Chapter Nineteen

How to Avoid Getting “Google Slapped”

By Ben Hart

“Dang, my ad’s just been Google slapped!”

I hear this frustration all the time.

What happens is Google disables your ad for certain keywords you have selected.  It happens to me.  It happens to everyone. Sometimes Google will not approve or disable your entire ad, not just individual keyword selections.

Google might also tell you that you need to bid a higher amount for your keyword to reactivated; or that you need to improve the quality of your ad.

Google is telling you one of two things:

1) Everyone else is bidding $1 or more for the keyword because this is a highly competitive and popular keyword and Google is not interested in your maximum bid of 10 cents.

2) Likely, Google is telling you the keyword you’ve chosen has very little to do with your ad.  There’s no match, or not enough of a match.

 Don’t get mad at Google when this happens.

Google is doing you a favor by disabling your ad.

Google does not want to deliver ads to searchers that have little or nothing to do with the topic being searched for. 

Now, there is a third surprise that can happen.

Sometimes Google disables keywords and gives you the option of activating these keywords for an exorbitant price – such as $10 per click, or even higher.

What Google is telling you here is that there is a problem with your landing page and website.

There seems to be no match between the ad and the landing page and site.

Google wants to take its customers (the searchers) to sites that are directly related to what they are searching for – not to sites that do not have what the searcher is looking for.

Again, Google is doing you a big favor by disabling your keywords.  Google is saving you money.  Business owners and advertisers get angry when Google slaps them like this.  But they shouldn’t. Google is helping us when it slaps down one of our ads or disables our keywords.  Google is telling us, “Your ad is no good.  Or your site is no good.”

Google wants to deliver its customers (the searchers) quality sites with lots of valuable information.

Google really does not want to deliver folks to just one page sites -- that is, to sites that are just landing pages.

Google wants to see a lot of relevant content on your landing page.  Google also wants to see links going out of your landing page to other pages on your site.

Google would also like to see links from other sites pointing to your site – especially from sites that are on the same topic.  This indicates to Google that your site is respected by those who should know.

Google looks at all these factors in deciding how high to rank your ad.

It’s not just about how much you are willing to pay to get a click.  And it’s not just about how good your ad is at getting clicks.

It’s also about the quality of the information on your site.  Is your site a site that Google will be proud to serve up to its customers?

Google does not want to deliver sites that are just ads, and ads only – even for its PPC ad program.  Google wants to deliver quality sites to its customers.

Google has all kinds of ways to measure that.

Google’s spiders crawl through your site.  They see if the right keywords are on your site, in the right places and in the right distribution.  They check the links on your site to see where they lead, and links coming into your site.

Most importantly, Google tracks visitor reaction to your site.  How long do your visitors stay? Do your visitors click the links to explore your site and then come back to the page where your ad took your visitor?

Google tracks all this and more.

So that means the landing page for your website needs to break some of the rules of effective landing pages that I outlined earlier in the “landing page” chapter in this book for your other ad campaigns.

The best landing pages have no outgoing links – and frankly very little content – just a sign-up form and the offer, plus some explanatory text.

But that doesn’t pass muster with Google – and for good reason, from both the perspective of Google and Google’s search customers. Because what is it that makes Google so valuable?

What makes Google valuable to searchers is if Google delivers great information and great websites to searchers in its search results lists.

So you need to take that reality into account as you develop your Google ads and landing pages.

Key Tip: Turn Off “Budget Optimizer”

Do this unless you want to turn control over your finances and marketing decisions to Google.

With “Budget Optimizer” turned on you will no longer see you bids at all.  You just pick your keywords for your ads, tell Google you budget, and Google takes over from there -- managing your account for you.

Don’t allow that.

My exception to this rule is if you would like to see how you do compared to how Google does managing your account.  That can be interesting.  Kind of like seeing if the human can beat the computer in chess.  The difference is, Google has no way of knowing what your goals are.

What budget optimizer does is maximize the number of clicks on the keywords you have chosen for the money you want to spend.  The problem is, not all clicks are equal.  Some keywords produce a lot of clickers and few buyers.  Other keywords produce fewer clicks, but more buyers.

If you can’t even see what Google is bidding on your keywords, if Google is keeping all this secret, than that’s not even of much use to you as a research tool.  Google is keeping its bidding strategy secret because it does not want to reveal its algorhythms.

Still, it can be fun to see if you can beat the machine.  If you find that you can’t, consider leaving Budget Optimizer turned on.  I do far better with it turned off.

Here’s something else to be careful off.

If you turn “Budget Optimizer” on to see if you can beat the machine, Google erases all your old bids and keeps no record of them for you.  So all your history will be lost simply by checking the “on” switch for “Budget Optimizer.”

What will also happen is that whatever budget you give Google, it will max-out on your budget.  So you will spend more money then you would have managing your own budget.

Why?

Because you probably won’t max-out your budget every step of the way. Google will.

That’s not Google’s fault.  You’ve told Google to spend the money.  So Google will spend it, every penny.  Every time I’ve tried it, I have increased my spending and decreased my Return on Investment (ROI).

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