This weeks rant is less random and more geared to affiliate marketing than what i think I’ll be writing about most weeks. AdWords really annoyed me beyond belief. Everyone knows Google has refined their search, AdSense, and AdWord platforms to ensure quality. This is nice for the general public, but for us advertisers it has just made it that much harder to take advantage of the system. AdWords frustrates me the most because I have found it almost impossible to get nice cheap hits and also run the majority of leads that networks provide. Strict guidelines and quality scores make running ads effectively very hard and time consuming. I am no expert when it comes to this type of advertising and won’t claim to know every in and out of Adwords CPC network, but I can say that I have never ran a campaign without some type of issue with what I was advertising. Most of the type it was an issue with quality score. Quality score is an annoying scale that gives you an idea of how your key terms relate to the content on your site. Sounds nice, but sucks when you are trying to direct link your leads. I guess all this stuff just annoys me because I always get free AdWords vouchers and never make any money with them. It sucks, but it’s free and can’t complain about free stuff right?
Now I know that you read through that last paragraph thinking that I am stuck here and don’t know what to do to fix these problems. Well no I know what to do, it is just that I would rather do it the easy way than the difficult way. Its annoying to me to have to make a landing page for everything. Landing pages are nice if you know what your are doing with them and you can greatly increase your quality score with them If you can create them the right way. Just, who wants to sit there and great all these landing pages all the time in hopes that your campaign will work? Then there is the issue of the rules versus offered ads. Many of the leads that networks offered are not allowed to be advertised on AdWords. An example of this would be those Smoke-51 ads. It is hard to even use the word smoke in your text ads let alone get the website approved. You really have to be super creative and know what you are doing in order to get an ad like this to pass and be showed throughout Google. In this case you would need to step away from the bigger networks like AdWords and even AdCenter. Truthfully most advertisers stay away from them anyways and go for the smaller networks because they are less strict on their campaigns. Of course you run the risk of being limited on the size of your campaigns because you are running them on a smaller network. However, it is another way to get around the annoyance of AdWords rules.
Let me know if any of you have some useful books or web pages on the subject and i’ll be sure to update everyone with a post.
