Life in the Blue

A SEO friend asked me about the content network yesterday. Content network is a hip word people like to throw around when they are hanging out with thier friends, kind of similar to geotargeting. Really, most know little about the content network and view it as a black hole that sucks away thier budget. In many ways, they are right. When I hear the words content network, I cringe. Sometimes I think of the content network as a bunch of Black Donnellys mobster types sitting around a dingy bar all day counting their cash and talking about where is the best place to hide assault rifles.

Disclaimer – There are many fine publishers who work to provide relevant advertisements embedded within unique content. This article does not apply to you. I have nothing to say but good things about what you do, and sirs, do not change a thing.

That out of the way, his question was this - “My Uncle Buck is doing some PPC for his site and is getting some non-converting traffic. For example, one site has referred 24 total visits, with an average of 1.0 pages viewed per visitor, and another site with 133 total visits and an average of 1.02 page views per visitor. Neither site has any conversions. Is this from Adsense or Adwords, and what can he do about it? Basically he doesn’t want to pay for referrals from these crappy sites.”

My friend, I was once like you. There was no way to identify where the traffic was coming from, or to stop traffic from those sites. The easiest way to identify possible click fraud or fraudulent sites is to look at the number of pages viewed per visitor. Sure, it’s possible that every now and then someone will come to your site, be totally uninterested and leave without viewing another page. But look at the first site; it had 24 visitors without a single person looking at another page. And the second site was equally as bad with an amazing 133 visitors, but no one is browsing past the landing page the site. This data alone should be enough to report to Google and ask for a refund from obviously fraudulent clicks. That can be a timely process with little benefit, so the best thing is just be sure to shut them off totally.

When Buck looked back as his log files, he was able to identify which sites were sending the non converting traffic. One of the sites as just listed as an IP address - 67.29.139.199. I later found out that other people had problems with this as well, and it was actually an IP owned by click fraud ridden ABCSearch. Read more about there spammy practices here.

The other site was another crap site I have never heard of called SearchFeed. Take a look at this site. It provides nothing for the user other than a search box that returns only PPC ads. I can’t see any legitimate customer coming from this site with the intention of buying whatever you’re selling.

So to answer his question, this traffic is coming from the content network, so it’s adsense ads. If Buck goes to an adgroup and clicks on the summary tab, it will show him the separation between what is coming from the search network (Google Adwords) and the content net work (Adsense).

If Buck wants to turn off the content network for the whole campaign (you can’t do it just for the adgroup) go into Edit Settings for the campaign and uncheck the box next to content network. If he still wants to run some content ads, I would recommend he check the box for content network, then check the next box for “let me separate prices for content clicks.” Then on that summary tab of each ad group, he can click ‘edit’ next to his content network bid and lower it. This is a good idea because usually content bids are lower than search bids.

Finally, at the top of the page that lists all of his ad groups in a campaign, there is a link at the top that that says “add excluded sites.” Then a box comes up where he can put in the URL of sites he doesn’t want traffic from. This will block your ads from those sites for the entire campaign. Buck would have to do this for each campaign in the account.

So there you go Uncle Buck. LifeintheBlue at your service. The point is that there are worthless sites all over the internet. They exist for no other reason than to display PPC ads and steal legitimate advertising dollars. Advertising on these sites will leave you with a depleted budget and no conversions. The greater issue here is that Google and Yahoo need to work to shut down this practice all together, but, in the meantime follow my advice and you will be living a life in the blue.

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As you travel the back waters of the internet for blogs and forums regarding pay per click, you will undoubtedly cross paths with a number of people who can’t get enough complaining about the Google Quality Score. In case you haven’t heard, Google now places a ‘quality score’ that relates your keywords, ads and landing pages. The idea is that a higher quality score will increase your average position, because your site is very relevant to what the user is looking for.

The people who complain about the quality score are the same people who still write checks and still think Zubas pants are cool. (Were they ever cool?) They cannot accept change. Believe me, I don’t like change either. Saying that you welcome change is really just saying that something you didn’t want to have happen, happened. But you don’t have to like change to embrace it. I am always prepared for change and move with it. As long as you are prepared and can adapt to whatever is changing, you will be just fine.

