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Perry Perry Perry! - How often can I say this guy’s name! I’ll cut to the chase, yet again Perry Marshall has some tips for us on making sure Google gives you the cheapest click prices in AdWords.

The Quality Score

The metric that determines whether Google will “slap” your ad campaigns with a high cost per click, is called the Quality Score. As usual with Google we don’t know exactly how they calculate it, but we have a good idea thanks to guys like Perry, who have a lot of clients with huge AdWords campaigns - he has some great data from which to draw conclusions from.

According to Perry’s latest update on defeating the Google slap, the main culprits for a low Quality Score are:

• Ads, keywords and landing pages don’t match very well in terms of Search Engine Optimization. For more on this, see my last article on tips for beating the Google slap.
• Too many different kinds of keywords in one ad group and too many different kinds of ad groups pointing to the same landing page are both symptoms of the problem.
• Your site doesn’t have much content, or Google’s bot can’t easily find it. Again, SEO will help this problem as well.
• You’re bidding on keywords that most advertisers have difficulty achieving relevance on.

I realize for some of you, this might seem a bit confusing, but that’s because you haven’t played with AdWords enough yet to get a firm grasp of how the system works. Once you start bidding and buying traffic you start to get a feel of how the software operates and the tips above by Perry just make common sense.

Google needs to keep the relevancy of advertisements high so you need to take extra steps to provide more value to readers when you send traffic to your sites via AdWords.

As Perry explains, here is Google’s point of view:

Imagine that you’re in the search engine business, trying to serve up good results to people who search.

Eventually you figure out that 1% of being a successful search engine is showing good results at the top of the list. The other 99% of your job is eliminating the bad results and the spammers. When Jack Welch was president of GE, his policy was to fire the worst-performing 10% of employees every year. Likewise, Google slaps the least relevant 10% of their advertisers every six months.

How To Determine Your Quality Score

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I spent some time yesterday in my jet-lagged state going through mail built up in Brisbane while I was away in Canada - that’s real normal mail, not that fancy electronic stuff we use nowadays.

I have a pile of newsletters and audio CDs from Perry Marshall’s Renaissance club that accumulated over the last six months.

I don’t know what it is about Perry but I like his style a lot more than most Internet marketers, probably because it’s more down to earth and he writes like I write. He rarely puts on a hard sell for anything he does. Although he doesn’t push himself as a copywriter (he’s generally considered the Google AdWords guru), his copy is clean and again, down to earth, and I tend to follow his copywriting style as a template for my own.

Most of the Renaissance club newsletters are about using the web for direct marketing and general Internet business stuff. Perry has the whole formula for marketing a business online down to a tea - run adwords for traffic, use a namesqueeze, demonstrate expertise to make sales and zero in on the ideal customers so they come to you rather than you going to them.

If you would like to join Perry’s newsletter (it’s paper and comes in the mail once a month, usually with an audio CD too) you can check out all the details here -

Perry Marshall’s Marketing Letter & Renaissance Club Newsletter

It’s still the cheapest way to get a copy of his Definitive Guide To Google AdWords ($29.95 as part of the welcome package for joining the Renaissance Club) and if you ever plan to do anything with Google AdWords you have to have this book - it’s the Pay Per Click bible.

Advice On Defeating The Google Slap

There was a section in one of the newsletters on the Google Slap that I want to share with you. If you don’t know already, the “Google Slap”, as it has been labelled, was an adjustment made to Google AdWords that penalized people who used a landing page with little content. It really hurt a lot of people using namesqueeze pages because they suddenly had to pay stupid amounts per click when previously it was pennies per click.

Since then Google has continued to slap advertisers whenever their system determines the site you are sending traffic to has little content.

Perry included an excerpt from an email communication with Glenn Livingston, who had some great tips for beating the Google Slap.

I summarize the tips here for you:

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There all kinds of good things about this post, with one big kicker of a free resource for you. Perry Marshall told me about this and we all love Perry. This gift is from Simon Chen’s X10 seminar which was held in Coolum (for the life of me I can’t remember why didn’t I go to this seminar - Coolum is right next to Brisbane and is beautiful!) and contains over 20 hours of top tips and footage from some darn good marketers.

Here’s Perry’s explanation:

Simon converted the DVD’s of this - which originally sold for $1000 - and put them ALL online on Google Video.

You can watch the *whole thing* - uncut - here:

video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3038739116388313537

There’s an absolutely brilliant session by the late Ken Giddens on Search Engine Optimization and AdSense.

Alex Mandossian delivers some outstanding copywriting magic. Paul Colligan takes the mystery out of affiliate marketing and Declan Dunn gives a very, very different take on the big picture online.

As I said - no strings attached, just 20 hours of great content from Simon.

video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3038739116388313537

Needless to say I haven’t even begun to go through these but I figured you deserved to know about them so you can start scheduling in 20 hours of video watching time sometime soon.

If you are wondering why Perry told me about these free videos it’s because I’m on his email list. If you want to be too, just sign-up for his free Google AdWords e-course (aff).

Enjoy!

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I’m sure many of you already heard about the recent changes made to Google AdWords. Advertisers logged in to see their keywords disabled with huge minimum bid prices in order to reactivate their campaigns. Personally none of the campaigns I look over were affected however based on the amount of emails I received flying around about it, there were a lot of other people who got hit hard.

Google’s intentions, as always, is to increase the relevancy for it’s end users - the people conducting searches - so that when they click advertisements they get answers to their questions or solutions to their needs. Logically then the recent changes made were designed to increase ad relevancy, but what surprised me was the lack of any official instructions from Google on how to deal with the changes. The first I heard of the changes were from the Internet marketing email lists I subscribe to.

