ClickEquations Blog

• Just had a breakthrough in my understanding of Quality Score – while prep’ing for the Tuesday Webinar http://bit.ly/11570 . #
• There’s always a new way to game the Google. http://bit.ly/ED9j #
• My Quality Score Webinar with Bryan Eisenberg is Today at Noon EST. Still time to sign up – http://bit.ly/Z56Q #
• ClickEquations Update Live later today. User defined cookie lengths for last-click revenue allocation, assists metric for each keyword, etc #
• Great Quality Score event with @TheGrok today. Hundreds of Q’s remaining which we’ll blog. Welcome new followers. #
• Forgot to mention that editing goes live today – Oops Make changes to keywords and ad-groups directly from within ClickEquations. #
• Reviewing the unanswered questions from yesterday’s QS webinar – blog posts with answers forthcoming… #
• BTW: A sneek-peek at a future ClickEquations feature was accidentally left in yesterdays update. Find that easter-egg before it disappears. #
• Replay of the Quality Score Webinar done with Bryan Eisenberg is now online – https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/936134385 #
• 20 interesting Quality Score questions answered in posts here http://bit.ly/CYAe and here http://bit.ly/JRdh. More to come. #
• Shoot, I keep forgetting to #ppc my tweets. Intersted in Quality Score, please look at the last few… #
• Going head-to-head with a ClickEquations competitor in front of a large advertiser and their agency in a few minutes. This should be fun! #
• I love four day weekends. #
• Online Advertising drives excellent branding results, per new Nielson study in Australia http://bit.ly/xscU Is PPC a branding tool? Not sure #
• Silly thread over at Mashable suggesting that Google not sell ads on keywords with unpleasantness. PC amok again. http://bit.ly/qxBv #

In our Quality Score Webinar with Bryan Eisenberg (If you missed it, you can now watch the replay) there were way too many questions to answer during the event.

This is the first of several posts in which these questions will be answered. We’ll split the answers between here and TheGrok.com, but keep linking to more as they’re posted.

Have more? Put ‘em in the comments. Disagree with any of the answers. Comment please!

Q: What does ‘removing ads from the bottom’ mean?
A: I think the point you’re referring to was part of the discussion of text-ads. Since most people run 2-4 versions of their ad to test for better CTR and conversion rate, it’s a good idea to regularly remove the ads getting lower CTR (and/or Conv Rate) and add new ones in an attempt to create a new ‘kind of the hill’.

Q: What about long tail keywords?
A: The only thing that matters about keywords relative to Quality Score is the CTR they generate and their relevance to the ads, queries, and landing page. The concepts of head and tail don’t factor in.

Q: How does Google determine if a landing page is relevant? Someone might actually find the page useful but still bounce back to Google to click another ad.
A: The primary determinant of relevance is semantic – do the words on the page match the words in the query and keyword purchase, either literally or at least contextually. Bryan mentioned the idea of Google measuring bounce rates and using the fact that someone came back and did another search or clicked another ad as one of their clues, but that is likely less significant. If a page has good relevance but many users bounce that’s better than if it has no relevance and users bounce.

Q: Is there a way to check the Quality Score of your competition?
A: No you can’t see their score on an individual keyword basis, or figure out their CTR(s). But you can certainly assess the relevance of their text ads and landing pages. Finding keywords that have low relevance – because they tend to be broad matched and lumped into a more general group – and then tightening up your relevance to that exact word/topic, would be a way to get an advantage.

Q: What’s a good click-through-rate?
A: As we mentioned in the Webinar, their is no real answer for this given the wide range of keywords, queries, ads, and situations. Long ago Google wouldn’t run ads with less than 1% CTR for very long, and while that is no longer true it is rare that less than 1% is a very good CTR. For brand-terms on the other hand I’ve seen 30-40% common in some cases. Just depends is the real answer. Testing some reasonably broad types of text-ads should help you find the range for any keyword. But writing good text-ads is pretty hard for many people.

Q: Does the Quality Score of one account in My Client Center effect the other accounts in that Client Center?
A: No. All Quality Score issues are constrained on one Google Account.

Q: If QS suffers when keyword and query aren’t tightly aligned, should you use Exact and Phrase match early in a campaign and delay Broad until a good QS is established?
A: No because QS is only calculated ‘as if’ all keywords were exact match. Not sure exactly how this works but it suggest Google is trying to not penalize you because they match a broader set of queries to your keywords.

TIP FROM PARTIPANT: Quality Score is in the Keyword/Placement Report in Google. I had said it was only under the pop-up in the management window.

Q: If you have two ads in an AgGroup, does the QS as displayed reflect the lower of the two? Should you just run one until ‘established’?
A: Probably not, more likely an average. Running one wouldn’t help because as soon as you ad another you’re in the same situation (although you may have some good history built up, but that probably counts much less than whatever is currently running.)

Q: Do the other search engine use a Quality Score?
A: There are other search engines? Hm. Actually you’ve stumpeded me. Comments?

