This is a guest post by Chris Thunder, who just launched a platform that helps Adwords advertisers improve their Quality Scores for cheaper Google Adwords traffic. Check it out at Tenscores.com. Follow him ontwitter and see if Tenscores.com can be useful to you.
With the amount of work required for building and managing PPC campaigns, it's easy to forget the importance of optimized targeting.
If I ask you what you need to do in order to increase your ads’ click-through-rates (CTR) for higher quality scores, your immediate answer might be: write a better ad.
And you’d be right.
But it’s not the only way and too often advertisers rely on ad spit-testing when trying to achieve a higher CTR.
If you’ve read a little about quality score (QS), you know that the biggest factor that influences it is CTR. When we plan about increasing CTR, new ads in more focused ad groups come to mind, sometimes we even remember to include and keep expanding a good list of negative keywords (although we know that that has no direct impact on QS).
What we often forget is that ads have varying performances depending on the hour of the day or the geographical region in which they are displayed. Two things that Google takes into account when calculating quality score but are rarely talked about.
If you’ve hit a brick wall and can’t improve your CTR no matter how hard you try, these are the 2 targeting settings that might get you the results you want.
Day-Part Targeting
Ad performance can vary greatly depending on the hour of the day. Although the data above has not reached statistical significance, it may suggest 9pm (21h00) to be bad hour.
You may be getting lots of impressions at 2 in the morning but very little clicks and conversions without even knowing it. If that’s the case, it would be very beneficial to prevent your ads from showing at those times of the day.
To find out how your ads are performing by the hour of the day:
Choose a campaign in your adwords account.
Click on the “dimensions” tab (or make the dimensions tab viewable in the sub menu).
Click the “view” sub-menu and select “hour of day”.
You should now be able to see at what times of the day your ad group is under performing.
The next thing to do is to exclude your ads from showing at those times by changing your campaigns settings: Advanced Settings > Ad Scheduling. Make sure your data has reached statistical significance.
When you do that, the average CTR recorded for your keywords will start to increase and your quality scores will slowly rise.
Geo-Targeting
Ad performance may also vary by specific geographical regions. Notice the difference between Texas and Ohio.
If you’re like most advertisers, your adwords campaigns are probably set to show on the whole territory of your chosen country right now (or even many countries at once). If you run a geographic report in adwords, you will find that your ads perform better in some specific regions than others.
You need to find the regions where your ads perform really poorly and exclude your ads from showing there.
To find out how your ads are performing by specific regions in the country you’re targeting:
Choose a campaign or an ad group in your adwords account.
Go to the “dimensions” tab once again.
Click on the “view” sub-menu and select “Geographic”.
Now you can see the specific regions where you might be receiving lots of impressions but low clicks and conversions compared to others.
Exclude those areas in your campaigns settings: Under Locations and Languages>Locations click edit.
A window will pop up, look for the Exclude areas within selected locations link at the bottom of that window and exclude the areas that are poorly performing for you.
If you don’t want to completely exclude those areas, you might consider creating a separate campaign for them.
When you do that, your average CTR will also slowly rise since it won’t be affected by low performing locations and it will result in better scores.
Those are two quick but very rewarding actions that you can take right now to achieve higher CTR’s and better scores.
In case you’re wondering how effective these two little techniques can be, here’s what Brad confided to me in email conversation (don’t tell him that I told you):
“I can’t agree more with your two points – I do it all the time – in fact I have an account that just by changing the geo settings and splitting up the ads by their geo CTRs, the accounts CTR almost doubled.” ~ Brad Geddes
If you want to track how these actions affect your keyword’s quality scores and your first page minimum bids, I’d like to invite to you to try our Quality Score tracking tool… sign up here and I’ll send you a quick email the next time we open doors.
Warning
Before excluding your ads from showing at a certain time of day, make sure you have enough data to make the right decision. Use splittester.com to see if your data has reached statistical significance.
DO NOT use CTR as your only measure of performance. Google uses CTR to increase or lower your scores and as a result, increase or lower your CPCs… however, it is not a measure of your profitability. Learn about Profit Per Impression and use it as the final verdict.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily bgTheory. If you would like to write for Certified Knowledge, please let us know.
