Multi-Faceted Sage

There have been numerous posts in the past few months of people claiming that their keyword minimum bid has shot up to $5 or $10. An increase this large is not due to competition increasing the cost of their bids. This jump is because of the "Quality Score" generated from your page, if their algorithm assigns the page a low score for the keywords you are bidding on then you will be penalized by having to bid at a much higher level then your competition.

The information Google provides suggests that content is king and you should focus your attention on good site content. What I found was that identical content on two seperate domain names produced very different results.

Here are some observations of this topic using the travel site Go Trump.com.

To test things out, I used 1 adwords account with two adgroups; The only difference with the two campaigns was the URL. For GoTrump, I used a page that was in googles cache because I figured that might help improve its quality (Existence for more then 1 minute has got to count for something right?). The second URL was created seconds before setting up its campaign.

The Ritz-Carlton in Cleveland, OH was chosen because it was the first hotel page I found from doing a site:GoTrump.com search.

Here are the adwords I chose. The last one was suggested by Google using the Site-Related keyword suggestion tool. They are all inactive because the minimum bid has been set at $10, since the page is not "relevant" for the selected keywords (which includes the keyword they suggested was relevant).

A little copy-paste and notepad action later... I copied the html from the hotel page and placed it on a different site rucci.org/ritz_cleveland.html, and created an identical adwords campaign which by the way had the same relevant keyword suggested to me.. The result was being able to bid at a reasonable price of .50 cents per click.

So what did we learn? I guess quality has less to do with the content of the page and more to do with google liking a URL or domain name. Looks like its time to rename the business!