Chapter 2 » Commandment II
Have Great Domain History

Updated: Nov 14, 2010

This is very similar to account history. If you neglect a domain by advertising it on the search network with low CTR, it will acquire bad history.

Fortunately, this is one you can see coming by monitoring your ads carefully. Unfortunately, a domain can have poor history very fast, it doesn’t take weeks nor days it can happen within a few hours.

The moment you start advertising with a domain, if you don’t have an acceptable CTR after a couple hundred impressions, your score will drop slowly from 7 to 5 then 3 and eventually 2. That’s why every time you start advertising with a new keyword, and a new ad, you cater after it like it was your new born baby and you make sure it breathes and lives properly with high CTR.

Again, anything below 1% is bad on the search network, but you want as high CTRs as you can get, that’s what Google likes!

If you can’t a get a good CTR on particular keyword even after using the methods described the Writing Irresistible Ads section, pause it. This is very common for single worded and broad matched keywords that generate high impressions.

SPECIAL CASE: In some markets – and for some keywords – other advertisers have screwed things up for you. When a keyword itself has a reputation of low CTR for all the advertisers who’ve used it, Google will use that information and give it a low QS for every new advertiser who tries to use it. It’s up to you to have that keyword perfom well for you and have high QS. When in doubt, talk to an adwords representative, they’ll tell you if it’s the case or not (Appendix D).

Symptoms of poor domain history

Low scores due to poor domain history can be diagnosed in two ways.

First, the diagnostic tool will tell you that your keyword is not very relevant. Hover your mouse over the bubble beside your keyword in the Status column.

This is what you’ll see:

Second, every keyword you try to advertise with that domain will
invariably be given a low score that ranges between 2 to 5.

Remedy

Same as for account history, you can bring your domain in good standing by getting high CTRs advertising with one keyword at a time. This is a good solution in a mild cases of Quality Score drops from 7 to 5 for example.

If the problem is severe, if your scores all range around 3, 2 or even 1 (the slap)… then it’s best to start fresh! Forget about using that domain in Adwords any longer, say farewell and get a new one. It’s life!

WARNING: This doesn’t mean that the domain is bad for other advertising channels like natural traffic so do not discard it completely.

If you’ve been thinking about changing your website’s name this is a great time to do it.

If you have a domain that you’ve been using for years, that you’ve built a brand around, you can use the same domain in a .net, .org or other country specific extensions. (I recommend .net)

For example, you’re advertising www.yourdomain.com but nobody clicks your ads because you hadn’t read the Writing Irresistible Ads section of this book so you get bad history. Your keywords get poor scores and advertising becomes harder than hell.

You simply register www.yourdomain.net and transfer the pages over to
this new domain. You make sure the pages are of quality (see commandment III). You learn how to write magnetic ads and you create new ad groups. Bingo! Your scores are back up.

You now follow the rules and make sure this new domain doesn’t get a bad reputation with Adwords.

IMPORTANT (again) – If you have a domain that is ranking high is the natural search results and has had a poor history with Adwords, use a new domain and follow the commandments. But make sure you restrict the domain from getting indexed by Google or else you might be penalized with duplicate content.

Next: Commandment III – Have High Quality Landing Pages

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