If you promote a bad quality website on Google AdWords, it is very likely that you will get penalized by Google by automatically lowering your Quality Score. This means that just throwing up a review site with a few affiliate links will not pass Google’s quality standards. It may have worked in 2002, but this is not the case in 2008. If you’re trying to build this kind of website, you need to have as much quality content as possible. Now why does Google penalize you for this? They do not want people to click on your ad and immediately leave your website–which can likely happen when you don’t give them a reason to stay.

This is how Google has been able to dominate all of it’s competition over the years. Yahoo and MSN are at least two years behind Google. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last week, you probably have heard that Microsoft is trying to acquire Yahoo so they can be competitive with “the G word”. They are hoping that their combined traffic can create a competitive search engine alternative to Google. Going back to landing pages, Google was able to completely grab market share overnight , and this is how they did it: they started implementing quality standards into their algorithm. Unless your website has quality content, whether it’s a website promoted through SEO or PPC, you’re not going to easily grab any kind of ranking with their service. Google AdWords, in order to stay a step ahead of it’s competition, must force strict standards on the companies that advertise with them.

It is also important to remember that Google AdWords crawls your website once and it’s not disclosed how often they will “re-crawl” your website. This means that if you don’t have quality content and you’re penalized, it might be months before you can recover. If you are “Google Slapped”, as we call it, you need to call Google’s Customer Support and ask them to re-crawl your website once it’s been corrected.

Another benefit to building a website with quality content is that it will give you free traffic, because Google will also send more organic search results to your website. So, instead of building a one page website with to throw AdWords dollars toward, build a quality website that people want to visit! That is the formula to getting quality traffic.

For example, alot of people getting started in this business want to put the price tag for their product in their ad in an effort to qualify certain visitors to their website. You need to be certain that you are truly bringing in a selective client if you choose to do this. Qualifying a website visitor quite frequently backfires on Google AdWords because in decreases the CTR and increases the CPC. Google’s answer to this is that it’s far better in the long run to bid on selective keywords to bring a selective audience to your website. Remember, you want people to click on your ad on Google AdWords. Yahoo! Search Marketing and MSN AdCenter, on the other hand, use a different method to determine their CPC. When using these services, you may want to qualify your customers so that you pay less in the long run. Just remember that Google AdWords rewards you when people click on your ads, so instead of adding a price tag to your ad to qualify a customer, write a good advertisement that results in more clicks.

The best way to get people to click on your ads is to include the keywords the user was searching for inside of your ad copy. If you use my methodology (and that of several Fortune 500 companies), you should create one campaign, an AdGroup for every keyword, and variations of each keyword in the AdGroups. If you do this, you might as well make every advertisement as keyword dense as possible. Remember to take your time with this. If you have over 1,000 keywords, it could get very repetitive after a while.

There is a trick to putting the exact keyword into your advertisement, it’s called Dynamic Keyword Insertation. To place the searchers keyword into your ad dynamically, simply do one of the following:

• {Keyword:Web Design} – to capitalize the first word
• {KeyWord:Web Design} – capitalize every first letter of each word
• {KEYword:Web Design} – capitalize every letter in the first word

See how I’ve added “Web Design”? You need to add a default word or phrase inside in case the keywords the visitor typed do not fit properly into your ad space. Also, you can dynamically insert words anywhere into your ad copy as many times as you’d like. Some people like to add it to their title, within their ad, and their display URL.

You also need to create more than one version of your advertisement. I like to create two at a time and continue to optimize my ads by pulling out the advertisements that don’t perform and replace them with ads that do perform. Some people prefer to use Google’s automatic optimization utility, but I like to let them run evenly for a few days and change each ad out on a weekly basis. It’s all up to you.

You see, Google is not trying to punish you, rather, they are trying to make the most money off of you as possible–which, in turn, makes you a lot of money. They want to people to click on your ads. They really do! If your ad is not being clicked on, they’re loosing money from other businesses who have ads that people want to click on. So, Google automatically places the best performing ads on the first page of Google’s results and penalizes those ads that don’t perform by increasing their Cost Per Click (CPC).

So, how do you increase your CTR? Believe it or not, it’s really easy. All you have to do is test your ads.

• First make sure that you bid on Exact, Phrase, and Broad versions of each keyword.
• Organize your keywords into AdGroups. Like I said before, it’s a really good idea to create a separate AdGroup for each keyword and put different variations of those keywords into each group.
• Bid on Negative keywords. This will increase your CTR by not showing your ad for keywords that don’t perform.
• Put each keyword into your ad body as much as possible. Make sure it’s in the headline, the body, and the display URL.
• Split test your ads. Remove ads that don’t perform and replace them with ads that do perform.

Most people I talk to about Google AdWords share stories of failure. They simply don’t understand how people can afford to pay $1.00-10.00/click and stay in business. The truth is that although the minimum CPC may be expensive, having a very good CTR will lower your CPC dramatically. I know people who bid on keywords that are $10/click, and they pay only 50 cents because they have such a high QualityScore. In reality, you can build a more successful AdWords campaign than a Fortune 500 company who spends millions by only spending a few thousand. If you know what you’re doing, the possibilities are endless.

I would feel comfortable to say that about 90% of online advertisers don’t know what the heck they’re doing. Sure, they might be bringing in profits, making conversions, and have been doing these things consistently for years. Most of them, however are still paying huge amounts of cash to make their profits, or can only afford to work in a niche market because their advertising costs are so high.

Here is the secret to making it (the right way) in any market on Google AdWords:

1. The first thing you need to do is decrease your PayPerClick costs for your keywords, and in order to do this, you need to have a list of profitable keywords to advertise in.
2. Take those keywords, and have 1 campaign per product that you’re promoting. Under that campaign, you need to organize your keywords into AdGroups. This is the tricky part, because when I say organize, I mean every keyword should get it’s own AdGroup, period! So if you have 500 keywords, you need to have 500 AdGroups with different variations of each keyword in the AdGroup.
3. Under each AdGroup/Keyword, you need to write two to four text ads that can compete against each other. Compete these evenly, don’t use Google’s optimizer. Watch them compete overtime and continue to trade out advertisements that are not effective. These ads need to include the keyword in the following places:
   • Your ad title
   • Your ad body
   • Your display URL
4. Next, your landing page needs to include the exact keyword that was searched for, preferably in a headline. You can dynamically insert your keyword into the landing page by appending the keyword into the URL path and passing it into a dynamic page, like PHP, ASP, .Net, Java, etc.

You probably think I’m crazy, right? How on earth are you going to find the time to do all of this. Well, for years, companies have been using this methodology to create their campaigns. Do yourself a favor, try it out. The second you create a campaign using this method, your Quality Score wont say “OK”, it will be changed to “Great”. Google has been saying it for years, there is a direct correlation between your Campaign, your AdGroups, Your Keywords organized in AdGroups, the content of your ad, and your landing page. To get a “Great” Quality Score, all of these areas need to be in perfect alignment. If you do this, you will most likely beat a lot of your competitors right away.

This has been part one of the Google AdWords series, to view other parts, simple see “Related Posts” below.