Then again, if Google did release advice on how to deal with the changes they wouldn’t really have any effect, since the campaigns they want to penalize - those with poor relevance - could manipulate the system to remain active. I think Google intends for advertisers to figure things out for themselves, always with the notion that to win with Google AdWords you need to have the most relevant advertisement for the end user based on the keywords searched for. If you can do this, you don’t get penalized.

AdWords is not my specialty and more experienced AdWords experts have done the research and provided advice on how to deal with the changes. I’m not going to look at this problem in depth - I’ll just draw for you the conclusions I have reached based on what emails I have received from the experts.

As expected, Perry Marshall was the first person to provide me with a real credible answer, which I believe was sent out to his mailing list, however I have heard that it may have only been his Renaissance Club (aff) members who got the email about it. No matter what, his information pretty much summed up why the changes were made and how to combat them so your campaigns don’t get penalized.

I also received some great information about dealing with the problem from Daryl and Andrew’s mentoring program. John Reese sent through an email but it largely just said he was still “looking for answers”.

Why Did Google Make These Changes?

In a nutshell it appears Google instigated this round of changes mainly to deal with the relevancy of landing pages. Basically if the content on the page that your Google AdWords ads click through to - the “landing page” - has poor relevancy to the keywords you include in the campaign, you got penalized by having your keyword minimum bid prices shot through the roof to prices Google doesn’t expect you can pay.

This largely affected two groups of advertisers -

1. Those who use namesqueeze style pages, with very little content on them (designed just to capture an email address or some other form data) and standard Internet sales pages, again with little content besides sales copy.
2. And people with AdWords campaigns set up poorly where keywords aren’t broken down into niche keyword groups, often resulting in the relevancy of your keywords not tightly enough matching the content on your landing page. For example if you only have one adgroup and pile all of your relevant keywords into the one campaign. This obviously is a poor tactic to begin with and would normally result in low click through rates and even worse conversion rates.

Essentially what I took away from the advice I received was that if you build your campaign well and really drill down your adgroups into sub-niches with small sets of keywords and highly targeted adcopy that - and here’s the most important part - clearly matches the keywords on the landing page you use to go with that adgroup, you will be fine.

Of course the smaller the landing page the less content you have to play with so it’s always going to be most difficult with a namesqueeze style page since they often only have 50-100 words. My Blog Traffic King page is a namesqueeze but as you can see it has a lot of content and I only use very focused keywords in my AdWords campaign to drive traffic to it. Consequently it was not penalized.

If you are having problems some possible solutions include breaking up your AdWords ads into even more focused groups, adding more keyword relevant content to your landing pages or making sure your landing pages are hosted on full websites with lots of content. Google doesn’t just look at the content on the landing page, it reviews the content on the entire domain, so if you have a landing page sitting as a subpage on a large content site or blog, you can get away with the landing page itself not having much content. As Perry said though, you have to experiment and see what happens, we are dealing with Google AdWords afterall, the one place were testing really makes a difference.

Dazed and Confused

If all this is flying over your head it probably means you haven’t studied up on Google AdWords yet and you aren’t a disciple of Perry Marshall like me. The only reason I could even explain as much as I just did regarding this problem is because Perry keeps me updated with all the Google AdWords changes. I have bought his book, taken his free course and I read his Renaissance Club newsletters.

If you are planning to do anything with online marketing Google AdWords is your first port of call to start driving targeted traffic to your site and Perry Marshall is the master of this topic. Try his free 5 Days to Success with Google AdWords E-Course and then upgrade to his Definitive Guide to Google AdWords E-Book (aff).

I’ll have a full review of the Definitive Guide sometime soon, but you can rest assured it’s going to be a glaringly positive review because it is a top class book.

Yaro Starak
AdWords Campaigner

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I was listening to a podcast recently on copywriting where the host was interviewing Perry Marshall (I received the podcast because I’m a Renaissance Club Member). I know Perry for his work on Google AdWords but of course as an online marketer he has to be a fantastic copywriter as well. I’m a big fan of Perry’s copywriting style because he likes to tell stories. I love stories. I love reading them and telling them so that gives me a real advantage when it comes to online marketing. All I need to do is tell a story and I can sell stuff. Neato!

Like this story so far?

Anyway, back to it. So Perry was talking about his upcoming Google AdWords Seminar in Chicago in April and how he was faced with some stiff competition because a few other Internet marketing seminars are on in the same month, including one by Armand Morin, another big Internet marketing professional. Because of this the sign-ups for Perry’s seminar while being good, haven’t been great, so Perry felt the need to do something significant to boost attendance.

He came up with the idea to offer something completely unique that no other big marketing convention has offered before. Perry is big on immediate results education. He wants every participant at his seminar to enjoy some personal hands-on advice focused on his or her business so that person could leave the seminar with actionable strategy tailored specifically for them. As Perry’s sales page puts it -

You can read the full page with a description of the conference here -

Google AdWords Seminar, April 2006, Chicago

Sounds good doesn’t it. Good copywriting wouldn’t you agree?

The other thing I like about Perry’s copy is it isn’t over the top. While he does use long sales letters he doesn’t do the mindless bombarding of testimonial after testimonial after testimonial with audio and video and boxes and hand drawings and scribble all over the place. He uses words and stories, they take front stage, I never feel over stimulated like I do when reading some other sales pages. That being said I’m quite interested to learn which page is selling better and perhaps as much as I like Perry’s work he may in fact be making a mistake by not including multiples of all the bells and whistles but I hope that’s not the case. I hope Perry’s sales page is beating the other ones.

Anyway, as you can tell I’m a fan of Perry and if you can get to Chicago in April and you use Google AdWords, or plan to, or even if you just run a business that could benefit from online marketing I suggest you head to Perry Marshall’s Google AdWords Seminar, April 2006, Chicago and get your 2-hour personal mastermind session.

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