By: Mark Ballard

Mark Ballard — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 19:48:00 +0000

Hi Craig,nThanks for bringing attention to Steve’s post and I’ve really enjoyed your whole recent series of posts on QS. Yeah, it doesn’t look like there are answers to the three original questions, but I don’t see an issue with answering the question of “What is the average CTR by position for various visible QS levels?” The impact of bid is reflected in the position of the keyword and by limiting the comps to keywords with the same QS you get a fairly apples to apples view.nnRegarding questions of user intent, this appears to already be factored into the QS we see. In other words a keyword with low commercial intent (and in turn CTR) will never have a 10 QS for anyone. This allows Steve’s graphs to work. Google also has to be accurate in its assessment of each keyword’s potential, otherwise you would see bigger spreads on the graphs.nnAnyway, we’ll have to take a look at our own data on this and see if we can confirm.nnMark BallardnRimm Kaufman Group

By: Steve Baker

Steve Baker — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 16:04:00 +0000

Hi Craig,nnYou’re quite right about my mis-use of the term ‘Exact Match’ – as I’ve corrected in my comments, it’s actually searches that exactly match your keyword, which may not be the performance of the keyword on Exact Match.nnUnfortunately, since Search Query Reports only show searches with clicks, the ‘correct’ analysis is impossible to do, as the click through rate would be dramatically overstated.nnI also agree that I didn’t really answer my own questions very well – the original question that I was trying to answer (for internal use) is what the approximate average impact of moving an advert up or down a position may be on click through rate (for projecting likely levels of clicks and conversions for different budgets etc). I was simply playing with the data when I noticed that for any given Quality Score, there is a remarkably predicatable relationship between the click through rate and average position.nnI’m not convinced that the bids are particularly important in this analysis, since they play no part in the relationship between Quality Score, position and click through rate.nnIn truth, I have my own concerns about this analysis – it doesn’t take any account of whether the third position is above or to the right of the organic listings, for example. And as Brad Geddes has observed today (http://bit.ly/iXnhGU) the click through rate is always going to vary substantially depending on user intent, if nothing else.nnI sincerely hope that my analysis leads to others performing variants on this kind of analysis – though I would caution that I’ve already had to correct one commenter who read the post and turned off all his low QS keywords to push the bids up on the ones with a QS of 10!nnSadly, I’m about to disappear on holiday, but I look forward to hearing other people’s thoughts on how to improve the analysis, or observations about practical applications, or lack thereof, upon my return.nnMany thanks,nnSteve Bakern

Comments on: Quality Score Decoded?

By: Mark Ballard

By: Steve Baker