ClickEquations Blog

Do you think the fourth function of Quality Score is to make money for Google?

I've heard people puzzle about why going along with some aspect of Quality Score increases the quality of the ad or the users' experience. Yet it makes perfect sense the other way around. Quality Score is what Google thinks is a quality ad.

A "high quality" ad is one that Google can put up and make lots of money with, while at the same time users will be reasonably happy -- happy enough to keep clicking.

So CTR rules because there's only so much space on the page and ads that don't get clicked on much wreck Google's revenue stream. Then, if users have a bad experience they will stop trusting those ads and clicks will decrease over time, so Google has to enforce some minimum standards.

Yet the profit motive is so strong that Google will not put up an exact match ad if there's a broad match in another ad group and the ad in that group has a higher CTR, regardless of the fact that the exact match ad has more search terms in the ad text and the landing page has more of the user's search query terms too.

To an extent, Google is paying lip service to Quality Score and relevance, hiding the search queries that broad match, knowing that if people saw them they would flip. The opportunity for using a data driven approach to negative keyword discovery is not fully available using Google's native tools (104 other unique queries...), yet rather than offer advertisers an easy way to diagnose and optimize this aspect of their account, Google hides the ball, talks the talk about Quality Score, privately knows about the wildly inaccurate matches, yet somehow calculates that they'll take the money as long as people keep on clicking.

Savvy advertisers solve these problems, most pay too much, relevance suffers, long term success at Google suffers as greed tips the balance in favor of short term profits, and even the advertisers who are aware of and solve for these problems pay the price of increased resource use to deal with these problems.

And consultants don't have a motive to lobby Google, because it's these very complexities that allow them to optimize an account and have clients pay through the nose for their services.

When you say that a function of the Quality Score is to provide a preferred customer program to reward top performing advertisers, what does that actually mean? The most interesting aspect of the webinar you're having on Quality Score is that it will "cover the more philosophical issues of transparency and fairness." This and the pragmatic tips will be great.

Thanks Greg - Lots of stuff to reply to in there:

- Certainly QS drives Google profit. That's the main point of all three really.
- Improvements in 'user experience' and 'Google profit' are generally correlated, which is why they use that to defend and justify everything, but the trouble is at the margin when they make decisions which drive profit at the expense of user experience. They do it all the time but not surprisingly don't point those out. Minimum first page bids are a good example - there should be a quality level (not score, but concept) where no bid is high enough to make the first page - but that doesn't happen.
- What I mean by Preferred Customer Program is that High CTR, both in terms of complete account history, and at the AdGroup level, both help successfull clients do better with new and less powerful keywords. They get a boost on that keyword that a new or less successful client would not.
- I too find the issues of tranparency and fairness interesting. I'll do another full blog post about it this week, and certainly some will be covered in the webinar.