Inside Google AdWords’ Quality Score
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: It Pays to Pay Attention to Quality Score
Section 1.01: Ignoring Quality Score Can Kill Your Campaigns
Section 1.02: Quality Score Could Be Your Best Friend, If You Embrace It
Chapter 2: What is Quality Score?
Section 2.02: Where Quality Score is Represented in Your Campaign
(a) Keywords
(b) Other Factors
(c) Unknown Factors
Section 2.03: Why Google Likes Quality Score
(a) AdWords: Google’s Big Revenue Source
(c) Enhance User Experience and “Don’t Be Evil”
Section 2.04: Background of Quality Score and Periodic Changes
(a) Early Days of Quality Score
(b) Timeline of Significant Events in Quality Score
(c) Periodic Algorithm Changes and Updates
(e) Patents and How They Relate to Quality Score
Section 2.05: Why Google Guards Its Secrets
(a) Translating from Googlese into English
(b) Prevents Users from Gaming System
(c) Trade Secrets
(d) Darwinian Model—Let the Strong Survive, Let the Weak Go to the Third-Tiers
Section 2.06: Overview of Other PPC Systems’ Version of Quality Score
Section 2.07: Putting Quality Score Concepts into Action with Your Campaign
(a) You Can Pay Less than Competitors
(b) Forces Better Behavior that Might Result in Higher Conversions
(c) Leverage Google’s Favoritism Toward Savvy Advertisers
Section 2.08: Checklist to Boost Quality Score
(a) Determine if Quality Score is really to blame
(b) Make certain you have activated the Quality Score keyword column
(c) Avoid Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) with big keyword dumps
(e) Put keywords on landing pages
(g) Create separate landing pages per ad group
(h) Beware direct affiliate linking
(i) Link only to quality, relevant landing pages
(j) Are you taking advantage of all matching types, including negative?
Section 2.09: Six Misconceptions about Google AdWords Quality Score
(a) There is Only One Type of Quality Score
(b) Changing Match Types Alters Quality Score
(c) Higher Positions Benefit Your Quality Score
(d) High CTR Means High Quality Score
(f) Quality Score Suffers When Ads or Keywords Are Paused
(g) Content Quality Score Affects Search Quality Score, and Vice-Versa
Section 2.10: Your Quality Score Has Tanked: An Emergency Guide
(a) Check Your Keyword Quality Score
(c) Contact Your AdWords Representative
(d) News on the Forums and Blogs
Chapter 3: Helpful Resources
Chapter 1: It Pays to Pay Attention to Quality Score
Section 1.01 Ignoring Quality Score Can Kill Your Campaigns
To understand why Quality Score is important, we first need to explain how—if you don’t understand Quality Score and pay attention to it—it could potentially impact your company. The company in the example below is fictional but this scenario takes place nearly every single day.
An advertiser in the manufacturing industry used Google AdWords to promote its product. To protect the innocent, we’ll call this advertiser Ultra Bearings, Inc. Ultra also used Yahoo! Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter and other scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel online advertising systems like MIVA and AdBrite. It spent in the low four figures per day.
Industrial ball bearings aren’t terribly sexy, but they’re in a hot niche market and companies need them. So it was worth it to Ultra to be a bit aggressive in its advertising style. Maybe the keywords didn’t exactly describe what was on the landing pages, but hey—they pulled in clicks.
On top of that, Ultra Bearings felt like it owned its particular niche. It’s a satisfying feeling knowing that you dominate a niche within Google AdWords. Ultra had grown comfortable with its advertising style and felt that it was entitled to those sweet nickel clicks, number three positions, and great click-through rates.
The AdWords campaigns were implemented by someone in Marketing who seemed to have a knack for AdWords. She later left when Marketing was downsized. The guys in IT were temporarily given the job of overseeing AdWords. But they had other things to do, so AdWords was left to cruise on its own. It didn’t seem to matter, though. AdWords still generated decent leads for Ultra, and Accounting diligently paid the ad costs each month, so everyone was happy.
Then one day, Ultra’s AdWords-generated leads dropped through the floor. Since search marketing had grown in importance in the last few years, this represented over half of Ultra’s web-driven business.
It was a scramble even to locate the log-in and password for AdWords, but finally someone found it in a desk drawer—a cryptic scribble on a Post-It. Ultra’s minimum bids had shot up to $10 and ad positions had dropped precipitously. The only remedy that Ultra could imagine was to pause its campaigns until someone can figure out what happened. What was that woman from Marketing’s name? Angie something? Could someone find her? Half of Ultra’s web-driven business was now moribund and its profits stagnant at a time when no company could afford such a luxury.
A cautionary tale for the Internet age? Take it as you will. Welcome to the Age of Quality Score!
Section 1.02: Quality Score Could Be Your Best Friend, If You Embrace It
Google wants its advertisers to accept Quality Score. In its own plain-spoken manner, Google no more than suggests that you heed its advice about Quality Score. After all, no advertiser really is forced to pay attention to it. If you ignore Quality Score, Google won’t turn off accounts, won’t decimate entire ad campaigns, and won’t blacklist you. They simply raise minimum bids, forcing you to pay more for the same positions. Fortunately, this is a situation that you have control over and can be fixed!
