Adwords Unacceptable practices

Practices Leading To Adwords Account Life Bans.

Recently I wrote about Google Adwords users getting banned by Google. This is an important signal from Google; it is affirming a business model built around the "user experience".

Google wants users to have a good user experience and that means it will control the quality of the Ads that it displays on it's advertising network.

There is little doubt that Google has suffered from becoming associated with poor quality sites that sometimes put visitors at risk.

It's latest act, driving undesirable Adwords users over the cliff, like a flock of diseased stock, is Google asserting that it is sticking to it's core commitment.

They are not going to state exactly their method but they will disable Adwords User Accounts ( for life) by identifying;

"unacceptable business practices and policy violations for poor-quality landing pages ,,,"

They say that these include but are not limited to :

• Data collection sites that offer free items, etc., in order to collect private information
• Arbitrage sites without relevant and original content that are designed for the purpose of showing ads
• Affiliate sites without relevant and original content that are designed to drive traffic to another site with a different domain
• "Get-rich quick" sites
• Malware sites that install software on a visitor's computer
• Poor comparison shopping or travel sites whose primary purpose is to send users to other shopping/travel comparison sites, rather than to provide useful content or additional search functionality.

Let's take an overview of these unacceptable practices;

Data Collection Sites
Google here is concerned with sites that exist simply to collect information from users - usually solely to support later marketing efforts. You may have seen sites that are basically offer you a free e-book or something to try to get your email or other ID information. They usually offer no other information of any value because that's all they are trying to do. They use this information solely for marketing purposes. Google says - "BAD" and they're out.

Arbitrage sites:
Ever been to a site where the top half of the page is simply Adsense advertising? Yes? Well the chances are that these are arbitrage sites. They use Adwords to buy cheap click traffic and aim to get you to click on their Ads at a higher click price paid to them. They pocket the difference between what they buy a click for on Adwords and what they are paid for a click by Adsense. Google says "NO LIKEY!" and they are banished.

Affiliate Sites without relevant and informative content.
People who use the Internet are looking for things but they are not always looking to be sold to. They want sites that have some interest such as opinion and information. Affiliate sites with no relevant and informative content add nothing but another click and web page between the person and their goal. They add nothing on the way of any value. Affiliates can play a reasonable role in the ecology of the Internet but on Google's patch they must add value of some sort.

Get rich quick sites
Check out on line adverts on sites which cover running an Internet hobby business and you will find Adverts for get rich quick schemes. These schemes almost never get you rich quick. The best will give you an income, even a reasonable one, if you work hard at them. The poorest may cost you money for no result. Thankfully advert servers such as Google are getting better at squeezing out those who make false promises about getting rich quickly.

Malware Sites
There is no defending people who would stoop to intentionally delivering malware or spyware to peoples sites. Google has been actively trying to remove such sites from the search results and it is rightly making sure that such sites can't exposed themselves to visitors by using Adwords. Few will mourn their passing.

Poor Comparison Shopping or travel sites
While some sites offer useful search and comparison features there are some sites which offer little real value for the user. They add nothing to the user experience. Google expects that such sites will add useful content or additional search functionality. Trying to use Adwords to promote "thin" sites will result in the Adwords account being banned.

Remember that Google applies it's rules algorithmically. In basic terms it writes a program that applies rules that test if a site fits one ( or more ) of these types. This type of programmed identification may not always be 100% accurate so if you are an Adwords user, or thinking of becoming one, then make sure you do not advertise any site that might risk being categorised as one of these types.

There are plenty of ways to make money from the Internet which give visitors value - if you do that then you will have earned your Internet income.
Google Adwords: About Disabled Accounts

Banned from Adsense and Adwords - Don't be!

Banning of Adsense and Adwords accounts happens all the time and it's worth taking the time to carefully read the terms of service and policies for both programs. If you are at all serious about delivering good content, advertising it and monetising that content then your Adsense and Adwords accounts will be valuable to you. There are other companies you can go with. Indeed it is sensible not to put all your eggs in one basket. But for most serious webmasters AdSense and Adwords are core programs.

There has been a recent spate of Adwords users getting banned who have had previous warnings or who have in some way infringed the program policies. The bans are lifetime bans so you should take this seriously.

It's not clear what has triggered this particular wave of bans - there may be some users who have in the past engaged in arbitrage practices with AdSense. Most of the banned people simply got a letter saying they had broken the program policies and that they were banned for life.