Q: Does testing ads frequently reduce Quality Score?
A: In theory this makes sense – as you’re restarting the history and calculation, but my guess is that if a keyword in an AdGroup has a good history, you get the benefit of the doubt for a while until a new text-ad proves lousy. Google wants to encourage testing. I would never recommend a full new set of text-ads, rather leave known winners and fold new ones into the mix until they prove themselves.

UPDATE: Ten more questions and answers are over on TheGrokDotCom blog.

UPDATE II: And the final Q&A Installment.

UPDATE III: Don’t miss the blog posts that started it all: Quality Score: The Pre-Amble and Quality Score Drivers

A cornerstone of High Resolution PPC is the fact that there is a true but over-simplified view of just about every aspect of paid search marketing.

With Quality Score, the popular notion is that there is one single specific metric calculated based on a few simple variables and attached to each keyword in your Ad-Groups.

Google fosters this impression, but a careful reading of their materials (and the comments of some very knowledgeable folks) suggests it’s not that simple. There are a number of different Quality Scores or QS components which are calculated independently and used separately or collectively in different situations.

And these scores aren’t static. Quality Score is computed in real time for every search. The calculation is based not just the keyword but on the unique combination of search query, keyword, the text-ad selected, the searcher’s geography, and other variables.

While we don’t know everything about the Quality Score calculation(s), we can rank and summarize the main influencers:

• CTR is by far the largest factor, and considered at many levels – from the historic overall average CTR of your account, to the CTR of the Ad-Group the keyword is in, to the recent CTR of the specific query-keyword-textAd combination.
• Relevance is important – this requires you to keep tight topical and even literal groupings for your keyword within an Ad-Group and ensure that the specific terms (or clear & common synonmns) appear within each matching text ad and on the target landing page.
• ‘Other Factors’ are also considered although they probably play a generally minor role – these include the geography of the user (do you’re ads get higher CTR’s in FL, you’ll get a higher QS for FL searchers), the load time of your pages, the content on and linked to your landing pages, and more.

Around these basics there are a lot of details to chase down and act upon.

But the basic lessons should be learned first.

1. The impact of Quality Score on your campaigns in enormous. Even without knowing exactly how it’s being calculated or applied, we need to understand the general goals of Quality Score and execute our campaigns accordingly. Selectively or occasionally doing these things isn’t going to to work.
2. Quality Score rewards things you want to do anyway. Do not tolerate poor performing click-through-rates. Narrowcast your Ad-Groups from query to landing page. Treat your visitors with respect. Doing the basic right takes you a long way, and yet of the hundreds of accounts I review each year, very few uniformly get these things right.

Applying these lessons in a rather simple fashion could in many cases deliver excellent Quality Score results.

Want a quick-fix Quality Score strategy example? Try this:

1. Go through your Ad-Groups, look at the text-ads that are running. Delete any ads getting CTRs 50% lower than your top performers.
2. Go through the keywords in each Ad-Group. If there are keywords getting performing 2X worse than your average CTR, pause them or move them to a new ‘Rehab’ Ag-Group.
3. Visit your landing page. Think like a prospect and fix anything that would stop you from understanding, trusting, or moving forward.

To learn more about Quality Score, and hear a more detailed approach to applying the deep facts to improving your campaigns, attend our Quality Score Webinar today (Tuesday Nov 25) at 12:00 EST.

Quality Score does three things for Google:

1. It acts as a bozo filter to limit or prevent ‘undesirable’ ads and advertisers
2. It acts as a ‘preferred customer program’ to reward top performing advertisers
3. It provides a ‘secret sauce’ that ensures nobody knows how/why certain ads are run at specific times for certain prices.

The first two are rather straightforward. These are the aspects encompassed in the ‘improving everyone’s experience’ description and rationale Google generally gives for Quality Score.

But it’s the last one that has real impact on paid search marketers.

Quality Score is Google’s way of passing judgement on and rating a number of different aspects of your paid search campaigns.

This rating is then used to make value judgements about your suitability to advertise for any particular keyword at any particular time.

And to manipulate everything the concept of auction was supposed to tell you about bidding for keywords. Yes there is an auction going on, but it’s happening in an environment where everyone has a different multiplier on their money. Some are positive, some are negative.

Imagine placing bids on ebay when you had no idea the conversion rate that was going to be used to turn your dollars into the local currency of the seller. And what if when looking at the bids or relative order of other bidders, you had no idea what conversion rate had been applied to their bids. How would you bid in that environment? Quite differently than in one that was open and transparent, that’s for sure.

There is a lot we know about Quality Score, and a lot that Google just isn’t going to tell us.

This week both in blog posts, tweets, and most prominently in a Tuesday afternoon Webinar with Bryan Eisenberg, we’ll explore Quality Score in all its aspects.

These will include the practical – what is it, how does it effect your campaigns, and which changes should you make to control and take advantage of it – but will also cover the more philosophical issues of transparency and fairness.

If you haven’t yet, please sign up for the Tuesday Webinar. And in any case, welcome to Quality Score week.