This is a guest post by Chris Thunder who pretends to know a thing or two about SEM. He’s a quality score freak, and if you want charts like the ones presented in this post for your own data, it’s easy to get them with TenScores: The Quality Score Tool.
From 10 to 8, it’s in fabulous health…
At 7, it is still in great shape…
6, 5, 4 are signs that it’s getting weak…
At 3 or 2 it is seriously sick…
At a 1/10 quality score, your keyword is dead.
A craftsman uses his hands to do the labour and without them he cannot make a living. He trains them, makes them stronger and hones his skill… but if he ever gets a heart attack those hands are useless.
The same is true in Adwords.
Your landing pages and products make you money, you can tweak things here and there, optimize continuously but if your quality scores drop low enough… all advertising become meaningless. You’ve just had a heart attack.
Quality score is the heart beat of every Adwords account. It defines how much search share a keyword’s ad receives and how expensive or cheap the advertiser pays for it. Although it is not the metric that makes you money, it is the one that will stop anything from happening if it goes down low enough.
How Low Quality Score Kills Your Advertising
Unprofitable Advertising Costs
The differences in costs between one score level to the other can double, triple, quadruple and even be ten times higher at the lower end of the scale.
Here’s a graph that shows the average first page minimum bid for keywords at each quality score in one of our adwords accounts:
Average first page minimum bid at each quality score. Plotted by Tenscores.com
Notice how first page bids double from 7 to 6, then from 5 to 4 and how they quadruple from 3 to 2.
Surprising? Not really.
If you’re a math geek too, you surely have already reverse engineered the formula for first page minimum bid and you know that it is minBid = minAdRank / QS which is a simple rational function thus the shape of the resulting curve.
And… the only purpose of that last sentence was to make me sound clever 🙂
Forgive me.
Here’s the graph that says it all better than any mathematical gibberish. It shows the average cost-per-click (CPC) at each quality score for the account:
Average CPC at each quality score. Plotted by Tenscores.com
Notice how the price doubles from a 10/10 quality score to a 7/10. And 7 is considered to be a great score to have. Notice the sudden bump between 5 to 4.
Could that mean the difference between profit and loss? Absolutely.
Now imagine two advertisers in this same market advertising on the same keyword. One has a 10/10 and the other has 4/10. The chart above tells us that the advertiser with a 4 could be paying 10 times more that his competitor.
Now imagine that the advertiser with a 4/10 is… well, you. Yes, right now you might be paying 10 times more than you should on those keywords you’ve neglected to optimize.
Little To No Traffic To Your Website
You can set up ads in 5 minutes and reach 1 million users with Adwords, right?!
Well, it’s not that easy… and quality score will shatter your dreams of traffic orgies in an instant.
Let’s talk about Impression Share (IS).
Impressions Share is the percent of traffic that Google is willing to send you for a given campaign versus the amount of traffic that is actually available for that campaign. (You can view the impression share of all your campaigns by customizing the columns in your adwords account at the campaign level)
Impression share depends on two things: Ad Rank and Budget.
If you have a big budget to spend, obviously Google won’t really stop you from throwing money at them and if you want more Impression Share, just pay more.
Increasing your Ad Rank, however, is the smarter way to go. Ad Rank – a (secret) number Google uses to rank ads in sponsored search results – influences Impression Share and itself is greatly influenced by quality score. It’s formula is AdRank = MaxCPC x QS.
The higher your quality scores, the higher your Ad Rank, and the more impressions Google is willing to send your way. The lower your quality scores, the lower your Ad Rank, the less generous Google is with traffic.
Every time your keywords’ scores drop, traffic is chocked, the pipeline gets thinner until ultimately the flow is completely clogged.
I don’t know about you, but I hate paying more than I should and I despise getting less than I deserve. And that’s why I don’t ever settle for low scores — ever.
How To Increase Low Quality Scores
It all boils down to relevance.
Yes, we all know that click-through-rate (CTR) is the main factor that influences quality score. But what is behind a great CTR? It is having the most relevant ad shown to Mr Searcher. CTR is Google’s best measure of relevance. The importance of understanding relevance beyond what Google tells you is really crucial. The relevance I’m referring to has NOTHING to do with having the same keyword appear in the ad, the ad group or the landing page.