Quality Score has become the bedrock of the AdWords system and the reason why, in the eyes of many top advertisers, AdWords works better than any other pay per click (PPC) advertising system out there. In fact, AdWords’ Quality Score has become such a relentless, positive force that other companies have copied it. When the number two competitor, Yahoo!, launched its new advertising platform called Panama, it duplicated many of AdWords’ key features.
When Quality Score was first introduced, many advertisers complained that Google had it in for them. With each subsequent improvement to Quality Score, advertisers again complain that they are being targeted; that this is merely another tactic to line Google’s coffers. If you’re one of these complainers, drop the victim mentality now. Complaining might make you temporarily feel better but it won’t get Google to change and it certainly won’t decrease your minimum bids. Quality Score is not going away. Quality Score is not a passing phase.
If Quality Score has negatively affected you, you shouldn’t view it as punishment. Simply view it as a signal—a valuable turning-point for forcing you to improve your ad campaigns, to boost conversions, and to achieve greater success in PPC advertising.
The truth of the matter is that you cannot conduct an effective advertising campaign in Google AdWords without paying close attention to Quality Score.
Chapter 2: What is Quality Score?
We’ve talked a lot about Quality Score already—how it can negatively affect you, why it’s important, and how to view it positively, but what is it exactly? Here’s the definition, straight from Google:
“Quality Score is a dynamic variable assigned to each of your keywords. It’s calculated using a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad group and to a user’s search query.”
Here’s what this means in layman’s terms: Quality Score ensures that Google only shows relevant ads to its users. Searchers want to find the information they’re looking for quickly and easily and Quality Score helps them show more relevant ads. For advertisers, it translates to this: to make sure that your potential customers see your ad, you need to pay attention to Quality Score. It also influences your ads’ position, and it partially determines your keywords’ minimum bids, which can help reduce your budgets.
Google is constantly improving the user experience by providing the best search results possible. Quality Score was implemented to ensure that individual advertisers are doing their part by making that their advertisements are relevant to the user’s query. As we will see later, significant events led up to Google’s decision to do this, and this desire to improve individual advertisers’ ad campaigns does have wider ranging implications. But let’s first look at it on an individual advertiser basis.
Quality Score is also based on “dynamic variables.” A dynamic variable has meanings both in mathematics and in programming. You should care about this because Google has a programmer-driven, engineer-driven culture. Understand the techies and you will understand AdWords. Essentially, it means that there are no fixed rules. Quality Score continually shifts and adjusts in response to factors that it senses in your ad campaign.
For instance, one major Quality Score variable that Google will admit to: Measuring a keyword-targeted ad on the Search Network. This variable, in conjunction with others both known and unknown, develop a rich Quality Score unique to each advertisers’ situation.
The engine that drives all this is the AdWords algorithm. Another math term, an algorithm, at its most basic level, is a formula that produces a specific result. No one outside of Google’s inner circles knows what the algorithm is, though Google does give hints. Through much trial and error and reverse-engineering, many advertisers have figured out the basic shape and outline of the AdWords algorithm.
Section 2.02 Where Quality Score is Represented in Your Campaign
It’s often difficult to see exactly where Quality Score affects your ad campaign, as Google has never been very forthcoming about showing this. In addition, Quality Score is applied differently to different situations. For instance, Quality Score on the Search Network has different attributes from Quality Score on the Content Network.
The reasoning is sound because search and content are different animals. Search targets active users, people specifically looking for your product or service. Content targets passive users, people that may be interested in your product or service but aren’t actually looking for it yet. Since content ads are shown on websites or blogs that may have myriad of subjects, Google takes into consideration “the relevance of your ad and keywords to the site on which your ads will appear, your ad’s performance history on that site and similar sites, as well as the quality of the landing page to which your ad is linked.”
Easily the most important and prominent factor of Quality Score in your ad campaigns, keywords are at the heart of Google search and, by extension, AdWords. Quality Score keyword designations in the form of “Poor,” “OK,” or “Great” can be seen within your ad campaign. In fact, this is the only way you can actually see Quality Score in action with your campaign. In early 2007, Google added this in the spirit of “transparency,” as they put it, and it has been helping advertisers improve their ads ever since.
(i) Ad Text
Relevance of ad text is the biggest issue as far as it touches on Quality Score. Keywords within the copy are one way in which ad copy is deemed relevant.
This is a big issue with Google, as it wishes users to be satisfied with their Google experience. One way to do this is to eliminate the disconnect that happens so often between the perceived result of a click and the actual result of a click. While Google has taken measures to control this with their organic search results (the non-paid results that occupy the majority of the search engine results page), it’s only with AdWords that they can wield the greatest control.
Web gurus often advocate various tactics for dealing with ad text. They have formulas for determining how many keywords should be placed in ad copy, where they should be placed, and even methods of graphically tweaking the text to create certain shapes.
Yet all this ignores the fact that ad copy is only truly relevant when the user pays attention. Certainly, keywords must be placed in the ad text, at a minimum; but in the end, only human eyes can evaluate the relationship between ad clicks and ad results.
