'Net Features : quality score

Quality Score: Advanced Questions (and Answers)

Administrator — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 20:00:00 GMT

If you’ve been advertising with Google AdWords for a little while, you probably have a handle on the basics of Quality Score: what it is, what it does, how it’s calculated, and how it affects your campaign performance and costs. If you don’t fully understand the fundamentals of Quality Score, there are plenty of beginner resources out there for you.

This is more of a FAQ (frequently asked questions) for intermediate or advanced AdWords users. You know how to set up and run a campaign, and you understand the importance of a high Quality Score. But it’s a complicated system, and you may still be struggling with some of the finer points.

Below you’ll find expert answers to seven common technical questions about Quality Score.

How does having the keyword in the display URL or destination URL affect Quality Score?

The only real impact this can have is on click-through rate (CTR), but CTR is a major factor in determining your Quality Score. There may be an incremental bump in your relevance, but the main impact is in whether it compels more searchers to click. Generally speaking, it often helps, but having the keyword in the display or destination URL has a significantly lower impact on CTR and Quality Score than headlines, calls to action, and benefit statements.

How useful is dynamic keyword insertion in improving Quality Score? Does appending a dynamic keyword to the URL help improve Quality Score?

Dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) is generally very helpful in raising CTR and, subsequently, Quality Score (again, there is no direct boost, but click-through rate is the biggest single Quality Score factor, and DKI can have a significant impact on CTR). Including dynamic keywords in the URL, as in the body text of the ad, can have a marginal impact on click-through rate.

Do keywords with zero impressions lower your Quality Score at the account level?

How can a keyword that does not receive impressions hurt your Quality Score? Google does use several gauges to determine not only how a keyword is performing, but also how it could potentially perform. This is where keywords with no impressions can negatively affect an account. If there is no new data to suggest to Google that a keyword could perform well, then it won’t give you the benefit of the doubt. Also, keywords with zero impressions tend to cause clutter and confusion—it's better to keep your ad groups small, tight-knit, and clean.

Is it best to pause keywords with low Quality Scores (3 and below) while you modify parameters to help bump up their Quality Score?

It’s important to think of the two different levels of Quality Score, the first being the account level and the second being the keyword level. So if you have a lot of keywords in the account that have Quality Scores of 7 and only a few with Quality Scores of 3, then the account overall has good performance, which means it will be easier to turn those low-scoring keywords around. However, if you have mostly keywords with 3’s, your overall account performance is poor, and these keywords will be more difficult to turn around. Pausing and activating keywords should really be based on performance.

What if you have a relevant keyword, good ad copy, a great landing page, but a Quality Score of 1?

There are four possibilities:

1. You don’t mention click-through rate, which is the most important part of QS. If everything seems great but you have low CTR, tweak your ad text to make your ad more compelling so that more people will click on it. Also, make sure you’re using negative keywords to filter out irrelevant clicks.

2. You may be suffering from poor history at some level, be it the ad group, campaign, account, potentially even your industry’s experience with the keyword.

3. Your keywords may not be as relevant as you think they are. Is your group all about “golf”? Or all about “golf club sets”?

4. It may be that Google is punishing you for your business tactics. Are you upfront about how and when you charge customers and use their personal information?

Why would I have a low Quality Score on my most highly converting keyword in the ad group?

Conversion rate is not a factor in determining Quality Score. Your conversion rate could be 100%, but if your CTR is very low, your Quality Score will be low as well.

How do long-tail keywords with next to zero impressions effect Quality Score on a campaign as a whole?

It depends on the terms and on the account. Google has two ways of dealing with low volume keywords:

• In Aggregate – They can look at a basket of keywords that are related and sum that score to figure out the performance of the keyword niche in question.

• Extrapolating from Head Terms – They can take a broader variation of a term and apply its performance to lower search volume terms to create a best guess at relevance.

Which option they use depends on the data in your account, so the advice is really to avoid adding these keywords, and in the event that you do, make sure you have a means for clustering and measuring the keywords in aggregate, and monitor account-wide Quality Scores closely.

About the Author: Ken Lyons is the Senior Online Acquisition Marketing Manager at WordStream, a provider of Internet Marketing Software, including a new line of Quality Score Management Tools designed to help paid search advertisers generate more qualified traffic at lower costs.

Google Instant Driving Up Online Ad Prices

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 20:15:00 GMT

Google unveiled Google Instant today and it has the community of Web professionals (particularly those involved in online advertising via Adwords) quite concerned. No doubt about it, Google Instant is a significant development in the user search experience. What we don’t yet know (at least not fully) is how it will change the online advertising landscape.