It is about having a deep understanding of who the searcher behind the keyword is. Understanding what led him to typing those words in Google. Understanding his emotions, his frustrations and the short or long series of events that caused him to turn to a search engine for a solution.
It’s about understanding what relevance means to him, NOT what it means to you.
Only when you have that kind of understanding can you write an ad that instantly resonates with him and lift your click-through-rates.
I’ll give you an example.
Once upon a time, in a distant land, an affiliate marketer decided to try the dating niche. One of the products he wanted to sell was a book about how to be better in bed – more specifically, the book claimed to have “500 Love Making Secrets”.
After trying out a few ads, he found one that worked pretty well in terms of click-through-rates, it said:
2.04% CTR
The last recorded click ratio was 2.04%, the average cost-per-click was $0.21. Not too bad, wasn’t it? The quality score was 7/10 and it stayed at 7 for a very long time.
But profits weren’t that good.
He had no control over the website he was sending traffic to so landing page split-testing for better conversion rates was not an immediate solution.
The answer came from the following ad:
3.84% CTR
Click-through-rate jumped to 3.84%, quality score swelled up to 10/10 and the cost-per-click was cut in half: $0.10.
Profits got better and he lived happily ever after.
The successful ad wasn’t the result of looking at the website and trying to think up ways to write a better ad. It wasn’t born by trying out tricks like putting keywords in the title, adding a question mark or putting capital letters in the display url.
It was born after intensive research on the person behind the keyword.
I pictured myself being a man looking for love making tips. “What images would be flowing in my head, what do I secretly want, what experiences led me to this search and what is the ultimate result that I’m looking for?”, I asked myself.
Then I typed the words in Google. I took a look at all the websites that were returned, and I asked myself why those results would be relevant and why some wouldn’t be. I looked into blog comments and forum threads to read what people on the same quest were saying about it and how they were expressing themselves.
What I realized is that no man really wants to learn 500 love making secrets just for the sake of it. Instead, they want their partner to be the happiest woman alive and they want themselves to be the source of fulfillment a woman craves for. (And they want to witness her inner animal – grrrrrr!).
This exercise can be done for any type of website, any type of offer, any type of product. Whatever it is you are selling, figuring out the deepest needs buried in the searchers mind will give you the competitive advantage you need to dominate your market.
It will help you discover the features and benefits you need to put forward about your offer to align it with what searchers are looking for, resulting in above than average click-troughs and conversion rates.
6 Steps To Getting Into The Searcher’s Mind And Writing The Perfect Ad
Step 1 – Possess their bodies
Choose a specific keyword in your list and sit in front your computer. Close your eyes and put yourself in the shoes of your prospect. Imagine what happened to you just before you decided to type that keyword into Google. Imagine what you felt, the urgency of the matter or frustrations tied to it. Imagine what the best solution to your problem would be. It could be information about something, it could be a better price for the product, a better feature…
Step 2 – See it like they see it
Type your chosen keyword in Google and look at the natural search results. Glance over the 10 results and find the general theme of the results. Are they mostly commercial in nature or are they informative. What are the words used and how, as a searcher, do you feel when looking at them. What are the ones that grab your attention?
There’s a reason why google is the number search engine, one of those reason is that they do a great job at showing searchers what they want. Researching the natural search results helps you understand better what is happening in the mind of a searcher. Google has already done half the job for you.
Step 3 – Experience what they experience
Visit each of the websites returned and try to understand why the first website is number 1, why the second is number 2 and so on. Take a look at what information is offered and understand how each is relevant to your quest – and if it isn’t, find out why it isn’t. Start thinking of ways each website could give you, as a searcher, the solution you desire in a better way.
Step 4 – Eavesdrop on their conversations
Find blogs or forum related to you keyword. Read what people are saying about it. Learn how they express themselves, how they talk about the subject. Figure out what they want, what questions aren’t answered and what solution would make their live easier. Amazon reviews of a similar product as yours is a great place to start.