(ii) Landing Page
Landing page quality was incorporated into the AdWords Quality Score in November 2006. Google notes that its Quality Score spiders (a.k.a. robots or crawlers, which automatically search web pages on a regular basis) crawl landing pages about once a month to check for updates. Some AdWords advertisers indicate that they believe the spiders crawl more frequently than that.
(iii) Click-Through Rate (CTR)
CTR of keywords also helps determine Quality Score. CTR simply means the ratio of people who see your ad to people who actually click your ad. It’s not good for 100 people to see your ad, but only 1 person to click on it.
Keywords with low CTR might be marked as OK or even Poor, which in turn raises minimum bid price or makes keywords inactive altogether. CTR helps Quality Score determine a keyword-targeted ad’s position on a search result page and the minimum cost-per-click.
(iv) Minimum Bids
Keyword minimum bids—the thing that tells you whether you’re paying ten dollars or ten cents per click—are determined by Quality Score measurements which calculate the relevance of the keyword to its ad groups.
(v) Campaign/Account
It is suspected, though not confirmed, that Campaigns and/or Accounts may have separate Quality Score ratings. As will be later discussed in-depth, Google has a habit of implying one thing but saying another. Advertisers have never been able to get a clear answer from Google as to Campaign and/or Account Quality Score ratings. In informal instances, Google has implied that such ratings do exist. However, in more formal settings, Google representatives have, in carefully scripted corporate tones, categorically denied that anything of the sort exists. This tendency to dissemble is known as “Googlese.”
(vi) Ad Performance History
Performance history of ads is part of the Quality Score for both site-targeted and Search Network ads.
Google’s AdWords Quality Score algorithm incorporates other factors that no one outside of Google knows. Google purposely keeps these factors secret. These unknown factors represent an aspect of Quality Score that keeps AdWords an active, living thing—and it keeps advertisers on their toes. Based on reviewing patent applications, some examples of these unknown factors could be how many times a user selects a given ad in a given session or the duration of time, from an ad result selection, until the user issues another search query.
Section 2.03: Why Google Likes Quality Score
(a) AdWords: Google’s Big Revenue Source
Google offers a lot of great products free to Internet users. But how does it make most of its money?
In 2006 Google made $1.2 billion just from the site-targeted ads on AdSense. That’s well over a third of their total revenues (37%). Factor in the Google search and the Search Network advertising revenues, and advertising comprises well over two-thirds of Google’s revenues.
Given this, Google has a vested interest in keeping its advertising programs robust. Irritating a handful of advertisers who don’t like Quality Score is hardly worth compromising the entire Google advertising juggernaut. Quality Score means good health to AdWords, which translates to prosperity to Google, Inc.
By late 2005, the term “MFA” had entered the lexicon of search engine marketing. It stood for “Made for AdSense,” which referred to websites that were created only to get users to click on the ads. There was little if any relevant content. Some publishers made a killing (if one believes their claims). It wasn’t exactly a scam because no one forced the users to click on the ads, but it certainly impinged on the good “user experience” that Google strives for.
MFA advertisers would set up AdWords ads (also PPC ads from other companies), typically advertising high-profit info products. A Google user, enticed by a tantalizing ad, would click on the ad—only to be sent to a landing page that contained little else but Google AdSense ads or affiliate-linked products. The way these advertisers would profit was with the arbitrage. By loading up their landing pages with high-profit keywords, yet bidding on low-cost keywords in AdWords, they would exploit the disparity between the low AdWords cost and the high AdSense revenue. The result was instant profit for the advertisers and a poor user experience for the searchers.
By 2006, Google—and millions of Internet users—had had enough of this. Google decided to take steps to kill MFA ads once and for all, and Quality Score was one of the prongs in its multi-pronged attack.
(c) Enhance User Experience and “Don’t Be Evil”
Google was founded on high-minded principles. One well circulated list of Google philosophies includes such values as “Focus on the user, and all else will follow” and “You can make money without being evil.” The most famous phrase, “Don’t be evil,” isn’t actually one of the official corporate policies. In the early days of Google, it was a phrase written on the whiteboards for the programmers and engineers who, it was said, could not accept fuzzy value systems. They wanted one sentence that would say it all. “Don’t be evil” and its off-shoots permeate every area of AdWords.
Section 2.04: Background of Quality Score and Periodic Changes
Quality Score wasn’t always in place. In fact, AdWords existed for quite some time before Google decided it was time to pump up the quality of ads.
(a) Early Days of Quality Score
Prior to the introduction of Quality Score, bidding was a simpler process. An advertiser’s maximum bid for a keyword was multiplied by the CTR. The highest result was placed in position #1, second highest was placed in ad position #2, and so on. Minimum bids were five cents; and in fact, five cent clicks were not all that hard to achieve.
Soon after Quality Score was instituted, two different “states” were added to the mix: active or inactive. If a keyword was active, it meant that your bid was sufficient and that keyword’s ad would be displayed. If a keyword was inactive, its ad simply would not run. In that case, you had either of two options: increase your maximum cost-per-click (the maximum you were willing to pay) or increase the Quality Score by improving the ad. These “states” are no longer the sole determining factor of an ad’s quality.
