The problem with Google’s Quality Score & Ad Rank for AdWords
As an AdWords publisher you’re operating in a fiercely competitive environment. You have to gauge your costs precisely and prevent overpaying for your online ads. Everything is geared towards achieving a good ROI. And all other advertisers are doing exactly the same. They will try to outbid you if necessary and you will usually have your hands full coping with this cutthroat competition: bid, counterbid, overbid, underbid — it takes a lot of marketing savvy (not to mention resources i.e. time and money) to survive in that space.
Enter Google’s Quality Score management team to make life even more difficult for you. If they don’t like your landing pages, they will let you know in no uncertain terms — no matter how well your ad performs for you, no matter how well the page converts. So you are neatly caught between a rock and a hard place: on the one hand, you have you visitors who obviously like your page or they wouldn’t be signing up for whatever you’re offering; on the other, you are supposed to please Google’s meddling QS managers who are wagging their index fingers at you. Else, your Ad Rank will suffer, making your click-throughs inordinately more expensive. And no, they won’t let you argue your point with them.
Bad things can happen if you don’t comply:
- Your ad may get banned altogether.
- Your ad may get demoted by dropping it to the bottom of the list, reducing traffic and conversions.
- Your minimum bid may be artificially raised by 300% or more — same service, triple the cost if not worse!
There are lots of AdWords publishers who simply don’t buy into the logic that you’re supposed to pay an arm and a leg for some ad only to be presented with condescendent “guvment” Google (actually, “nanny state” is the more appropriate term) telling you what to do on your landing pages as well. None of their business, they seem to think — and who except the Google QS nazis can blame them?
You want your landing pages to convert well — nothing wrong with that, is there? It’s what you’re actually paying Google for to make it happen by sending you ad traffic. The last thing you need is some fresh-from-college unwordly kid in Mountainview Ca. who knows about as much about real life marketing as your parakeet knows about Texas hold’em strategies to play the arbiter on whether your landing pages are up to their intransparent and arbitrary par or not. Just as if you weren’t the better and most competent judge of that! Blatant conflict of interests in place here anyway, one would think. Because Google has only one single agenda to service — their own, namely to squeeze publishers for money until the pips squeak. Which would probably be fairly tolerable if only they kept their fingers out of other people’s pie.
So it’s all about the “user experience”, they claim? That’s all very well, if only it were true. How on earth can you fault a well converting sales page for being a “bad user experience”? If it were, wouldn’t visitors simply flee in droves rather than sign up for your stuff? Why make the advertiser pay more for that traffic?
Nor is this about “weeding our illegal content” — if it were, Google would dump it altogether (which they actually do sometimes to fend of the risk of litigation for accessoryship) instead of simply trying to bend your arm and coerce even more money out of you. Where’s the logic in that?
It’s as if you were paying premium money for a regular tv commercial promoting your bar. Suddenly, the tv advertising department rings you up to say: “Sorry, but if you shake your martinis instead of stirring them we’ll have to triple your advertising fees.” How would you find that? How would anyone in their right mind find that? Yet that’s exactly what Google’s Quality Score management is doing to their advertisers — absolutely ridiculous not to mention humiliating as well!
So it was by clients’ specific request that we set our developers to work, figuring out what to do about it and how to re-empower the very people Google is making most of its money with: the AdWords publishers!
And here’s the solution
The qualityCloaker™ tool for AdWords publishers will help you get around the — very costly — issues Google’s Quality Score impositions and their consequent Ad Rank demotion may cause you. It lets you reclaim your freedom as a marketer, determining yourself what to show to your visitors and how to facilitate conversions — rather than having some quixotic marketing noob breathe down your neck every time you make some little change to your sales copy.
qualityCloaker™ Features in a nutshell
- IP delivery for mediabots: Displays a page to the mediabots that is in full compliance with current QS requirements
- Sends traffic to where it will actually convert: Forwards human visitors to your real, well converting pages
- Unlimited scalability: Deploy it on any page or site you wish — no usage limits
- Multiple accounts: Use it across an unlimited number of AdWords accounts
“Google”, “AdWords”, “Ad Rank” and “Quality Score” are the registered trademarks of Google Inc., Mountain View, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, Ca 94043 (USA). Any other mentioned trademarks are their respective holders’.
logobotixX Enterprises LLC and the qualityCloaker™ application are neither affiliated with nor endorsed by Google Inc. or any other trademark holders mentioned above.
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