Can You Succeed With Google Adwords By Playing By The Rules?
Lately I have been scouring the webmaster and internet marketing forums and blogs getting information on Google Adwords. I have spent thousands of dollars on Adwords campaigns and I have been doing so for years. Over the last few months many (not all) of my campaigns have been getting “slapped.” The Google slap is when your campaigns stop running all of a sudden and you have no idea why. You invariably get a notice that your keywords have a quality score of 1 (the worst) no matter how relevant your keywords really are.
There are scores of posts on different forums and blogs everyone with their own theory as to why this happens. Seemingly well meaning advertisers suddenly find their ads are no longer running or even that their domain has been banned from Adwords. The natural instinct is to wonder “what did they do wrong? They must have tried to cheat the system somehow. I will play by the rules so I will be ok.”
However, the facts do not bear this out. The webmasters come from too many different fields, too many different variables in their campaigns. Some have high clickthrough rates, some have low clickthrough rates, some have many keywords others have a few targeted keywords. Old established sites or new sites. All are having problems. I believe most webmasters are really trying to play by the rules but many are still getting slapped.
The real problem is that Google Adwords refuses to communicate with it’s advertisers. If you ask why your campaign is banned you just get canned responses. They will never simply tell you what the problem is so that you can correct it. Their reason for being so cryptic is that they say they are protecting their system so that it cannot be cheated. Google is so powerful now that they can get away with treating even high paying advertisers poorly.
However, I would not bet on a company long term which treats it’s paying customers contemptuously. Google makes money one way, by Google Adwords and Adsense. People who are spending money on advertising will simply start looking for alternatives if they cannot get results consistently with Google.
And when webmasters finally come to the conclusion that even if they rack their brains and budgets trying to play by the rules that they still will be potentially banned they might start actually looking for ways to “beat” the system or completely give up using Adwords. It is really a shame because obviously Google Adwords is an incredibly powerful advertising system. Probably the best internet advertising system every invented. As usual your thoughts and comments are always appreciated. Matthew Meyer.