Need Google Adwords Assistance

A few months ago I moved our beach house web site from a server in my house running Zope to WordPress at Media Temple. In the process, I screwed up my Adwords account.

In particular, I forgot that I had a special landing page that tracked the referring url and then redirected to the home page. After the move, the url for that landing page was returning a page not found error.

Now my ads won’t run no matter what I do. I’ve pointed the ads at the home page, the about page, the features page, etc. I’ve tried domain aliases. No matter what I do, Google Adwords never seems to budge from its opinion that the landing page is of poor quality and not relevant.

I don’t believe my changes to the landing page are having any effect. I’ve been battling this for a couple of weeks now. I’ve sought from the Adwords help forum and from Google’s support (which thus far has only sent me back borderline insulting template emails).

Has anyone encountered anything like this? Any ideas on how to fix it?

Finally, any SEO/SEM experts interested in trading some assistance for some free time at the beach?

Details on the problem are in this Adwords Help Forum Thread.

Page Load Time Means Money

One of the arguments I made in my presentation on site performance last year was that making small changes to your site to speed it up can make a big difference in your revenue. This was based on bandwidth savings.

However, now marketers using Google Adwords have an additional incentive to make their pages load quickly. Google is incorporating landing page load time as one of the factors for evaluating the quality ranking of an ad:

“Users value ads that bring them to the information they want as efficiently as possible. A high-quality landing page should load quickly as well as feature unique, relevant content. Fast load times benefit advertisers as well, since users are less likely to abandon a site that loads quickly.”

For companies that are spending thousands of dollars on text ads, ignoring their landing page load time could be spendy.