I believe Andrew Goodman’s opinion on quality of landing pages and that google bases it on CTR and user complaints to be 100% WRONG. There’s a LOT more to it than ctr, user complaints, and quality of landing pages.

I had been running a campaign w/adwords from Jan to about Jun and then the KW’s died-off as more people got into the industry. Just a few days ago I decided to re-activate the campaign and tweek the keywords some. Two days go by I’m seeing 10-13% CTR on my google adwords and making roughly 3-4x the investment. All of a sudden BAM every keyword goes from .08 to $5.00 to activate or change “quality” of page.

Sorry Google and Andrew but if 8-9% of people are clicking the adds and enough are doing what’s on the landing page to earn me almost 5x my investment I’m pretty damn sure the landing page is working.

After the first day running I noticed the ad was not only ranked 1 on the right column but had actually moved to the top results ads right NEXT to the company who owns what I was promoting.

My campaign was converting for me just fine, I was paying out top bid for the keyword and yet google says the quality of the landing page is “bad”.

Shoe- You mentioned google bases it on history… if they did this wouldn’t you think they would have not cared? I mean I had been spending thousands on this campaign, and history would have shown this.

What I’m showing is completely opposite of what Andrew said.

There was an error in paragraph three, it should say 10-13% CTR not 8-9% (which was my original guess until I checked stats). And in paragraph 4 when I say next to I mean above.

Nice program Shoe.

Just one comment, or more like a bit of advice for the guy with the diabetes site.

If what you are looking for is visits / newsletter sign ups. You should have more leverage to go after terms that likely do not convert well for the drug companies.

I looked and found a few cheap diabetes terms still available. Depending on your site, these may work for you:

Term / Y! traffic 4 Aug. / CPC / Placement

diabetes blog / 15440 / $0.10 / 3rd
diabetes symptom / 41856 / $0.13 / 5th
american diabetes association / 16615 / $0.12 / 1st
sign of diabetes / 4943 / $0.21 / 3rd
juvenile diabetes / 7189 / $0.21 / 5th
diabetes recipe / 3238 / $0.18 / 4th
child diabetes / 3015 / $0.25 / 1st

Good luck.

Aaron

ToddW, call me crazy but I’m seeing a common theme between your post and what Graywolf was talking about a while back. Perhaps your CTR is in fact TOO HIGH? I know that sounds crazy, but if your CTR is way above your keyword or industry average, it might look statistically too high and that might be working against you. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s possible.

Why would they penalize me for writing good ads and getting a good CTR? I only do the search network and the KWs are HIGHLY targeted. G normally rewards for good CTR (goes to top of search results instead of right) and relevancy. Hmmmm…

BTW: What do you mean common theme between my post and Graywolf.. URL please? (Sorry, I’ll probably remember when I read it!)

Oh, and I agree ANYTHING is possible with G!

Thanks for replying.
-Todd