AdWords Mysteries

Even though we do not display any advertisements on our site, we do depend on PPC traffic to seek our members.

As we started to pilot the new version of eWoFF.com, we created accounts to get PPC traffic at Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Yahoo and MSN have been predictable and somewhat successful. However, we just cannot seem to sort through the mysteries of Google AdWords! We thought that we were technically competent to setup and sort through Google AdWords. We are only now realizing that our technical tinkering may have broken us for good with Google!

We invite any feedback on our learning of Google AdWords! Given that we have not yet made with Google, some of what is here may not apply! Here is what we have learned so far:

a. Do not use any complex DHTML on your landing pages! Before we even started to setup the various landing pages, our home page was totally unreadable by AdsBot (the special robot to scan for quality of landing pages for AdWords accounts)! You cannot really see what AdsBot sees, but you can guess by what GoogleBot sees! Nearly all of the text on our pages was asynchronously served from web services. Bad idea! This little fella never waited for the stuff to be served!!

b. Never have any important landing page be served to two different URLs that Google crawls! We do not know how they do it, but they link a page to only one URL Our home page used to be served to http://beta.eWoFF.com and we forgot to remove the DNS listing for beta host when we started serving this page at http://www.eWoFF.com. Bad idea! Google kept the old keep the old page as our home page until we removed the beta host entry! Same problem bit us a second time, when we continued to serve eWoFF.com site at WebofFamily.com.

c. Once your campaigns go bad, they do not turn around. At least not in days or weeks! As we improve the quality of the landing pages, it is better to try to setup new campaigns for these improved pages. It is a hopeless venture to tune campaigns that have gone bad!

More to come!