(b) Timeline of Significant Events in Quality Score
- 2000: Google AdWords is begun.
- CPM is the first pricing model. CPM, or cost-per-mille (thousand), meant that advertisers paid per thousand impressions.
- Google AdWords Select introduces the idea of cost-per-click pricing, which is a boon to advertisers because relevant ads can achieve higher positions at potentially lower costs than competitors’ ads.
- Google drops the “Select” designation and the name is now known as Google AdWords.<
- August 2005: Quality Score introduced.
- February 2007: Poor, OK, Great Quality Score designations added for keywords.
- February 2007: Update to Quality Score to improve the overall quality of ads by lowering minimum bids for high quality ads and raising minimum bids for low quality ads.
- August 2007: Improved top placement formula added.
(c) Periodic Algorithm Changes and Updates
Just as any car owner takes his car into the shop for periodic tune-ups, so too does Google “tune up” AdWords with algorithm changes and updates (not to be confused with scheduled system maintenance, which typically happens on a weekend).
Some updates are not announced; they just happen. With other updates, the writing is on the wall shortly before they happen. All updates upset a select minority of advertisers. No updates are negotiable.
Despite the usual uproar, algorithm updates have, to this point, always resulted in a marked improvement not only in AdWords but in a residual effect to the PPC community as a whole.
How often is Quality Score updated? Savvy advertisers would say not enough because Quality Score allows them to pay less. Others would say that it’s updated too often because their minimum bids increase each time. One representative from Google indicated that Quality Score is updated “relatively real-time.” We’re not sure what that means. It’s more Googlese,—a concept we will explain in a later section.
Most AdWords advertisers want their ads to appear as high on the search results page as possible—some merely because they feel it looks good and some because they generate higher conversions in those top spots. It’s arguable whether a position #1 results in more conversions. It certainly generates more clicks but many are “impulse clicks.” The users click on the ads simply because they’re at the top of the page, not because they feel they’re relevant. Only after they visit the page—and you’ve paid for them to do so—do they determine relevance. In any case, top ad positions are coveted by many advertisers.
In August 2007, Google changed its formula with regards to top ad placement. Google has separate Quality Score calculations for ads that run on top versus ads that run on the right side of the search results. Prior to top placement changes, it was possible to nudge one’s ad to the top positions by paying higher bid prices. The upshot of the top placement changes is that actual cost per click (CPC) is devalued in relation to an ad’s quality; and maximum CPC was brought into the fold as an important determiner in top ad position.
(e) Patents and How They Relate to Quality Score
In July 2007, it became public that Google had filed three patent applications that potentially touch upon 44 Quality Score factors. For AdWords advertisers who are on top of such issues, this might at first seem like business as usual. But looking at these patent applications in detail we see something different. In summary, the patents are respectively about:
- Predicting ad quality.
- Estimating ad quality from observed user behavior.
- Comparing ads and their respective Quality Score parameters, in order to determine if the ads should be filtered, where positioned, and if some are worthy of higher positions.
Following are just a handful of the 44 Quality Score factors these patents take into consideration:
- Number of times a user clicks on a certain ad per session.
- Duration of time spent on an ad result selection.
- Number of searches that happen in a given session after the initial search result or ad selection.
While the details of these patents are interesting in a technical sense, the larger picture that they paint is that, a.) Quality Score is becoming increasingly splintered and segmented, so that ever more factors play into it; b.) Google is always, as they put it, “refining” Quality Score; and, c.) user behavioral models are the next wave in improvements for PPC.
Indeed, we see rumblings of this with Microsoft’s contextual ad system, ContentSense, poised to eliminate on-page factors that determine which ads it serves up—and to serve ads completely based on the user’s behavioral history. Can PPC be far behind?
Section 2.05: Why Google Guards Its Secrets
(a) Translating from Googlese into English
Obfuscate. Dissemble. Stonewall. Not sure what these words mean? Look in the thesaurus under “Googlese.” Googlese is the official language of Google. Googlers, by nature, are a friendly, fun-loving, sociable bunch. They kayak, they party, they drive Toyota Priuses. Talk Quality Score, and it’s the corporate line all over again.
AdWords’ blog is no better. Blogs are supposed to be loose, informal, off-the-cuff. But Inside AdWords is so tightly written, it could make a diamond out of a lump of coal.
One fair defense about this stance is that AdWords does not want to play favorites, and giving anyone a scoop—even the scent of a scoop—undermines democratization. By cutting a few advertisers out of the loop, even those advertisers spending high five figures or more a month, Google ensures that everyone operates on a level playing field.
(b) Prevents Users from Gaming System
So let’s say Google AdWords does an update. The update is intended to improve ad quality and AdWords as a whole. The dust settles. Then, seemingly within minutes, intrepid advertisers begin to figure ways around the legitimate methods.
One method, already mentioned, was the arbitrage model. Another involved sending AdWords clicks straight to affiliate landing pages. AdWords advertisers plugged direct affiliate links in the ad’s destination URL and a different link in the display line. The first link was affiliate-coded so that the advertiser would get paid for a sale, should the user purchase or generate a lead. The other link invariably was the product vendor’s domain—or a cheap, throwaway .info domain bought solely for AdWords.