Step 5 – Spy on your competitors (quietly)
Now look at the sponsored results. You could use a spying tool that tells you how long each ad has been showing for your particular keyword. This will tell you – just like the natural search result – what searchers are really looking for. Your competitors have done the other half of the work for you so you should piggy back on their efforts and do a better job than them.
Step 6 – Hit ’em!
Write 2 or 3 ads to test with what you’ve discovered. It should now be clear to you what type of message resonates most with your prospect. If you’ve taken notes during your research phase in the previous 5 steps, that will help.
When you have done this exercise, you will know who is behind your keywords and what they are looking for. You’ll be able to segment your ad groups according to your ads and searchers desires. You’ll be able to fine tune your campaign settings to target the right person for the message you’ve written.
Your ads will be sharper, Google will be happy and your wallet will feel it.
Of course there’s more to it and there are other little ways to tweak ads for higher CTR. But there’s nothing I have found that improves ad efficiency better than deeply understanding who you are marketing to.
How To Keep High Quality Scores
Understand That QS Varies — A Lot!
The search market place is constantly changing. Advertisers come and go, competitors rise and fall. So do quality scores:
Adwords quality score tracker
The graph above shows the quality score evolution of one of our keyword over a period of 23 days. The blue line represents quality scores progress and the green line represents first page minimum bids evolution, both having their numerical values displayed in the table below the chart.
Notice how QS has been jumping from 4 to to 7 to 10 and back to 4.
There are many reasons you may wake up one day and find that costs have doubled for your main keywords due to a decrease in quality scores.
Knowing the main causes of quality score rise and fall will help you react fast when it happens.
Here’s what to watch for:
Unsuccessful ad split-tests
When testing new ads, bad ads can have nefarious influence on your keyword’s average CTR. Your quality score will drop even when one of your ad is performing very well. That’s why it is sometimes a good idea to have one test ad being tested against 3 copies of the successful ad in one ad group. This ensures that your average CTR doesn’t drop too much due a bad test.
The competition beating you
The competition for your keywords may suddenly start performing better. Google compares your CTR to the average CTR being achieved in your market. You get rewarded for performing better than your competitors, you get punished for under performing. If your competitors suddenly start showing more relevant ads to your poll of prospects, and if that goes on for a while, your quality score will drop since you’re no longer on top of performance. Keep an eye on what others are doing, and try their ideas on your ads.
Keywords changing meaning
You keywords may change meaning. It’s not uncommon. In his AdWords book, Brad gives an example with the word “Bleach” which shows results for a cartoon. Before that cartoon existed, you would have probably found results for the detergent. There was also a time when typing the words “make the cut” in google would show results of movies and amazon books. Today it mostly shows results for a scrap booking software that was created about a year ago. This all means that your keywords may suddenly start attracting searchers that have no interest in what you’re offering due to a change in keyword meaning. Keep a special eye on what your broad and phrase match keywords are triggering, make sure they stay relevant to your ads.
Uncrawlable landing pages
Forgotten to renew your domain name? Or did you remember to check that the new landing page was actually uploaded correctly? Or maybe you work in a large organization in which different people work on the same set of pages. Working on a website can sometimes lead to errors not caught in time. When spiders come for a visit and find nothing, you get slapped with 1/10 quality score — a heart attack. Make sure your landing pages are always available and crawlable.
The fact is: quality score varies and it can vary a lot. Those variations may mean the difference between good ROI and great ROI. They may mean the difference between profits and losses. So whenever you think you don’t need to keep an eye on quality scores, you’re doing a disservice to your wallet (and making Google richer).
Track Your Quality Scores Changes And Optimize When Necessary
You went on vacation and left your ads unmanaged. “They’ve been quite stable and since revenue is steady there’s no risk”, you tell yourself. After 2 weeks in Hawaii, you come to find out that your top keywords have stopped generating traffic or that their costs have become unprofitable…
Oops, quality score did it again!
Having a system in place for tracking your daily scores and being notified of changes will prevent drops from sneaking up on you with serious consequences.
That’s one of the reasons why we developed TenScores, which is a web platform that automatically tracks quality score changes of an entire adwords account. (It is still in beta and we open doors infrequently, please sign up here to be notified next time we’re open).
