As I’ve mentioned in the first three parts of this series, the amount of money you pay per click is comprised of a strong relationship between your AdGroup’s and keywords, your advertisement, and your Click-Through Rate (CTR). There is one final thought that I would like to add as I conclude Google AdWords Part IV. Your landing page does hold a fairly large part of Google’s algorithm for computing your Cost Per Click (CPC). You need to be sure that your landing page is keyword dense and is full of quality content. Google wants their customers to click on your ad and become a regular visitor to your website. They want you to succeed because what is good for you is also good for them.
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.