Google Instant is really a “search enhancement” which shows users results as they type. While it's a little early to determine the greater impact an instant search experience will have on consumers, we do know a little (or at least can make some assumptions) about what could effectively happen in the future as it relates to Adwords advertisers.

Understanding Google Instant
The most visible feature of Google Instant is the “as you type” dynamic search results. The query prediction and “scroll to search” feature (which essentially just means scrolling through the suggested results) are really more “effects” of the new interface. So, anytime a user does anything (types, clicks, scroll to see results for a predicted/suggested keyword) the entire results page is going to change.

Google on the Instant Offensive
Google has really been in front of the Web community regarding how the search enhancement might impact them directly – primarily as it relates Google Adwords as Instant forces everyone in the online advertising community to entirely rethink the notion of impressions. According to Google, “With Google Instant, an impression is counted if a user takes an action to choose a query (for example, presses the Enter key or clicks the Search button), clicks a link on the results page, or stops typing for three or more seconds. It’s possible that this feature may increase or decrease your overall impression levels.”

The Effect on Adwords Advertisers?
If you’re an Adwords advertiser, expect to hear a lot about how Google Instant might change the game in the coming days and weeks. Since what advertisers are charged is based on Quality Score, and since the primary determinant of Quality Score is CTR (click through rate), it’s not much of a stretch to see how increased ad impressions would equal a lower CTR and ultimately a higher CPC. Right in time for the holidays no less!

Google Instant will become the core search experience on Google.com for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE 8. We’ll also be offering Google Instant to our users in France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain and the U.K. who are signed in and have Instant-capable browsers. Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll work to roll out Google Instant to all geographies and platforms.

WordStream's Negative Keyword Tool

Administrator — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 20:00:00 GMT

Keyword research platform WordStream has released a free negative keyword tool. If you need to improve click-through rates and Quality Score (don't forget your ROI from advertising) this is definitely a resouce to check out.

The tool aids users in identifying a list of high-traffic keyword niches related to their business, service or product. Search marketers are then able to designate which of the keyword niches are relevant and which ones aren’t. The Negative Keyword Tool then saves any keyword terms deemed “negative,” and suggests additional, related terms that have a high likelihood of getting matched against the ad groups within paid search accounts.

“The Free Negative Keyword Tool saves PPC advertisers the headache of going the long, tedious and expensive traditional route of waiting for your ad campaigns to mature and accrue query data, then sifting through search query reports to uncover negative keywords,” said Larry Kim, WordStream’s Founder and Vice President of Product Development. “So rather than wasting tons of time, money and energy, you can quickly and efficiently weed out irrelevant terms with our tool, thereby eliminating wasted spend before these terms ever cost you a single penny.”

Quality Score: 5 Steps to Optimizing a PPC Account

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:05:00 GMT

by Amber Speer, Hannapin Marketing

The most common mistake when companies try to manage their own pay-per-click (PPC) account is a lack of organization around, and understanding of the Google Quality Score and Yahoo! Quality Index.

Google Quality Score is an assigned number from 1 – 10, based on how well your keywords relate to your ad text and landing pages. The higher your Quality Score, the higher your ads can be ranked in position for less cost. Generally speaking, in Google, any keyword with a Quality Score of 6 or below is considered low.

The goal for most PPC advertisers is to achieve a higher Quality Score; which sometimes means making large changes within the account in a short amount of time. However, this tactic can be detrimental to your overall account health. Re-structuring and re-organizing your accounts for a higher Quality Score can actually decrease your scores initially, if not done correctly. A decrease in Quality Score will essentially bring in less traffic and less conversions or leads, at a higher spend. The goal then becomes to optimize your account without initially killing existing high Quality Scores. Low Quality Scores will eventually pick up in a few months — but who wants to have a broken PPC account for any length of time when the goal was to make it better?

Though trial and error, research, and speaking with my Google and Yahoo! reps, I have found the best way to restructure and optimize existing PPC accounts without killing existing high Quality Scores.

1. Don’t be in a hurry. Whether restructuring your account entirely, or just moving a few keywords around and writing new ads, take it slow. Especially in Google, when you make large changes in an account, it can throw the system into “shock,” as we call it. Google assumes your Ad- Words account was set up correctly in the first place. So, when you begin to make large changes, Google thinks that you must be doing something wrong, or made a mistake the first time around. Therefore, after large changes to an account your Quality Scores can tank. After a while (maybe a few months) Google can see that you have actually improved your organization, and your Quality Scores will begin to recover. But a couple of months with bad Quality Scores can result in lower traffic numbers, lower conversions, fewer leads, and lower ROI. Therefore, make a plan of optimizing your account week by week. Do one campaign or ad group restructure per week, including writing new ads, adjusting keyword bids, and settings.