A free way to do it is with Excel sheets. I really like this little quick guide Jacqueline Dooley put together, in it she explains how her excel sheet shows her at a glance where she’s lost quality score points. If I didn’t have TenScores, I would personally use her method weekly – instead of monthly like she advises – on all my main keywords until they are all above 7.
How To Start With High Quality Scores In The First Place
Start With Your Brand’s Keywords
People who are searching for your brand’s name, your domain name or product name aren’t shopping around, they want you and they know it. The CTR you achieve from those keywords sets a foundation for your accounts history that influences the scores you receive for other keywords.
Build On Your Typical Visitor’s Profile
Start in first gear and shift gradually.
Before you go in and load millions of keywords and ads in your account, start small and test the waters with a few ad groups. Although the searcher behind every keyword is different, people in your market place share common frustrations or needs that need to be met. Use the tips mentioned above to figure out the kind of message that resonates most with prospects in your market.
Once you have found the kind of message that generates above average CTR, it’s ok to scale and use the same message on millions of keywords if they fall under the same kind of market and same demographics.
A common mistake that many new advertisers make is to start in 5th gear with too many keywords without having a deep understanding of what their market responds to. They end up having poor performance in a short amount of time, quality scores drop and the account is almost doomed to failure. Don’t make that mistake.
I hope this helps you get closer to achieving your goals, if you have a friend who would benefit from reading this page, email it, tweet it or facebook it to hook’em up (it’s also a great way to give back to CK for the great content you receive).
My rule (and like all rules there are exceptions) is that if your quality score is 6 or below; stop raising bids and start working on quality score.
However, I keep receiving the question: Outside of cost and position; why is quality score so important?
Here’s the answer.
First, take a look at this list of what quality score actually affects in your account:
If your ad is eligible to be shown in the auction
What position your ad will be displayed on the search page
The price you pay for the click
If products extensions will be displayed with your ad
If sitelinks will be displayed with your ad
If location extensions will be displayed with your ad
If your ad is eligible to be displayed in the top spot above the natural results
If dynamic keyword insertion will work
Not working on quality score can put a keyword into a negative spiral.
Ad rank (where your ad is displayed in the search results) is a simple formula: ad rank = QS X Max CPC.
Ads are shown in descending order of ad rank (the highest ad rank is position 1, the second highest ad rank is position 2, etc)
Let’s say your paying $2 per click with a quality score of 4. This means your ad rank is 8.
Now let’s say that your competition is bidding $1 with a quality score of 7. This means their ad rank is a 7.
At this point in time your ad appears higher in the search results.
However, with a 4 quality score your ad does not show DKI, it does not show product extension ads, in fact the ad displayed on the SERP is identical to what you see inside your account as none of the ad ‘add-ons’ will be displayed with your ad.
Your competition’s ad, with a 7 quality score, is showing extensions (this could be product or location extensions) and looks nicer on the SERP than your ad. So what happens? Your CTR goes down and theirs goes up.
This causes your quality score to drop even more.
And their quality score to rise.
Over time, their ad starts showing above your ad even through their bid is half of yours.
Then the next advertiser below you has a 7 quality score and their ad is showing product extensions….
The cycle repeats itself until your ad just stops showing because of low quality score reasons.
Spending a little time working with quality score each week might not always result in increasing all of your quality scores; but it will help keep you from falling into a downward spiral.
If you need quality score help; our new training site will have tutorials on quality score as well as a tool where you can quickly see where inside your account you should spend your time optimizing your quality scores.
I made a comment on Twitter that stirred up some confusion; however, as tweets are limited to 140 characters; it seemed easiest to write out the explanation as a blog post and then let people read the rationale in its entirety.
The common assumption is that the CTR used in the search quality score algo is based upon the search query matching your exact matched keywords. Sometimes this is stated as ‘the search query exactly matches your keywords’. That statement is actually true, but sometimes confusing as Google has an exact match type; and the match type itself does not play a factor into determining quality score.
What if you do not have exact match keywords? How are those keywords assigned a quality score? You do not have to have exact match versions of broad matched words. Please note, this is not a debate about what is best practice, but about what is possible – there’s a difference.
