My first Adwords campaign was a total disaster.

It was about 8 months ago I think. I received an 80€ Google Adwords coupon. I was all excited! So excited that I set up a campaign way too fast, didn't target good keywords, didn't create relevant and specific landing pages and didn't geo target my campaigns. Many many impressions, many clicks, 0 sales. Anyway, I screwed up.

Then 2 months ago I thought I'd give it another try and maybe read stuff about PPC (lol!). Basically, I've only read 1 ebook and it's "Beating Adwords" by Kyle & Carson (you can access it from the accreditation courses page).

It made me feel really stupid. I understood what I missed when I started my first Adwords campaign. It all made sense. Btw I love feeling stupid. I love making mistakes. I love failing. ‘Cause I have awesome results once I change my strategy based on what I learn.

(yeah don’t worry the slap and the kiss are coming, you’ll get some action!)

So to keep this short, my 2nd Adwords campaign has been really successful. Right away. I know you’re dying to know what I learned and even though I urge you to read Beating Adwords if you plan on starting an Adwords campaign, I’m just gonna list below what I changed:

• Instead of creating 1 huge campaign linking to my home page (oh dear, that was so dumb), I created several campaigns linking to my review pages (1 landing page = 1 ebook review).

• I picked « product name keywords ». Basically, if I review an ebook called « Ultimate Singing Lizard Care Guide »  (I don’t think there are such things as singing lizards but I would want one if I could), I select keywords that are the name of the product or variations (the product name + words such as « buy », « review », « purchase », etc).

• I geo targeted only "rich" countries mainly because on my previous campaign I had a lot of clicks from people who just couldn't afford the ebooks I was promoting. I know that’s harsh but let’s face it, people who are from countries that have a very very low currency won’t buy a $37 ebook about singing lizards because if it equals a month of hard work, they’ll buy food. You got the point.

   

Anyway, after $4 spent on Adwords, I had already made around $70 in sales. Great ROI, right? My quality score was between 7/10 and 10/10 meaning that my ads positions were high and I wasn’t paying my keywords much. Exciting, huh?

And then Google slapped me in the face. Hard.

That was really unexpected. We had a nice relationship, good communication, everything was going smoothly, we weren’t engaged but we were definitely considering moving in together..

Anway, Google sent me an email that started with « We have reviewed your account and found that one or more of your sites is in violation of our Landing Page and Site Policies. »

Damn.

Suddenly, my ads weren’t running anymore, my quality score was 0/10. I freaked out. What freaked me out the most was that the email wasn’t giving me any clue as to what was the reason of the slap ! There were various links to Google’s ad policy pages but there are a lot of possible reasons for a slap ! I was clueless.

So I took a deep breath, I looked at my site and I made a slight change. I thought that Google was probably thinking that my review pages weren’t objective enough, that they were claiming too much the effectiveness of the programs I’m promoting. So I added a paragraph to my landing pages stating that I wasn’t able to guarantee any results blah blah blah.

Then I decided to contact Google to inform them that I made a change, that I was willing to do what it takes, that I needed them to be more specific to help me make appropriate changes. A sweet guy called Michael (I don’t know if he’s sweet really but I pictured him as the cute geek) replied and told me he was transferring my email to the people in charge of landing pages stuff.

(sorry, yeah it's a bit long)

I waited 4 days, Mike told me it would take time. Then a nice lady called Treesa told me that my site was suspected of being a « Bridge site » and that an « investigation » was being conducted on my site. That depressed me.

I made some research, bridge sites for Google are sites that are only made to drive traffic to another site. The definition doesn’t say anything about affiliate marketing, it was pretty blurry. I told Treesa that I was doing affiliate marketing, that I was reviewing products but that I understood that they wanted me to give more value to my visitors in order for my website to not be considered a bridge site. I told her that I was thinking of adding a blog to my site to publish articles related to my niche (should have done that long ago). I asked her what she was thinking.

In the meantime, my site was still being investigated by weird looking guys in dark offices (I guess).

Treesa told me that it was a good idea indeed but that I had to be patient before the final decision. Argh. We exchanged a few emails about content and Google’s policy.

The day after that, I received an email from Google telling me that I wasn’t anymore violating their Landing Pages policy! I checked my account, my ads were running again and my quality score was back to 10/10! And Treesa told me that she was glad to hear I had already received the email and she told me how they appreciate my constant efforts to abide by their policy to improve my visitors experience on my site.

The Google kiss (oh I’d even say French kiss!) was as sudden as the slap. What a passionate relationship, right?

What’s the bottom line of this post? Communicate! Show your willingness to resolve situations, educate yourself on such issues, contact Google (or any company you might have such kind of problems with) instead of waiting for them to take a decision and close your account. I can’t be 100% sure whether my emails with Treesa played a part in the final decision but it definitely was a good experience.

Google pisses me off sometimes, I feel like we’re all half naked Princesses Leia trying to please Jabba the Hutt to calm him down but I must say I actually do respect the high quality standards of Google because if they can make the internet search experience a quality and relevant one, I definitely want to be part of that.