2. Adjust campaign settings first. One thing you can do quickly and should be done immediately is to make sure your settings are correct for each campaign. The first setting I make sure to change can be found under rotate ads > set ads to rotate evenly. Do not set them to “optimize.” Setting your ads to optimize means that Google will only show the ad with the highest click-through rate. This also means that if you’re writing new ads for testing purposes, you can not split test (A/B) the new ad versus the old ad. The second setting I change can be found under bidding and budget > delivery method. This should be set to “accelerate.” This means that your ads will show as soon as someone types in your keyword. Google has an option to show your ads evenly throughout the day in order to make your daily budget last longer. The problem with this is that you could be missing out on potential qualified traffic by not having your ads show at all times for any search query.

3. Don’t overwrite old ad text. If you’re testing ad text — and you should be — do not write over the old ads, even if they have lower click-through rates. If there are any ads you wish to discontinue, simply pause the ad, and write an entirely new one. Anytime you edit existing ad text you’re writing over that ad’s click-through rate. Quality Score is based on having a high click-through rate. If you remove or edit ads with high or medium click-through rates and accidently replace them with ads that have low click-through rates you are hurting your Quality Scores.

4. Re-structure for optimal targeting. If your PPC account has more than 20 keywords per ad group, or only has one campaign in the entire account, it’s time to re-structure. Remember, Quality Scores are based on how well your keyword relates to your ad text. Therefore, if you have more than 20 keywords in each ad group, you can probably break those down into smaller, more targeted ad groups and write better targeted ad text. Doing so will increase click-through rates — a main driver of achieving higher Quality Scores. As mentioned previously, when restructuring, take it slow. Execute one campaign re-structure per day. In that campaign, you will be examining all of the keywords in your ad groups to find groups of keywords that can be broken out into their own, new ad groups.

5. Adjust bids accordingly. Again, when it comes to adjusting keyword bids, or pausing or deleting keywords, take it slow. According to my Google reps, taking a keyword bid from $10 down to $1 (or vice-versa) does not register well with AdWords. If you find keywords that could use major bid adjustments, pause them now then activate them later when you have the time and budget to work with those keywords.

Although it might be frustrating to make large changes slowly, it will be worth it in the end. Achieving a high Quality Score in Google or Yahoo! will take time — it’s not an overnight fix but, eventually, you will see traffic, and conversions and leads go up, while spend goes down.

About the Author: Amber Speer is a Senior Search Marketing Consultant at Hanapin Marketing. Amber’s primary role at Hanapin is managing pay per click and search engine optimization campaigns for a wide range of clients. She also writes for PPC Hero, Hanapin’s blog on the pay per click industry.

Google Quality Score Improvements

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:51:00 GMT

Changes to how Google’s Quality Score is determined will take effect this week in all advertiser accounts.

There are three main “improvements” to the system; QS is calculated at the time of each search query, keywords will no longer be marked “inactive for search,” and the terminology “first page bid estimates” replaces “minimum bids” in Adwords accounts.

In relation to how Quality Score is calculated, Google will continue to consider clickthrough rate (CTR) of ads and keywords within an account and landing page quality – which is and will be evaluated less frequently.

Quality Score will continue to impact keywords that are inactive for search, but arguably less now than in the past – much less in fact. Google is essentially removing the restriction, rendering all keywords fair game in a PPC campaign. Although Quality Score will continue to impact how often (frequency of impressions) keywords are shown, this will change. Some keywords marked "inactive" may perform very well for certain queries in certain circumstances and, as such, may begin to receive impressions.

The inclusion of first page bid estimates and the removal of the “minimum bid” wording within Adwords accounts is more than just a cosmetic enhancement to the platform. First page bid estimates should be close to your existing minimum bid according to Google, but queries with a high level of advertiser competition may have significantly higher first page bid estimates. The result? Advertisers will need to bid above the old minimum to rank higher than the competition and show on the first page.

New Google Quality Scores

Administrator — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

According to an official announcement from Google, the method in which quality score (which influences how paid advertising is placed next to search results) is determined at Adwords is about to change.

Quality Score (according to Google) will now be more accurate as it will be calculated at the time of each search query (not a static per-keyword assessment), keywords will no longer be marked inactive for search (immediately creating more inventory) and the terminology "first page bid" will replace "minimuym bid" in advertiser accounts (arguably helping Google maximize revenue for every query).

Google will begin testing changes with a small set of users "within the next day or two" before deploying the changes for everyone.