You have a problem. You logged into your Google Adwords Account to discover that all your keywords are inactive and that you will need to bid $1.00, $5.00, or even $10.00 for these keywords. Unless bid prices in your niche market are that high by default due to high competition, you normally should not have to pay $1.00 to activate keywords. Your Google Adwords account has been flagged as not meeting the new Google Quality Score. You will need to address this problem accordingly to lower your overall bid prices and to avoid more problems down the road.



It can have several reasons why Google is adjusting your minimum bid prices. I got hit by the Quality Score myself not too long ago. I had recently started a few new Google Adwords campaigns and some campaigns just never got off the ground at all due to high bid prices required by Google. As a matter of fact I deleted these campaigns within a few hours after discovering the problem because there was no financial sense in keeping them active. These campaigns would not generate any clicks at the price I was willing to pay and Google deactivating all my keywords asking for up to $5.00 per click. Other campaigns of mine however enjoyed normal click bid prices. No punishment here. I reviewed the bad campaigns and I quickly realized that the landing pages and the site structure had a significant role to play. The campaigns that went bad right from the start were domains and websites with no real content. I had build 3-4 pages around the landing pages for the affiliate products I was trying to promote.

Doing more investigation I was able to determine the best approach for me. Using a domain name with existing pages in place and build a landing page matching the existing website design. The domains should be well indexed and preferably well-aged, too. However – certain key pieces needed to be in place, too. You don't want to have your landing pages “offer” leaks where visitors (the ones you paid for) would be able to leave your sales page too easily. In my case I moved the default navigation menu from the top to the bottom of the landing page. In addition all links would now open in a new browser window leaving the sales landing page still open. I also added links to a sitemap, my “About me” page, (of course) the homepage, the “Contact Me” page. I also added links to a related product sales page (a copy of my landing page just slightly different using the second best affiliate program). The Adwords spider was able to enter my site and go several levels deep to check out the site structure. The main website also offered not just 4 or 5 pages, but at least 30-40 pages. I build new Adwords campaigns and with a little more fine-tuning I was able to avoid the high click prices and enjoyed reasonably priced costs per click.

Here are some helpful questions to ask yourself when building a good landing page for PPC campaigns:

Do you have an “about us” page?

Do you have a “contact us” page?

Do you have a “Privacy Policy” page?

Does the landing page have content matching your keywords?

Is the web page coded in Flash (=unreadable for the Adwords bot)?

Does the page have a link to your homepage?

Does the page have a link to the sitemap?

Conclusion: When building a landing page, build a landing website. Keep the visitor in mind. Would you feel trapped as a visitor with nowhere to go other than your affiliate product? Even though that is your actual goal, you will need to play nice and offer the visitor a good experience when he visits your website. If you follow the rules you should be able to reduce your cost per click easily.