The truth is that the CTR that determines your keyword’s quality score is based upon the user’s search query precisely matching the keyword in your ad group, regardless of the match type you use.
For instance, if you have the keyword ‘Google AdWords’ broad matched, then your ad could show for:
Google ad words
Google adwords help
Google adwords alternative
my adwords ad is not running on Google
Google AdWords
etc…
In this case, only the CTR of number 5, Google AdWords, would be used to calculate your quality score.
This same exercise can be applied to phrase and exact match.
This is also why if you have the same keyword as an exact, phrase, and broad match in the same ad group, they will have the same quality score. As quality score uses precise match regardless of match type, all of those keywords are assigned CTR information under the same conditions.
<Please note this next section is for advanced PPC marketers and could require paragraphs of explanation. It might not make sense to many of you – and if it doesn’t – that’s OK>
There is a difference between all three match types showing the same quality score and being displayed in the same positions.
For instance, one of the quality score factors is, “Relevance of keyword and ad to search query”. This factor is calculated after dynamic insertion is applied to an ad copy. Therefore, if for some reason a broad matched variation was doing fantastic with DKI, yet the exact match was doing average with that ad, it might appear that the broad matched word had a higher CTR than the exact match, which might result in a higher average position. Yet since that broad matched variation is not a keyword in your account, your broad matched word would still maintain the same quality score as the exact matched word that has a lower average position. This example is a rare case; however, it could happen.
<End advanced section – next section for everyone>
I hope that helps explain the confusion. If not, please add a comment and I’ll do a long blog post using the search query report and actual numbers to showcase how match types and quality score interact with the actual search query.
In the old days, before October 08 when Google changed QS to be real time, using dynamic keyword insertion could help your QS because the ad received a higher CTR; not because the keyword was suddenly in the ad.
This is no longer true. DKI can affect your actual QS (what is calculated when the ad is being shown).
As Google is evaluating the ad copy and keyword to the search query in real time, they are using the actual ad (after DKI) being seen by the searcher to determine the QS.
each keyword’s Quality Score is determined after the keyword is triggered and inserted into the ad seen by the user. This is true of any AdWords text ad, where the ad and keyword are included in the Quality Score evaluation. Each ad variation and keyword combination will undergo its own Quality Score evaluation, and accrue its own individual performance history within your account.
Recently, I posted about a video from Google Chief Economist, Hal Varian which explained the ad auction process.
Many were surprised to see the sizes of the pies he used for the quality score factors.
Since the screenshot is pulled from the YouTube video, and difficult to read; here’s a breakdown of the three pieces from largest to smallest:
CTR
Relevance
Landing Page
In general, those factors are also rolled up to three main Google points; there are actually sub points under those items. For example, CTR also uses display URL CTR in determining the entire CTR pie piece.
Landing page looks like a small piece; however, this is what I find about landing pages:
A bad landing page will hurt you more than a good landing page will help.
For instance, in the old days of minimum bids, the higher your minimum bid the more likely it was to be the landing page at fault, and at a $10 minimum bid – it was almost always the landing page.
This is still true. A non-relevant landing page will hurt your account more than just about any other factor. It’s easier to work with a bad CTR than a bad landing page. While the total percentage allocated to landing page may look small, there is a much more severe penalty for a bad landing page than a lower than average CTR.
Going from a good to a great landing page helps very little.
I spoke with the Munich agency team a few weeks ago in Germany at an AdWords seminar and one statement they were willing to make was: If the system says your page is relevant, you can’t do any better. I have found this to be a fairly true statement. If you click on the magnifying glass icon next to your keyword and AdWords says your page is relevant – don’t worry about the small changes. Worry about the page as it relates to conversions.
On a side note, if you’re in Germany you have a fantastic team to work with. Take advantage of the support and resources that they offer. I was thoroughly impressed with that AdWords team.
Conclusion
Don’t spend hours of time tweaking your page for a quality score boost – it’s not worth your time. If you want to increase quality score, and your page is already relevant, then first start with testing ad copies. The changes you make to the landing page should be to increase conversion rate.
When you first add a new keyword to your account, your keyword is given a quality score. This isn’t actually your keyword’s (or landing pages) quality score.