The problem is, direct-linking runs afoul of many of Google’s high-level and ground-level policies—optimal user experience, double-serving (two or more domains selling the same thing), and so on—that Google eventually changed things around to make it harder to direct-link.
Whether Coca Cola’s formula or Google’s search algorithm, proprietary secrets lie at the heart of most large corporations’ successes. The ever-changing AdWords algorithm preserves Google’s high market position in the online advertising world.
(d) Darwinian Model—Let the Strong Survive, Let the Weak Go to the Third-Tiers
PPC forum chatter and blog gossip can rise to paranoid levels when AdWords updates hit. Wild theories are proposed by some, denounced by others, and somewhere within lies the truth.
One idea that seems to stick to the wall every time is that Google wishes to present the highest quality pay per click advertising system possible—and anyone who can’t rise to Google’s high standards should go elsewhere. Perceived as equal parts geek arrogance and an honest desire to forge improvement, this means that advertisers who don’t comply with the system can go to third-tier online advertising systems like MIVA and AdBrite, which is as damaging to a person’s ego as a baseball player being drafted into the farm league—but not as even as good as that.
Section 2.06: Overview of Other PPC Systems’ Version of Quality Score
The two other big PPCs—Yahoo! and Microsoft—had no quality score/index systems prior to Google AdWords’ Quality Score. It’s debatable whether Yahoo! and Microsoft were merely imitating Google, or if the idea of rating PPC ads by quality is so universal and powerful that it eventually had to happen.
Remember that all three are separate companies. Hone your AdWords Quality Score to sharp-edged perfection—and your other two PPC accounts can fail for lack of attention. You will need to deal with their ad quality ratings separately.
The first successful PPC system, Yahoo! Search Marketing began life in the late 1990s as GoTo, a name that was later changed to Overture. In fact, Overture was so successful that PPC old-timers still refer to it as Overture, even though it has changed hands several times since. In 2003, Yahoo! acquired Overture and called it Yahoo! Search Marketing. Looking to shape itself more in the image of AdWords, Yahoo! revamped in late 2006 to early 2007 and soon after added Quality Index.
As Yahoo! notes, the Quality Index “reflects an ad’s ability to meet the needs of users by taking into account various relevance factors and click-through rate compared to its position and other ads displayed at the same time. It also takes into account all keywords in [an] ad group.”
As with AdWords’ Quality Score, the Yahoo! Quality Index affects bid amount and ranking position. Quality ads are capable of achieving higher positions than competitors with poor quality ads.
In April 2007, last on the bandwagon, Microsoft adCenter introduced Quality Based Ranking. Initially, it was a disaster. QBR not only didn’t serve up higher quality ads, it seemed to have the opposite effect: showing comically irrelevant ads. adCenter had long been viewed as a welcome refuge of advertisers for easy five-cent clicks and laissez-faire editorial practices, and the introduction of QBR was not welcome to many advertisers. However, it can be said that adCenter’s QBR is not as stringent as Google’s Quality Score—at least for now.
adCenter notes that QBR:
• “[Assesses] the content of the ad and landing page in relation to the user’s likely intent.
• [Assesses] the keywords that an advertiser selects in relation to the advertiser’s landing page content, to confirm that they are substantially relevant to both the landing page and the user’s search query.
• [Tries to] ensure that there is substantive content on the landing page to fulfill the user’s query.
• [Assesses duplicate content] in overall search results” and may limit ads which display duplicate content.
Section 2.07: Putting Quality Score Concepts into Action with Your Campaign
Quality Score is your friend. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Whatever your favorite aphorism, Quality Score is actually a positive leveraging device for your advertising campaign, not a negative.
(a) You Can Pay Less than Competitors
AdWords Help and Learning Center are laced with language about how savvy advertisers showing quality ads can achieve higher positions for less money. Google practically drives it into your head, and if you don’t hear it, it’s your own fault.
This happens to be 100% true. That bears repeating: This happens to be 100% true.
It’s Google’s game, so you may as well play by the rules and be rewarded. Advertisers running less-than-quality ads (you know who you are), should run this experiment.
1. Take a note of your average positions and your cost-per-click for certain keywords or ad groups.
2. Then improve your ads. Make them more relevant. Include your keywords. Add features and benefits.
3. Give it some time, then see where you land.
Are you paying less? Do you happen to be getting higher positions for less money? Is one of your competitors, who used to smugly occupy that top box, slowly getting shoved downward? Wipe that smile off your face: It’s Quality Score in action.
(b) Forces Better Behavior that Might Result in Higher Conversions
Google makes a number of efforts to show that they care about your conversions. They offer conversion code in your AdWords account, and if that’s not enough for you, they’ve made Google Analytics completely free. It’s a robust tool for tracking your ad campaigns, from inception to conversions. That’s one way that Google cares about the end result of all of this—generating a lead, making a sale, getting another opt-in.
But do you think that AdWords really cares about your conversions? After all, the instant a user clicks on your ad, their job is done. That’s fifty more cents of aviation fuel for the Googlejet, right?
