5 Reasons Why Affiliates Fail With AdWords

No matter if we like it or not, AdWords still is one of the best sources of traffic for any online business. And it doesn’t really matter if you’re a small business with a micro-site, an e-commerce store, or an affiliate selling other people’s products.

But this is also where some problems are likely to occur, especially for new affiliates. Mainly, there are two situations in which an affiliate can fail with AdWords; one of them reversible and the other not. Firstly, you can fail simply by not generating profit (which can always be fixed). Secondly, you can fail when Google bans your account due to, what they think is, some kind of a violation (the permanent fail).
This short list presents some of the reasons leading to both failures happening.
1. Shallow Sites
Google pays close attention to how quality your site is as a whole when determining your CPC prices and the Quality Score. In other words, if you want to lower your advertising costs, you should create at least a dozen of quality sub-pages full of relevant content.
Also, don’t forget about the crucial pages like Privacy Policy, and Terms of Service. Google looks for those.
2. Too Many Keywords In One Ad Group (Or Campaign)
One of the early mistakes that affiliates make when joining AdWords is compiling a massive list of hundreds, if not thousands of keywords, and then dumping them all into one ad group within a single campaign.
Although this method will get you going in minutes, Google won’t be very pleased with the quality of your efforts. Mainly, it has something to do with the relevance of your keywords and your landing page.
The rule is simple. One landing page cannot be optimized for more than just a handful of keywords, therefore, create multiple ad groups and multiple landing pages if you want to use many keywords.
3. “Forbidden Fruit” Advertising
Directly advertising one of the forbidden products/topics is what leads to a permanent ban.
And the tough part is that on the no-no list for AdWords we can find things like gambling, lotteries, bingo…virtually anything that revolves around any form of online gambling.
This actually calls for some serious creativity on the advertiser’s part and a lot of out of the box thinking .
4. Broad Match
Broad match is the default matching method on AdWords. Meaning that every keyword you intend to use will be broadly matched to the exact keyword a visitor searches on Google.
Changing the matching method to “phrase match” or [exact match] is a much safer approach.
5. Budget Problems
The basic way AdWords operates seems straightforward. All you have to do is select a big enough budget and CPC price for your ads to show up on a good spot for your desired keywords.
The difficulty is that not all keywords are created equal, nor all landing pages are created equal, so your cost will vary from ad group to ad group. The only doable way of making it all work is to actually monitor each ad group and keyword daily and fine-tune your CPCs and budgets accordingly.
In the end, AdWords success requires two main ingredients: a bit of “careful” and a lot of “testing.”