Google Adwords

An unscientific analysis of the Adwords System

The information provided here does not promote proof, necessarily, but representation of events, and some circumstantial evidence, while using the Google Adwords System. Because Google does not publish specifics about the Adwords system, and their associated software algorhytms, proof is not a word that will be used in this report, as it is not possible to reputiate the evidence or facts.

Background

In mid September of 2009, I built a website. The website was http://www.mfwebdesigns.com. I had recently begun to offer the service of web designing, web hosting, and a number of other Internet related services. At first, and not thinking about the content of the site and how it would be crawled or indexed, it was built mostly using javascript. Of course, javascript is not visible to web crawlers and robots because of the nature of javascript, which is client-side scripting. Client-side scripting means the html document that is produced, is compiled ( built ) by the visitors browser, instead of a web server.

The lack of indexable content posed a significant problem. There was barely any html code or text to read by a robot. It's easy to get carried away with fancy graphics and animation, as it can look beautiful to human visitors, but homely to a robot.

To add to my problems, and not understanding much about Google and its methodical ways, I had already submitted the URL to them to index, opened a webmaster tools account, uploaded a sitemap, and set various other preferences in place. At the time, I did not pay much attention to the webmaster tools account and its data, barely checking it more than once ( right after I started the account ). I wish I had consulted this data before using Adwords.

Website Rebuild - Take 2

After reviewing my website, and its problems, I decided to rebuild it. This time, there would be plenty of indexable content, and only a moderate influence of javascript. The rebuild was roughly four weeks after the site's original construction.

Satisfied with what I had built, but disappointed in my page rank, I began looking at options to increase traffic. I found several different methods, ultimately choosing a paid banner advertising service, and the idea to use Google Adwords...

A Long and Painful Journey

In October of 2009, I decided to take advantage of an Adwords Coupon, valued at $50.00. I had never tried Adwords before, although I knew what it was - just didn't know the name - I see the ads on the right every time I used Google.

So, I signed up, browsed the help articles, checked out the forum, and decided it was easy. Easy, technically speaking, but perhaps challenging to design effective ad campaigns. Before creating a campaign, I consulted the Google Adwords External Keyword Tool.

I only had a vague idea of how I was going to go about creating a campaign with ads, so this tool seemed like the perfect instrument to discover what keywords would be useful, allowable, and about how much all of this was going to cost. Somewhat to my surprise, I discovered the cost what actually manageable, even cheaper then I had expected. And, there were a large number of keywords I had access to, allowing me to advertise to a vast, but targeted audience.

The option was available to export all of the keywords into a campaign I had just started to create. I thought, great, no need to type all of these keywords in myself. I finished the creation of my first ad campaign in Adwords, very interested to see how many impressions and clicks I could get....

Before describing what happens next, it's best to outline what the campaign was; the landing page, the settings, the ad content, and a sample of the keywords I was using. The parameters are listed below.

• Landing Page

  DEFAULT - www.mfwebdesigns.com

• Geo-Targeting

  OFF

• Budget

  $10.00 per day

• Max CPC

  $0.50

• AD

  Professional Website Design
  Custom & affordable designs
  From just $25 per page !

• KEYWORDS

  website design,website designer,
  ..anything to do with website design.

Keeping in mind, the keywords chosen came from the Google Adwords External Keyword Tool, which means the keywords were inspired by the content found on my website. Despite this, and after about 15 minutes of approval waiting, Adwords decided to essentially scrap my campaign. Every keyword I hovered over had the score of 1. The reason: Poor Landing Page Quality.

Shocked I could receive such a low score, it occured to me there must be an error in the way I setup the campaign.

After clicking in circles ( Google's help archive can make you dizzy ), reading as much as I could to discover my error, the realization was sinking in - there were no answers here, not for my problem. Google's explanation of why poor landing page scores occur is generic, which, being a programmer, I completely understand the reluctance to provide specifics about errors or problems since they are likely to be dynamic in nature. In other words, you really need a back and forth conversation, between actual people, if you're going to get to the bottom of it.