The initial quality score is a default quality score for everyone who has used this word before you. That’s an important benchmark as you can compare your quality score to your overall competition.
After you add several keywords, run a keyword report and save the quality score info for those new keywords.
After those new keywords have accrued enough data for Google to make a statically significant decision about what your actual quality score is (which could be a day to a few weeks depending on how many impressions, clicks, and when Google crawls your landing page) then your keywords are updated with your actual quality score.
Run another keyword report on your actual quality score.
Compare this data to the original quality score.
If yours is higher, fantastic, you’re above average. That doesn’t mean you should be satisfied – but you should note you’re in a good starting place.
If yours is lower, then you will end up paying more than average for the same ad position. If this keyword has a lot of traffic; stop raising bids and work on improving your quality score.
If your quality score drops at a later date, then use this checklist to investigate the reasons why it dropped.
Your ad rank is Max CPC times Quality Score. It’s just as important to optimize your quality score as it is to raise your bids. However, what’s very useful is to know your quality score compared to your competition – which is data that’s not too difficult to obtain.
This might be one of the biggest rumors of quality score – Google uses conversion rates to calculate quality score.
Let’s put the rumor to rest: Your conversion rate does not affect your quality score.
If we were to dissect why, it comes down to a few factors:
1. Conversions are defined by your company. You can define them in any way you desire. Google doesn’t know your business well enough to understand what is a good and bad conversion rate.
2. It would be easy to game. If conversion rate affected quality score, wouldn’t we all just make a page view a conversion and have 100% conversion rates?
3. Not all advertisers are using Google’s conversion tracker; therefore, Google wouldn’t have the data on all all advertisers to implement conversion with quality score effects. (You should use both Google analytics and AdWords conversion tracking)
4. Google offers AdWords conversion tracker as a free tool to help you make better marketing decisions. They wouldn’t want to scare you away from a tool that helps you make better decisions (and thus find success in advertising leading you to continue to spend money).
Feel free to use the AdWords conversion tracker. It will help your business succeed while not having any negative effects on your AdWords account.
It’s now easy to sort by quality score within the editor to see where you should stop making bid changes and do some quality score optimization work.
I also like the fact you can see a 1-10 number for advertiser competition within the search-based keywords research tool in the editor.
Caution before updating
At present, the only way to see minimum bid information is the an older version of the editor. The reason that’s useful is that the higher the minimum bid (especially over $1) the more likely the landing page was at fault. You might want to export your account into an excel file so that you can see cases where you might want to update your landing page over work on ad copy to keyword to landing page relevancy work.
Your landing page quality affects your AdWords quality score. and quality score has a large impact on the success of an AdWords account. So, it’s important to separate the fact from the fiction about what affects landing page quality score, and to understand what you can do to improve your landing page.
Myth 1: My keyword has to be on the landing page
False. The search engines understand semantic indexing. If a page is about cell phones, it probably has the words: Bluetooth, 3G, mobile or cell, phone, etc on the landing page. If your keyword was ‘mobile phone’ and you sent traffic to your page about ‘cell phones’ that did not mention the word mobile on it, your quality score should not suffer.
It can be a good practice from a consumer’s standpoint to use their lexicon (mobile or cell); however, it is not an absolute must. The closer related your landing page’s theme is to your keyword, the better your landing page quality score will be. However, it is not necessary to use the keyword on the landing page from the quality score perspective.
Myth 2: Adding a privacy policy will increase my quality score
It depends. If your site doe not collect any personal information, then you do not need a privacy policy (from Google’s perspective, but your country may have different laws regarding TOS and privacy policies). However, if you collect personal information, such as an email address, phone number, or credit card, having a privacy policy will help your quality score.
One of the quality score guidelines is transparency. Your privacy policy may say that you will sell any information given to you to the highest bidder. However, the fact you put that into your Privacy Policy means you were transparent to the user on what would happen to their personal information.
