Moose on the Loose

As you are well aware i think Google’s Quality Score is absolute Poppycock.

Have you ever tried bidding on your domain name & variations plus a few obvious keywords pertaining to the site & sending this traffic to your homepage.

If bidding on your own domain name & sending to that site, your minimum bid should be 1 pence / cents not 30 pence / cents.

We conducted a simple experiment for a site we own where we hold both the .co.uk & .com extensions. All traffic within this account for PPC currently forwards to the .com domain which has been obviously labelled & discriminantly flagged by Google as an affiliate site, in our opinion. The content & structure of both websites are identical by the way.

I will get around to publishing the table another time so you can make your own inferences, but here is the results summary which we observed.

To send traffic to the .com site (i.e. the one Google knows about) the average minimum ad cost is 253% more than sending to co.uk !

So within the same Google adwords account (note the same account, as this is something we shall come onto at a later stage), we sent the same brand keywords (including our url) to a totally irrelevant site. Now listen to this, to send to the .co.uk of our own brand costs 62% more & to send to .com costs 87% more i.e. It’s cheaper to send to another unrelated website. Figure that out for relevancy?

We have experimented with this on other generic terms & the figures became more extreme.

Our Conclusion: Google Quality Score simple flags particular domains so that they pay more, especially if you are an affiliate or don t have a shopping cart /basket on your site.

So next we created a new Google Adwords account & allowed the same ads & keywords to settle, to see whether Google not only penalises domains but also accounts. In each instant, within the new account a very significant saving could be made, unfortunately is was still cheaper to send our own brand terms to an irrelevant site, not only on our own brand but generic terms too.

Our Conclusion: Google Quality Score also flags particular accounts so that they pay more. More notably if you are recognised as an affiliate.

The next test we shall conduct will be using the same phrases & ads but with a shopping cart / basket within the site. Something to note is that even merchants with an off site shopping cart, Google assumes you are an affiliate when you could well be a merchant. How do I know because when questioning other direct to merchant campaigns we run which initially got disapproved, this is what Google Adwords reps informed us.

As a suggestion, in every Google Adwords adgroup & campaign you write that sends traffic directly to your site, simply insert your url (as a keyword phrase) & notice the differences in prices. If you are lucky enough to have the ad active at the minimum bid, remain silent, keep your head down & don’t let Google suspect.

Next time we shall be looking at & revealing the solutions on how we actually cracked this from theorised solutions and remedied the problem, thus significantly reducing our adwords advertising spend.

Summary: All the above simply confirmed our suspicions & reaffirmed comments we had already made on the A4UForum, in that the Google Quality Score is Poppycock and is primarily nothing more than a hand edited tool to be increasingly more bias against affiliates. This is my opinion of free speech.

On a final note, part of this solution is some instances may mean, letting go of sites you may affectionately hold close to your heart, in this industry sometimes you may have to be ruthless which is unfortunate. Whenever publishing websites you sometimes have to consider them as disposable assets, even if you have sweated blood & tears over them.

Is content king, well YES for visitor retention, stickiness, visitor return rate & brand building. For Google Adwords NO.

Thus you may have to be prepared to continually close first, then create a new account & copying the content from one domain to another sacrificing the former one with regard to generating traffic from Google Adwords. Automating the process to a certain degree will assist.

Google Adwords still haven’t had the common courtesy to come back with suitable answers about from the same old chesnut excuses from their book entitled “Googles Book of Chesnut Excuses”, because they know they are in the wrong. If they won’t play fair, then why should anyone fight fair.

Here is a simple way to ascertain whether Ebay UK is encroaching on your company trademark or url (website address) or other well known ones that you are aware off.

It’s Quite simple really:

• Step 1: Within Google UK, type in the URL’s of 10 well known charities & then search i.e. www.barnardos.org.uk, there are dozens of them.

• Step 2: Into Google UK, type in the URL’s of 10 well known retail or finance or holiday companies i.e. www.butlinsonline.co.uk, again there are hundreds of them.

• Step 3: Into Google UK, type in the URL’s of any sites you have which are popular or other affiliates you are aware of. i.e. one good affiliate site is www.reviewcentre.com

Remember to try the above without the prefix “www.” as well

Please note the results maybe geo-targeted and may not show for your specific location.

Objectives : Observe the number of sponsored ads featuring “Ebay” & even “Ask” encroaching on the owners of those trademarks or intellectual property.Where is the ethics on taking money away from charities?

Spread the word to any companies you work closely with. Because this has been directly addressed with Ebay, as well as Google who in my opinion have the same hypocritical mindset & was also addressed with the affiliate network Commission Junction (as it’s CJ links which are being used at the time of this post).

Yet still none of them have had the decency to address this effectively.

If it’s your company being affected are you too yellow (chicken) to take on Ebay & ask / insist they stop this practice, whether it be them or close associates?

Report Ebay UK to the following:

Advertising Standards Authority, Office of Fair Trading, Trading Standards or the DTI,

or Alternatively send an email to any Newspapers or industry trade magazines like NMA or Revolution then perhaps this may then cease.

They are potentially taking away business & customers away from you !!!

As far as I am aware this hasn’t happened yet. But could it & will they?

The thought only came about because I was using Firefox 1.5, and realised I couldn’t click on Google Adwords adverts from about advert number 4 or 5 onwards. The ad displayed yet wasn’t clickable. This went on for a few weeks until we downloaded Firefox 2, which seemed to have remedied the problem or it could have been coincidence with Google’s Technical team fixing the glitch. Apparently some users reported similar problems in Firefox 2. At first I thought it was either my PC or Norton Internet Security up to it’s funny tricks.

However this got me thinking … How far down the road are Google in developing their own browser? As they seem to be closely aligned with Firefox at this moment in time. Now just imagine the coup Microsoft could pull off if their IE browser by default blocked Google Adwords or Adsense … claiming it’s simply an ad blocker … perfectly legitimate I reckon … That would certainly send revenues plummeting for Google, but would also affect advertisers livelihoods. However it would certainly get advertisers recommending other search engines & perhaps balance the playing field rather the unhealthy dominance Google currently enjoys. The general public need to realise there is more to the internet than just Google.

With regard to this glitch, here’s a little conspiracy for you. Was it an experiment to analyse if it forced users to click higher bidding ads? … if that as the case why not display fewer ads you may ask … or unless was it a way of reducing CTR for those un-clickable ads & thus via quality score increase minimum bid for those lower ads. Anything is possible & then claim afterwards it was a technical hiccup. You cannot put anything past them.

If Internet Explorer did ever decide to Block Google Adwords & Google Adsense, it would be pure poetry.