Yes and no. If advertisers continue not to generate leads, not make sales, not get opt-ins, they eventually sour on AdWords. They start looking for other methods of advertising. It’s not completely altruistic that Google makes certain efforts toward helping you improve your conversions.
But that’s not the point. The point is your ad campaign. Keyword relevance, the major building block of Quality Score, helps turns browsers into buyers. Selling a person begins with the ad. They search for “red wheelbarrows”; your ad mentions “red wheelbarrows.” They click on your ad and they find out about red wheelbarrows and hopefully buy one. Pre-conditioning the buyer to enter his or her credit card number into the checkout starts at the very moment they see the ad.
(c) Leverage Google’s Favoritism Toward Savvy Advertisers
Quickly distance yourself from competitors who do not keep up with Quality Score updates—or even with basic Quality Score best practices. Since you are in touch with these matters, you are nimble on your feet and can change your practices accordingly. Staying in good graces with AdWords is really no more difficult that keeping up with the industry.
Section 2.08 Checklist to Boost Quality Score
(a) Determine if Quality Score is really to blame
Because many advertisers so roundly denounce Quality Score, they immediately blame Quality Score if something goes wrong with their campaigns. Before you blame Quality Score, examine all other aspects first—from the highest level account issues like budgets and ads down through the strata to the lowest-level, forgotten, zero-impression keyword or keyword level bid.
(b) Make certain you have activated the Quality Score keyword column
When Quality Score was introduced, advertisers felt that they were left in the dark. What’s my Quality Score? How can I improve it? Yet the great oracle, Google, would not respond.
Whether it was due to these requests or a decision from on high, in early 2007—well over a year after Quality Score was introduced—a Quality Score column was added under the Keywords tab within each ad group. Designations were given to the keywords—but again, very broad, Poor, OK, or Great. Even different shadings within each designation are possible. Click the drop-down box titled to bring this wonderful piece of information to light.
(c) Avoid Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) with big keyword dumps
Everyone wants to know about Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI). Too many advertisers, it looks like the answer to all of their problems.
DKI allows advertisers to insert a placeholder in ad copy which will automatically display the triggering keyword when the ad is displayed. For instance, if your triggering keyword is “grapes,” and the title of your ad reads, “{Keyword} on Sale Today,” the ad would display as:
Grapes on Sale Today
Imagine that! Your AdWords fortune is just around the corner. This isn’t much of a help when you’re dealing with a couple of ad groups with ten or twelve keywords that you can manually type into your ad copy. But if you have 25,000 keywords about laser eye surgery that you have just pulled down from WordTracker, it looks like it would be a great help
When it comes to DKI advice, Google is circumspect. Most of the advice you’ll find is on blogs and forums. One reason why DKI is not always good advertising practice is because it encourages laziness and discourages specific and custom ad copy, written for your target audience.
Too many advertisers use it as a crutch thinking that if the ad contains your keyword, it’s now relevant. But, it’s only relevant if the user clicks on it. Can you really connect with your target audience by changing only one word? With DKI, you’re only changing part of the ad. When Google says that ads should be relevant, they mean the whole ad, not just part of it. Promiscuous use of DKI ignores the holistic nature of your ads.
DKI doesn’t fare much better for content advertisers. If you dump thousands of unrelated keywords into a single group, Google is unable to effectively target your ads to sites that host your ad. The way Google targets your ad is by deriving a “concept” from the ad group and then finding the same “concept” in related articles. If you muddy the waters in your ad group by including several different keyword groups/concepts, you’re making it that much harder for Google to target your ad.
Putting keywords in ad copy isn’t a sneaky trick. It makes sense and Google encourages this. One, two, or even three well-placed keywords alert the user to the fact that, yes, this ad may be the answer to all their questions. However, be sure to use the keywords naturally. If it makes sense to put three keywords in this very short, character-limited ad text, then by all means do it. But don’t squeeze keywords in just for the sake of it.
(e) Put keywords on landing pages
This is the natural extension to putting keywords in ad copy. Keywords on landing pages let the user know, post-click, that they are in the right place. First of all, they know that they were not in a completely wrong spot. For example, searching for “male health advice” you want to end up on a page about “male health advice” not a page about herbal enhancements. Second, they know that reading this page will provide good value because it’s what they were searching for.
This practice has, for some advertisers, turned into a grim job of pouring keywords all over their landing pages in various sizes, shapes, and even hiding them in image tags. This no longer works, and it is debatable that it ever worked. Be cognizant—in a garden-variety SEO way—of using keywords on your landing pages, in the right density and format. But don’t overdo it.
Another method that is often sold, by search engine marketing gurus, as a brilliant “tactic” guaranteed to bring in one-cent clicks. Create separate ad groups per type of keyword. Red apples get one ad group, green apples another, yellow apples yet another. The theory is that you’re somehow tweaking the system to “shock” it into submission.
In truth, it’s called organization. Those 25,000 laser eye surgery keywords don’t belong in one ad groups. If you’re dead-set on all those keywords, you’d better start thinking long and hard about how they should stick together. Remember, those 25,000 keywords will all show the same ad. Does that make sense? Another great thing: Because you have discrete, well-labeled ad groups, you’re providing room for more keywords. An ad group may start with just a couple or three keywords, but as you learn your visitors and see traffic patterns, it may be necessary to refine your ad groups by adding keywords.
