Google Adds New Factor Into Quality Score

Adwords came out and introduced a new factor into rating a landing page’s quality score.

As part of our continuing efforts to improve the user experience, we will soon incorporate an additional factor into Quality Score: landing page load time. Load time is the amount of time it takes for a user to see the landing page after clicking an ad.

Why are we doing this?
Two reasons: first, users have the best experience when they don’t have to wait a long time for landing pages to load. Interstitial pages, multiple redirects, excessively slow servers, and other things that can increase load times only keep users from getting what they want: information about your business. Second, users are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt your conversion rate.

When are we making this change?
In the next few weeks, we will add load time evaluations to the Keyword Analysis page (we’ll notify you when they are available). You will then have one month to review your site and make necessary adjustments.

After the one month review period, this load time factor will be incorporated into your keywords’ Quality Scores. Keywords with landing pages that load very slowly may get lower Quality Scores (and thus higher minimum bids). Conversely, keywords with landing pages that load very quickly may get higher Quality Scores and lower minimum bids.

In my opinion, this won’t make any difference on a good affiliates campaign; in fact I think it will help give them a higher quality score. I’ve said it before that load time is a very important thing, not because it’s now a factor in quality score, but because it plays a big role in conversion rates. Some of the crappiest landing pages have the highest CTR because the image quality is simple and very low sized. This makes the page load lightning fast, we have to remember that some people are still in the stone age and have dial-up connections. You only have so long to capture a visitors attention, and seeing a blank page certainly skyrockets their chances of leaving before they give it a looooong chance to load up.

So upgrade your hosting if need be, make sure your images aren’t 10MB a piece, and start using GIFs or compressed JPEGs. Now will load time not only increase your click through rate and overall profit, it’ll help your quality score as well.

UberAffiliate Makeover!

So this is the launch post for my new theme, hope you guys like it a little better than the previous one. I wanted it to be as similar to the old one as possible so it wasn’t a huge change for my readers, but I did want a couple features changed and the whole thing touched up. I had Unique Blog Designs do this project for me, and I think they did a great job and would highly recommend them. They’ve done big time bloggers themes such as Shoemoney and John Chow. I worked with Nate and Matt, and they’re a great company to work with. They had my concept up fast, made revisions fast, and were always there to chat either via IM or email. If you’re thinking of starting a blog, or think yours needs a touch up like mine did, UBD ftw.

So now onto a few of the changes in the blog that I think are for the better :

• A header that actually is a clickable link that takes you back to the home page haha.
• I replaced that ugly spot for the 468×60 banner with a 728×90 leaderboard underneath. It’s a big banner but I actually think blends in rather well and isn’t too distracting.
• New section for popular posts and RSS information. I wanted something like this without doing the super popular three sections across the header.
• New post title setup. The old one was really boring and got the job done I guess, but this one looks prettier and is more sectioned off.
• Rotating 125×125 ads, yayyy my advertisers all get equal exposure now. I actually have some 125×125 ad spots left, so contact me if you want one.
• I have one of those neat looking footers now.

Overall I think it’s a really nice little upgrade from what I had before. The previous theme I designed 100% by myself and I thought it was good and unique, but just a little choppy in areas and could use some improvement. Thank you Unique Blog Designs!

What really matters though is what you guys think, after all I’m writing to all of you, not myself. So let me know that you think.

Google Adwords Mega Slap

It seems like I’m not the only affiliate who’s been affected by Adwords going nuts on a ton of accounts. I logged in yesterday to see a lot of my search campaigns slapped with $5.00-10.00 minimum bids. They must have done a quality score update, because people are getting slapped left and right.

For example, I’ve had one campaign running since November, so about a solid 4 months. CTR has been 14% lifetime for that campaign overall, and my quality score was great 100% of the time with $0.02 minimum bids. Spending was about $2,700/day on that campaign. Landing page was fine, links, content, etc. it was a functional site. Does this deserved to be slapped? I didn’t think so, but apparently Google did. They went on a spree or something, because most of my search campaigns on personal AND corporate accounts got slapped. I’m sure once I call up Google they’ll hopefully be able to do something about it and remove the slap, but it seems like they did some default automated action to go in and jack up everybody’s bids. There’s a discussion going on about this at Wickedfire, so you and I aren’t the only ones that have been slapped. Here’s a quote from that thread :

truth been told. This was my best site. Over 100 pages of unique content, blog posts excluded,

And I have been slapped 980 degrees around.

It seems that even those with huge content sites are getting slapped as well.

Am I no longer an UberAffiliate and going broke? Haha nooo, my income has taken a slight to moderate temporary hit, but things will bounce back and my accounts will be running fine soon enough. It just goes to show to definitely not put all your eggs in one basket. If you were making your living on one Adwords search campaign and this happened, you’d have no bread money until it got fixed.

I do believe this was just one of the infamous Quality Score slaps, and it has something to do with my landing pages. I have some creative ideas on how to fix this issue so I don’t get slapped again, so I’ll be sharing them if they work out. My landing pages weren’t simple “bridge pages” with just a Continue button and no content, I had a lot of unique content, links, all that jazz. Kinda sucks though because I actually have to sit down and do some work, haha. I’ve been lazy though and busy with getting my house etc, so a good kick is what I needed.

Thank you Google.

Charity Check Tuesday

EDIT IN : Some people think that I’m trying to scam money and use this to scam you guys for tax breaks. I’m really sorry, but a couple hundred dollars is not doing to put even the smallest of dents into what I owe for taxes. I just wanted to think of a creative way to give to charity.

It’s time to start the first of hopefully more projects to help give back to others less fortunate than we all are. We are all very lucky (and smart) to be in this industry, and I think we’re all able to give 1/100 of what we do back to those who need it. So here’s the announcement of Charity Check Tuesday. I’ve wanted to do something like this for a while now, but wanted to wait until I had a decent readership to do so.

What is Charity Check Tuesday?

Well, the biggest motivation behind this comes from Shoemoney’s Free Shirt Friday. Basically companies send him shirts, and he’ll post a picture of himself with the shirt on and give the company some link love. I think it’s a great way to involve different people in your blog, but I wanted to do something with charity (unless you want to send me a pimp cup…which is sweet haha).

So what I’m asking is that instead of sending me t-shirts, I’m asking that companies send me checks. Every Tuesday I’ll post a picture of me holding a check that’s sent to me and do a little writeup on the company (or person) that sent the check. What I’ll do is every month have a poll, and you guys will vote for the charity of the month. Then at the end of the month, I’ll combine the checks and write one big check to the charity that you guys choose (I’ll take a picture of me holding it so you know it’s not fake). I’ll give it a week or two to let some checks come rolling in before I start to post up pictures. Why Tuesday? I have no idea…

The minimum check amount must be $15. If it’s lower than $15, it won’t be posted on this site. It’s not that I’m trying to get more money out of you, but I can’t go in and cash a hundred $1 checks every week, the bank would kill me and I think I’d kill myself. If a company decides to be awesome and sends a huge check, it will get posted priority before other ones. Other than that, they’ll all be posted as they’re received. In the memo of your check just put your website URL so people can see it on the picture and so I know what to post about as well. You can attach a small note about your company/website as well to help me out a little more. You’re getting some decent traffic and helping a good cause…who could ask for more?

Sound cool?

Mailing Information : if you want to send a check for Charity Check Tuesday, write the check to Paul Bourque and then use this as the address you send it to :

UberAffiliate
P.O. Box 81
Niagara Falls, NY 14304