So here's a tip - if you haven't recently checked that your site, it's content and your ads all comply with the AdSense and AdWords program policies then do it now. Don't wait until you get a goodbye e-mail from Google.

Adwords Landing pages load times issue

A recent thread on webmaster world revealed that Google is planning to take into account landing page load times when calculating the Quality Score for Adwords campaigns. It appears that this information leaked out accidentally before Google had actually planned to release the information. What seems to have happened is that a change had been made to the Adwords FAQ for the planned change but then Google had decided to postpone the change but forgot to remove the FAQ change.

This could of course simply be Google "flying a kite" to see what the reaction in the Adwords community would be to this suggestion. Nevertheless for anyone using Google Adwords PPC program it now makes sense to assume that this change is inevitable and that it will happen sooner rather than later. So what are the implications?

Implications of Landing page load time
Where the landing page load time is slow then this will have the effect of reducing the Quality score for the campaign which is using this landing page. the consequence of this will l be that the Adwords user will require to set a higher bid price if they are to retain position so the campaign costs will rise.

Is Google being nasty?
In this case Google is arguably looking after the interests of web users because slow page loads are very frustrating for users. Arguably this change will also be of benefit to PPC users because it will make them realise the importance of this aspect of the user experience. having a slow landing page load time is in any case not good business because if you are paying good money for clicks through to a site then the last thing that you want is the potential customer leaving to do the shopping while waiting on your page loading!

What should Adwords Users and Affiliates do?
My first step was to start checking the load times for all my sites - including those that I am not currently running PPC on. Why include these sites? The prospect of this change made me realise that I need to go back again to my sites and look at them from a user point of view ( We should do this regularly anyway). So even where I am not using PPC I will benefit if I improve the user experience.

How do I check Load times?
I hunted for a good web based tool to check load times and one that finds issues and makes recommendations for improvement. At this point I would recommend WebSiteoptimization.com who have a speedy analyser which makes very clear recommendations geared to the analysis of your particular page. It shows various factors such as image load times, HTML load times etc etc.

Affiliate landing page load times
If you are doing PPC and are promoting a merchants product directly as the landing page then you should quality check the load times of the affiliates that you are using. if you find that you are promoting landing pages with long load times then factor in that you may be paying more in the future to promote these products through PPC. ideally the merchant will improve the load time if there is a problem. If they don't then you may have to re-evaluate the worth of this affiliate product to you.

Adsense and Adwords Content Placement Reports

As an Adsense publisher it is important that you keep up to date with Adwords developments. Why? Because any development that effects the way advertisers target their adverts can potentially have a significant influence on you income from Adsense.

Google recently announced that it was moving out of Beta testing to implement new Content Placement Reports for Advertisers. In this post we will look at what the content placement reports provide for Adwords advertisers and how this impacts on your Adsense efforts and your Adsense income.

Googles official AdWords Blog gave the low down on new Content placement reports. Googles announcement states that the new content placement reports;

enables advertisers to see the exact sites on the Google content network where their ads appear. Placement Performance reports also provide site-by-site performance metrics – including domain, URL, impression, click, conversion and cost data – as well as aggregated metrics for traffic generated from AdSense for domain sites. With these reports, advertisers have much more insight into their contextually targeted advertising spend and are able to leverage the information to more effectively optimize their campaigns and meet their objectives

This of course means that advertisers can use the site targeting feature to get more exposure from sites that are performing well for their adverts . Conversely they can also use site exclusion to reduce or stop their ad exposure in those domains or URLs which are giving them poor quality traffic.

At the moment these reports are only being made available to Adwords advertisers in the US but according to Google they will be available in other places in the coming weeks.

The new Content Placement Reports don't yet put advertisers fully in control because as has been noted in some discussion forums there are still problems sometimes when Adwords advertisers try to exclude some sites.

Nevertheless it is clear what direction things are moving in. Advertisers will start to have increasingly detailed information about the performance of their ads site by site and increasingly detailed control over where their ads are shown.

So how does this effect you as an Adsense publisher. Well if you want particular advertisers to remain committed to advertising on your site in the future you will need to think not only about how your content relates to the adverts but also whether users clicking through those Ads are likely to convert for the advertisers. Don't forget that for the advertisers the issue starts at the point the user clicks through to them it is conversions that really count for the advertiser whereas for the publisher the concern has mainly been about click through.

Now you cant control what users do after they click through from your Ads but you should at least be aware that the pattern of Ads which are shown on your site might be effected in the future by advertisers who are monitoring how those click throughs convert for them