Decent advertisers should not embrace the quality score with anything other than open arms and excitement. For hard working advertisers who aim to provide the user with a relevant and positive experience, your time has come. You will now be rewarded for your efforts. As for the spammers who buy anything and everything to get random traffic to their adsense ads, may you become the doormat of the search engine industry upon which I wipe my feet.

And this doesn’t relate just to spammers like ebay either. Even consider a good advertiser who sells both Zubaz pants and sweat pants. If the search is for Zubaz, how hard is it to have an ad for Zubaz and send the user to a page about Zubaz? I mean, if you walked up to a clerk outside a food and liquor store and asked, “Where do you keep the Tangueray?” And her response was, “Inside somewhere, you’ll have to find it.” You would not be a happy camper, and you would leave the store.

Some advertisers can’t seem to get it thru their thick skulls that it doesn’t matter how much money you throw at Google every month. You’ve heard these people. They just can’t throw out their average daily spend fast enough. “I spend over 4 gabillion dollars each day on Google and now they want to charge more for some of my keywords?” Nice try sport, a real number might have been more effective. While Google will encourage ad buying and help advertisers in any way possible, they know one important fact. There is only one person they need to make happy, the user.

Smart people learned long ago that you can’t force internet users to use or do something they don’t want to. Google won the search engine war because they provided, and still provide, the best user experience.

So my advice? Get of the soap box. I can’t even hear you complaining anymore because my ears are stuffed with the money I have made capitalizing on the new quality score. There may be some kinks to the quality score but they will get worked out. Bottom line, the quality score is not bad and it is here to stay. Use it to your advantage. Work to make your keywords, ads and landing pages more relevant. That will only help you live the life in the blue in the long run anyway.

Happy Chirstmas everyone.

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Welcome to Life in the Blue. As you can tell by now, this site is my blog. I hope this site to be a lively discussion about living the good life – Life in the Blue. I am a PPC guru, and my ads live at the top of Google’s paid search listings – in the blue.

A little background on your host - I have worked in the search industry for three years, with my main focus in pay per click. I have worked in some of the most competitive industries learning from the ground up. I also have experience in web site conversion testing, and learn more about online behavior everyday. It is my goal in life to travel the world going to conferences, blogging and getting paid to drink.

Moving on to this week’s discussion about life in the blue. This may bore some of the professionals in the audience, but you will agree how often this comes up. Many times I hear someone who knows very little say something like “I want to start a PPC campaign and be in the top spot on the blue, and I’ll spend whatever it takes.”

Yawn…Here we go again. Now I respond, “While simply bidding thru the roof will help your ad position, you cannot simply start a campaign and be the top result. Google takes into factors such as click thru rate history of the keyword, adgroup and advertisement. They also look at the quality of your landing page.” People who are a really big deal may throw around the phrase ‘quality score’ to describe this. You don’t know what your quality score is, though I have heard there may be tools in testing to give you an idea. It is basically has to do with how relevant your landing page is to the keywords you are bidding on.

A similar statement is “I searched and I always see my ad in the blue, but today it was the top one on the right.” They then start panicking, get short of breath and start opening up their wallet to throw more money at Google to get their ad back living the life in the blue. This is a common occurrence. Sometimes Google wants to see how the ads really compare against each other in click thru rate. As long as you have a strong CTR history and maintain it, your ad will go right back to the premium position.

Some people are bothered by Google’s secretiveness in quality score and not being able to control everything. I am not. For organic search they have their sandbox. The CTR history is the same effect. It rewards people for a long positive history and prevents fly by night strategies from taking control of the top spots.

The point of this is to always remember, that some things are not always about money. Google uses a variety of factors to calculate ad position. And don’t waste your time trying to figure out exactly either to always control your spot. Bids and click thru rates are always changing. Trying to come up with a bid strategy to control your position for every single keyword will not yield positive results. You might as well have spent your time…blogging.

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