them to a page for them to buy a blue widget and it converts well, why should I get hit with 5.00 bids. My CTR is great 10% or better, and I provide what the user wants. I think this is where Google is messing up. They are applying more blanket rules across the board when sometimes those blanket rules don’t need to be applied. 

So looking forward as a person promoting CPA offers you have to look into building more of a mini site or other techniques to trick the QS system. What are your thoughts on Adwords Quality Score System?