This new feature has been trialled in many accounts lately and is currently now out of beta testing. Next to all your keywords a magnify glass is now displayed. By hovering over the magnify glass, you can find out if your ads are currently showing or not for each particular keyword.

 

If the ad is not showing, it simply means it hasn’t passed the set criteria. Try the “What can I do?” link for more information. You’ll also find you can change the criteria in which the tool searchers for your displaying ad. Information such as the Google domain, language and user location are all changeable. Thus, if you want to find out if english reading people living in Japan can see your ad, it’s simple to find out.

Most of you who use AdSense would know by now there have been some seriously significant changes going on behind the scene.  If you’ve noticed any of your campaigns suddenly jump in PPC costs, then you may have been effected with the new algorithm additions. Basically Google is out to stop low quality sites picking up cheap traffic, well that’s the theory behind it anyway.

 

Obviously this has to be having massive effects on their profits, so why are they doing it? Well one reason it has come about is because of click arbitrage. This is when people go after very cheap AdWords keywords, in the hope people will click their ads, land on their site, and then click their more expensive AdSense ads. Yeh it sounds like a bit of messing around, but there are people out their which were making lots of money through this each month.

 

The new changes means each site used in AdWords is given a quality score. By looking at certain aspects of a site, and scoring them accordingly, Google is hoping to defer click arbitrage and spammy sites. When your site is spidered, if it is to receive a low score by Googles quality ranking changes, then your cost per clicks could raise to anything from 50 cents to $10! Even if your keyword has no competition!

 

The good thing is, like everything at Google, their quality control is fully automated. Yep it’s a computer. So all one has to do is to please the visiting computer bot, and your ads should not be effected at all.

 

Here are a few things I believe Google would class as a low quality site.

 

Having a lot of AdSense on your Adwords advertised landing page
Show them your not trying to click arbitrage & take your AdSense of that page Your site only having one page
If your site is a sales page, then fair enough you don’t want to distract your visitors away from the desired outcome (buying!) However you can still ad contact pages, FAQ pages & disclaimers down the bottom of your page.
Little on-page content
This is sure to set of triggers, you should show Google your page isn’t just trying to force people to opt-in by having content on the page
Site not related to the keywords searched
If your visitors are getting to your page through AdWords from users searching for flower and then  your site’s content is pulling up high paying AdSense such as lawyer firms which have nothing to do with flowers, then this is clearly going to be a low quality site for the visitor who clicked.
 

It’s hard to say how advanced their algorithm they have in place is, but these steps should definitely be a good start to ensure you don’t get slugged massive costs in the near future.