(g) Create separate landing pages per ad group
Visitors shouldn’t have to search your landing page up and down for what they need. If it’s yellow apples they want, preferably the entire page is about yellow apples. Only have two yellow apples to sell? Feel like you should combine yellow, red, green, and brown on one page?
Resist the urge. This is a great chance for you to fill out the yellow apple landing pages with content. Yes, content. Articles, news feeds, photos, commentary, opinions—all incisive and insightful and all about yellow apples. Do that and you’ve given your visitors everything they want.
(h) Beware direct affiliate linking
One interesting theory is that Google AdWords hates affiliates. It loves vendors who sell their own products; hates their affiliates. Not only that, but the Google algorithm can now detect affiliate links embedded in web pages and, in fact, is actively doing its best to rid the entire Internet of all affiliate marketing.
Also we saw Elvis at the Wal-Mart yesterday.
Like other nut cake theories it plays off of advertisers’ fears of losing their own livelihood. What Google has a problem with, more likely, are advertising practices often seen in conjunction with some of the more aggressive affiliate marketers out there. Affiliate marketing, after all, is nothing more than commissioned selling for the electronic age. Bad affiliate practices include those direct affiliate links in the destination space that we mentioned earlier. And problems with keyword relevance. And problems with I-framing your pages. Just follow this guide and you’ll be good to go.
(i) Link only to quality, relevant landing pages
Are you sending your ad traffic to “landing page-y” landing pages? Don’t pretend you don’t know what we mean. Those are the super-aggressive, click-here-now-or-die landing pages with little content, zero external links, but lots of money links.
Get back to your roots. Wipe the idea of “landing page” from your mind just for awhile. How about creating web pages that promote the chosen keyword in a natural, unobtrusive fashion; that have great content; that display subdued calls to action. All of this on the theory that your visitors are smart people, and if they’re interested in whatever you’re selling, they’ll click on it, thank you very much.
(j) Are you taking advantage of all matching types, including negative?
Using broad, exact, and phrase keywords, and negative keywords do not directly influence Quality Score. But the use—or misuse and non-use, we should say—of these matching types, particularly negative, greatly influences your CTR. And CTR is a major component of Quality Score.
Section 2.09: Six Misconceptions about Google AdWords Quality Score
(a) There is Only One Type of Quality Score
Search Network Quality Score is different from Content Network Quality Score. Also there are different Quality Scores for setting minimum bids and ranking ads For the Content Network, Quality Score and the maximum cost-per-click determine the ad rank on content pages. For search, Quality Score, along with maximum CPC, determines ad rank and determines promotion to top of page.
(b) Changing Match Types Alters Quality Score
Different match types help you target your audience but do nothing to improve Quality Score or decrease cost. For example, switching from a broad match keyword to an exact match keyword doesn’t increase your Quality Score, in and of itself. But, the fact that you’ll probably generate a higher CTR with an exact match keyword does.
(c) Higher Positions Benefit Your Quality Score
Quality Score is adjusted to compensate for ad position differences. The thinking is that higher positions naturally generate a higher CTR than lower positions. So, Google compensates for this by adjusting their formula to break up the self-reinforcing nature of those higher positions.
(d) High CTR Means High Quality Score
Your ad’s performance on Google.com determines Quality Score. You can have a high CTR but still have a low Quality Score because your CTR on Google.com is low. The kicker is that Google doesn’t separate your overall CTR from your Google.com CTR. Sorry, chief.
(e) Optimizing Your Account Deletes Your History
All aspects of your history are permanent. There’s no way for Google to know officially whether you’re optimizing your account, so they necessarily can’t delete your history as a result. They do, however, seem to look at your most recent history, which rewards those advertisers for constantly tweaking and improving their accounts and relevancy.
(f) Quality Score Suffers When Ads or Keywords Are Paused
No. Pausing an ad does not affect Quality Score, since Quality Score is based on how well your keyword and ad text perform. If your keywords and ad text are not doing anything, there is not Quality Score to accrue.
(g) Content Quality Score Affects Search Quality Score, and Vice-Versa
No. These Quality Scores are separate and do not affect each other. The two media are so different that it would almost be impossible for Google to have them affect each other.
These common misperceptions about Google AdWords are adapted from an AdWords presentation dated July 2007 and from an Inside AdWords blog post dated November 30, 2006.
Section 2.10: Your Quality Score Has Tanked: An Emergency Guide
The first indication that your Quality Score has hit rock-bottom often comes not from AdWords but from outside sources. You check your conversions and.don’t see any. Or you read a blog post about a new, earth-shaking AdWords update that has affected thousands of advertisers and.you just know you’re one of them. Before panicking, do this:
(a) Check Your Keyword Quality Score
The most obvious place to look, of course, is the Quality Score column for your keyword Quality Score. This is the only place that Google specifically tells you how you’re doing, so it should be the first place you check. Have long-standing Greats suddenly become Poors? If it’s just a few keywords, wait a few hours and check again. If it’s across the board, go to the next step.