Myth 3: My site is in Flash, so I can never have a good quality score
False. Google has made many improvements with regards to indexing flash. This does not mean they will index your site properly. An exercise you can try is to put your URL into the AdWords Keyword Tool< and have your page spidered. If the suggested keywords are similar to what you think the page is about, then you are generally in good shape. If there aren’t any results, or the suggested keywords are completely different than what you think the page is about, you may wish to try making your site more search-engine friendly using progressive enhancement technologies such as SIFR.
Myth 4: My page is all images. The new load time guidelines are lowering my quality score
False. Google only looks at how long it takes the page’s HTML to load in determining landing page load times. If your site is loading so slowly that you see a problem with load times in your AdWords account, you have larger issues with your site. Just loading a page’s HTML (not scripts, nor images) should be exceptionally quick. It should be noted, Google has said they may eventually incorporate all page elements into the load time for determining quality score. If this happens, you may need to optimize your images, scripts, and other called files.
Myth 5: Adding an ‘about us’ page will increase my quality score
While this is a good practice from a user standpoint, it is not an absolute must. As above, the actual AdWords guideline is to be transparent to the user. My testing has not shown that this will help quality score yet. However, it is a good practice as this could very easily be added to the landing page quality score formula and being transparent to users about your business is very much inline with Google’s goals.
Myth 6: Google hates affiliates
False. The question affiliates should ask themselves is: “Was the user’s search experience made better by visiting my page before going to the merchant’s page?”. If you review several services and show the benefits and features of each service so that a searcher can make a more informed decision – then you’ve helped the search process. If your page is just about a single product and every single link from that page just goes to the same merchant page, then you’ve not added to the search experience.
There are many exceptional affiliate sites that add to the search experience. Google does not hate affiliates. Google hates making the search process longer for the user.
Myth 7: Microsites and dedicated landing pages no longer work
False. While Google does wish a user to have choices, you can easily build a page that showcases a single product or service while still giving the user navigational choices. While microsites or one-page-wonder sites have taken some quality score hits over the past couple years, dedicated landing pages are still effective.
When designing your page, look for non-intrusive ways to add some navigational elements to the page. If you consider this from the user’s standpoint, the page you chose for them may not be the actual product they wished to see. More importantly, if a user wants to find out more about your company before committing to trusting you with personal information; do they have any options?
Myth 8: If my site doesn’t have a high Pagerank, I can’t get a good quality score
False. First, PageRank is stored at the page level and not the website level, but we’ll ignore that fact for the moment. Google has a completely different bot and algorithm for pagerank versus landing page quality score. While both ads-bot and Googlebot may share some data, the way the data is actually processed is separate and for completely different purposes. A brand new site can do well in PPC. A site that is banned from the organic SERPs can do well in PPC. A site banned from PPC can do well in the organic SERPs. Landing page quality and natural search rankings are completely unrelated to each other.
Myth 9: If I only have manufacturer descriptions, I will never have a good landing page quality score
Sometimes true. One of the quality signals Google looks for is unique content. If there are many sites using the exact same manufacturer description, the question to ask yourself is: Why should someone read this information on my site as opposed to the other many sites out there? If you can mix up the content with other information, offer buying guide decision help, or offer other unique content for a searcher – it will help your quality score. However, if you must use manufacturer descriptions, your landing page quality score may suffer some, so that just means you need to focus more on increasing the other factors that affect quality score.
Conclusion
It is important to note the landing page quality’s influence to your account. Landing page quality score is not used for all of the algorithms that determine your account’s visibility. You can view information about your landing page quality score within your AdWords account. Just click on the magnifying glass icon located next to a keyword within your account and you can see detailed information about your landing page.
While it is important to maintain a good landing page quality score for your AdWords quality score. It is much more crucial to ensure that when a consumer arrives at your landing page, you can turn them from a visitor into a conversion.
Learn Even More About Quality Score
Quality Score is so essential to a healthy AdWords account that you need to know how to work with it; and the steps to take to improve it. You can watch this free video on working with Quality Score or sign up for a 7 day free trial of Certified Knowledge where you will have access to the Quality Score Analyzer Tool, and video lessons on how to work with, and improve, your Quality Scores. Take a 7 Day Free Trial.
When you first add a new keyword to your account, your keyword is given a quality score. This isn’t actually your keyword’s (or landing pages) quality score.