• Google recommends more keywords with bids and volumes. http://www.google.com/sktool/# Cool, where is the API? #
• New tools is based on search queries. 2009 will be the year of search queries. Advertisers will finally realize keywords are overrated. #
• Revenue allocation is one tangled web. We’re digging in to get it right. #
• Driving home from bid algorithm review with our advisor at Wharton. #
• Heading to NYC for demos with several key industry players. It’s been an amazing few weeks of meetings with great results. #
• First Clickequations Analyst Excel plug-in training webinar on Monday. Clients & trial users invited. #

A lot of advertisers have keywords on which their desire and instinct is to ‘bid to position’ – meaning they want to rank in the top slot (or the top 3 slots) and are willing to pay almost anything to do so.

This is generally defined as a ‘branding’ requirement, although it may be more accurately described as a form of vanity bidding.

In preparing for next Tuesday’s Quality Score seminar with Bryan Eisenberg, I’ve started thinking about the impact of Quality Score on Bid-to-Position.

It’s easy to think about Bid-to-Position is based on the out-dated thinking of PPC as a pure auction. The strategy itself implies a willingness to pay ‘whatever it takes’ to attain a certain position in the rankings.

(Or at least pay an amount more than economically justifiable – many Bid-to-Position rules do allow you to set a MaxCPC over which the desire for a certain position will yield to some economic reality.)

But as the role and impact of Quality Score increases the ability to bid your way into a position gets harder and harder, and in many cases ultimately impossible.

Position is not driven solely by bid anymore. And in many cases bid won’t even be the largest influencing factor.

We can see this by looking at Google’s new ‘First Page Minimum Bid’ which, according to Google is “based on the exact match version of the keyword, the ad’s Quality Score, and current advertiser competition on that keyword.”

If that’s what it takes to get on the first page, then this obviously has a lot of implications to anyone hoping to ‘Bid-to-Position’.

1. First it reinforces the notion that all of your keyword work should be striving toward Exact Match, because Exact beats Phrase which beats Broad.
2. Second it says you had better really worry about the Quality Score of the keywords you’re trying to position. A lousy QS will sink your chances of attaining any position, let alone a top one.
3. Bids are only important in the context of these first two.

On Tuesday Bryan and I will dive deeply into Quality Score and how you can and why you need to focus on improving it for the keywords in your campaigns. This ‘secret formula’ has impact on every dollar you spend, and every click you get – or don’t get.

The impact of Quality Score on various bid strategies and campaign goals is just one of the topics we’ll cover. Please join us if you can.

Continuing the trend of pontificating about next year, playing with the new Google iPhone Search App, it occurs to me that this is IT for igniting local search. (NY Times Story Here)

Whenever Google starts putting ads into those results that is, which may be a while but we all know is coming.

Suddenly localization of advertising isn’t dependant upon either local qualifiers (words like “boston” or “back bay” in the query), or IP-based detection.

Now GPS (or cell-tower triangulation) adds the qualifiers automatically. And the placement and utility of the app will cause searches an very local queries that people would have never done at their desks or even on laptops.

It will be interesting to see how this type of geo-targeted result gets priced, since local bidding competition will be low.

Congratulations to our CEO Lucinda Holt, who is being honored tonight as the 2008 Iris Newman Award winner at the Women Inventing Next (WIN) Annual Celebration at Rittenhouse Hotel in Philadelphia.

The award specifically recognizes Lucinda for her commitment to helping advance women entrepreneurs. WIN is the Greater Philadelphia region’s only organization specifically for women who are leaders of and investors in high-growth businesses.

Lucinda is a serial CEO who has built and run a number successful high tech startups, a previous winner of the Eastern Technology Council’s Enterprise Award for CEO of the Year, and Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in Philadelphia.

It’s a tad early for year-end predictions, but I’ll make one anyway. 2009 will be the year search queries overtake ‘keywords’ as the focal point of interest among PPC managers.

Search queries, by way of definition, are the words and phrases user type into the search box before clicking the ‘Search’ button. They’re often and confusingly called ‘keywords, both in organic search and even within PPC.

In the paid search world we should pay close attention to search queries and the way they’re matched with the keywords we bid on – to determine how we can tune or keyword buys, match types, bids, text-ads, and landing pages.

Most paid search manager don’t have full access to every query for every click they pay for. Yahoo and MSN don’t provide them and Google Adwords provides only a very partial list and not matched at the keyword level.

Providing clear, complete, and detailed search query information is one of the great features in our ClickEquations paid search platform, and a few others provide query access as well.

Recently we’ve talked to a number of advertisers who’ve been mining queries to move to a much higher percentage of exact match keyword buys – a practice we’ve found to increase volumes and lower costs.

And this week Google introduced a new keyword expansion tool which can provide you with lists of actual search queries related to your keywords and your landing pages.

This is a great help. Both as a research tool, as additional insight into the algorithms google uses to contextually relate words and pages, and to get more people to think about the distinction between queries and keywords.

If you find the new Google Search-Based Keyword Tool useful, imagine how great it would be to see nearly every query for every click you’re paying for in your current search campaigns.