My Experiment with Google AdWords & Dropshipping: Fail | Hacker News Reader

My Experiment with Google AdWords & Dropshipping: Fail

semantici.st

2 pointssemanticist3 comments

"Clearly I’ve got a lot to learn about how Google Adwords works"

The secret to AdWords is the mysterious "Quality Score". The higher the Quality Score, the lower the CPC. The article didn't mention what the exact CPC was, but it did say that in total they got 82 clicks and they had £75 to spend. That would be almost £1 per click! That says to me that the Quality Score must be pretty low, likely 4/10 or lower.

When optimizing an AdWords campaign, pay attention to the keywords in the ad copy (title, body, and display URL), on the landing page (title, metas, body), and in the keyword lists themselves. The same factors that affect SEO and PR can affect AdWords QS. If he tried the experiment again and worked to get a QS of 7/10 or higher, the CPC would drop to a tenth of what it was before. A QS of 10/10 in a niche market can see CPC even lower.

The thing that confused me while I was doing this was that I'd told Google my daily spend was £7, but I wasn't able to actually spend that much. I tweaked the CPC up towards £0.60 for some keywords but it just wasn't giving me enough impressions, even when configured to try and spend the daily budget as quickly as possible.

Even with that, it does sound like that's where I need to work - the landing page wasn't in any way fiddled for common SEO factors, because I wasn't thinking about that for this.

Do you know how you can get a measure of your quality score?

You can see the Quality Score in 2 places. Go into a campaign's keyword list. In the status column, if you hover over the thought bubble icon a window pops up with info on the quality score. You can also add it as a column. Click the "columns" button above the graph and add it.

Quality Score is a measure of the relevance of the landing page to the keyword. Google wants everything to be relevant for the end user, so they penalize you with higher CPC if your page is not relevant. You can help your Quality Score by making your page match your ad copy and keywords. For example, if I sell nutritional supplements and have a page about nutritional supplements, I would get slapped with a low QS if my ad copy and keywords were about protein powder, even though they are really relevant. Instead, you should make a landing page for protein powder (use this in the title, H1, H2, etc, and in the body), use the same keywords in the ad copy (title, body, e.g. "Buy Protein Powder - Mega Whey Protein Powder - Build Muscle Fast", and in the display URL, e.g. www.supplements.com/Protein-Powder), and target variations of this keyword in your ad group (e.g. buy protein powder, best protein powder, cheap protein powder, etc).

That way someone looking for "buy protein powder" sees your ad, with "protein powder" repeated 3-4 times, clicks, and gets to a page titled "protein powder", sees sections titled "learn about protein powder", etc., and finally sees a call to action button "buy protein powder". They are more likely to convert. You also have to experiment with exact and phrase match (I never use broad match) and negative keywords as well. I guarantee you will see 7-10 QS right away, and CPC of £0.15 or less for position 4-10, and conversion rates of 5% to start, and many more impressions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com