I decided it was required to contact Adwords, except I could not find out how. I seemed to have missed it in the help archives. I went searching in the google adwords forum for answers, hoping I would encounter someone with a similar problem, and discover what they did to escape this score. As I read the forum posts, I could tell, there was no help here either. The problems I was having, everyone was having at some level, and there was no valuable advice offered, just references to help articles I'd already read and 'contact adwords'.

Before moving forward, it had only been about 5 or 6 weeks since I built the original website, and about 1 week after the rebuild of the site. In other words, I spent about a week or more reading about Adwords and Google, looking for answers. I decided to login to my Webmaster Tools Account, after browsing the Webmaster Forum and discovering some features I wasn't aware of. This is where it gets interesting, at least from my point of view.

As I stated earlier, the data inside my tools account was of passing interest. This was a new website and there wasn't much data to start with. But, I did have keywords, although not many, because of the original javascript. When I checked this time, my keywords were unrecognizable. There were no design, designs, designing, professional, affordable, hosting, domain, registration, etc. ( note: Google now shows variations of keywords instead of every keyword. ), nothing but keyword references from my terms of use and privacy policy. All that I had, which wasn't much to begin with, was gone. After reviewing the rest of what the tools account offers I discovered why.

When I rebuilt the site a second time, I had removed most of the old pages, and replaced them with new ones, and these pages had different names. Looking at the crawl errors I found basically my entire website was generating 404 errors. I had previously used home.php ( using 301 re-direct ) as the default page; now I was using index.php. The only pages Google didn't get a 404 on was, of course, my terms of use and privacy policy. There was nothing to change in those pages, so I left them as is.

The frustration I had felt was gone, after realizing this must be why Adwords was rating my landing page as poor. There was no content, and therefore no keywords. Of course, all I had to do now was wait, wait for Google to re-crawl my site and start showing relative keywords again. Still, I was confused as to why the keyword tool could read the content on my site, but Adwords refused to relent. I realized there must be a reason why Google defines this keyword tool as external. Meaning, outside influence, or apart from the Adwords system. Therefore, the Adwords system must be relying on the data gathered from the Google-Bot ( the data you see inside your webmaster tools account ).

As far as I'm concerned this conclusion has reached a level of near 99% certainty, because I had never used Adwords before, there was no data to archive, except that which it should have read - my newly constructed website. And, as an Adwords representative would later tell me in an email, content was not the issue in my new website. In her confusion over why the poor score existed, she made suggestions like add even more content ( everyone says this ), move an ad banner from the top, and perhaps improve the site visually, but she failed to do anything about the score. It was her advice that I be patient, and the score should change because there were really no issues to prevent it from happening automatically.

After waiting for a few weeks, maybe less, while reading and researching Google and Adwords, I decided not to wait any longer. I registered a new domain ( this domain actually ) and copied the content from my poor scoring site over to the new one. I added and verified the site in my tools account, and waited, this time, until I saw all of the content and pages were being indexed and crawled. I had keywords again after about a week, so it was time to try Adwords again, only with the new domain instead.

Success. All of my campaigns were generating quality scores of 7. This was evidence enough for me to determine where the Adwords system was getting its information. However, there are still questions. Is there a circumstance in which the Adwords system does not rely on data archived from your domain ? Does the Google-Bot inform the Ads-Bot when to update scores or does the system inform itself ? Those questions are for another article.

As for my original site, it took almost three months for the poor landing page to disappear. Three months, despite the fact my tools account was displaying the data from the new pages. In fact, it was about two weeks after this data started showing up in my tools account, when the scores on those old landing pages started to change - from 1 to 7's.

If there is something to be learned from this ordeal, for which it's hard to describe the pains it took trying to figure it out, it's value the data inside your webmaster tools account and understand that data is the base line for the Adwords system. Obviously, how, exactly, Google uses that information is proprietary, and not for public consumption ( trade secret ), but I wouldn't be surprised if Google doesn't use all of that data to help inform the Adwords system, aiding in the formulation of your quality scores.