If conversions are flat and ad costs high, one common theme is advertisers accidentally bidding high on content. Because content is a default setting when you are bidding on search, you may set up a killer campaign and exit without remembering to set a different bid for content—or just turning it off completely. Plus, Google is constantly adding new publishers to their Content Network and an influx of new ones may have hurt your overall stats.
Perhaps you’ve been less than diligent about reading the AdWords blog? Sometimes Google doesn’t always announce changes with skywriting, but their other blog posts will often give a hint of changes to come. Don’t just look at today’s post, but flip back through the archives a few weeks.
(c) Contact Your AdWords Representative
Yes, be prepared for your daily shot of Googlese from your AdWords rep. Especially in the face of back-to-back calls from advertisers, the AdWords rep may hide behind the corporate veil even more than usual. But if you press, you may get some news.
(d) News on the Forums and Blogs
If this is an issue that’s affecting advertisers other than yourself, the DigitalPoint AdWords forum will already have a thread started about it—complete with posters vowing they’ll never do business with Google again. Major blogs like Search Engine Roundtable or Search Engine Land will probably have some news on it as well.
Start All Over Again? Playing Account Roulette.
Some advertisers, believing their decimated campaigns are irretrievable and that landing page quality is to blame, decide to take desperate measures. This translates into folding the entire account and starting it up again under a different account. Sort of like the witness protection program for AdWords.
It’s an attractive idea, but let’s look at what this entails:
1. Registering a new domain.
2. Copying all of your materials to this new domain.
3. Making whatever changes you believe were at fault in the first place.
4. Blocking the spiders from accessing the first site, if anything still exists, in order to avoid duplicate content problems.
5. Setting up your new AdWords account under this new domain—and also tweaking it here and there to make it look different.
There are several problems with this. First, it’s a long, difficult process to take down the tents and start all over again. If you have been working this AdWords campaign for quite some time, there are innumerable nuances associated with it that would take months to recreate. Second, you would be destroying a site that mostly likely has strong organic traffic by this time. Don’t you just love those sweet “free” conversions that don’t come through AdWords? Third, it’s not even certain that this method works.
Even those advertisers who keep the same domain but open a new account with the exact same keywords and structure may be hurting themselves by starting from scratch. The thinking is that the Quality Score is so bad that starting from scratch is better than digging yourself out of a hole. But, it takes a long time to accrue history. Some history—even bad—can be better than none. One Google rep commented, “You’d be surprised at how much history helps” when asked about whether to fix what’s broken or start over. Again, this is more Googlese but here’s something that’s not. The time that it takes to start over usually outweighs the benefits of a fresh Quality Score anyway. Our advice: renovate first.
Some rogue advertisers even side-step Google’s “one advertiser, one account” rule by setting up shell corporations solely for the purpose of maintaining multiple AdWords accounts. While technically this is allowed, this thwarts the true intent of Google’s rule.
Put it this way, anyone who advocates doing this—ask them if they have done this. Nine times out of ten they’ll say, “Well, no, but I heard about it somewhere.” Instead, work within the system. AdWords is malleable. It won’t break. There is room for error, creation, and change. Discussing this with your AdWords rep won’t get you sent to the Principal’s office in Mountain View.
(vii) Google AdWords Help Center
Google AdWords is considered by many to be the best pay per click advertising system on Earth. Not surprising, their help section is one of the best around.
http://adwords.google.com/support/
(viii) Google AdWords Blog
Inside AdWords is the official house organ of Google AdWords. Though you may not always get the “inside story” from the AdWords Blog, the information that you do get is so valuable.
(ix) Google AdWords Learning Center
Invaluable source for learning Google AdWords from the ground up; not to be confused with the Help Center. The Learning Center offers a vast quantity of both video and text lessons in an easy-to-understand format that will have you up and running quickly.
http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/
(x) DigitalPoint AdWords Forum
Forum chatter ranges from dumb-headedly wrong to amazingly prescient. The DigitalPoint AdWords forum, the busiest of all AdWords forums, represents both ends of the spectrum. If there is an update or algo change to AdWords, chances are you will first hear about it here. If there is a nutty idea about how you can get Google AdWords ads for free, chances are you will hear it here.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/ (click on Google AdWords)
(xi) Webmaster World
Another AdWords forum, not quite as lively as DigitalPoint. However, Webmaster World offers a wide range of other items such as news and commentaries which DigitalPoint does not.
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adwords/
(xii) Search Engine Watch
AdWords forum, discussion, and news, and well as insightful commentaries on general Google topics.
http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/forumdisplay.php?f=31
(xiii) eWhisper
A PPC blog by advertising maven Brad Geddes.
(xiv) PPC Discussions
Personal PPC-related blog by Chicago-based Jeremy Mayes.
http://www.ppcdiscussions.com/
(xv) Clear Saleing
A blog by marketing company ClearSaleing—not updated frequently but when it is updated, the posts are fairly lengthy and thorough.
http://www.clearsaleing.com/blog/
(xvi) PPC Blog
For something other than the officially sanctioned view, see PPC Blog: A Cynical Look at Pay Per Click.
(xvii) PPC Hero
PPC Hero is a blog dedicated to educating its readers on everything related to PPC. But with a heroic flair.
