ClickEquations Blog

A few years ago when asked for the #1 tip to improve a campaign, I wrote that segregating brand keywords was the task that I thought nearly everyone should do, many haven’t done yet, and can offer huge benefits in any campaign.

As covered in the discussion of Secret Truth #3 and #4, when the keywords within an ad group or campaign have inconsistent business goals or performance profiles, the quality of your results suffer.

There are probably no keywords in your account that have as distinct business goals or performance profiles as brand keywords – which is why they really need to be isolated.

Should You Bid On Your Brand?

The wisdom or necessity of buying paid search on your brand keywords – where you should rank #1 (or at least) very high in the organic results, is often discussed. In the end, most decide that buying the paid search coverage is a good idea, even if you have multiple prominent organic links.

We agree that bidding on your core brand names and terms is worthwhile.

There are several reasons for this:

• If you don’t buy those links someone else will
• Many report a ‘brand halo’ effect in which the paid listings actually increase organic traffic
• There are people who click paid links over organic ones, for various reasons
• You’ve already spent a lot of money to build the reputation that generated the branded search. Paying a few cents for the ‘last mile’ of the click to actually get the visit is a prudent investment.
• It’s great to see huge CTR and conversion rates in your PPC account
• The huge CTR of your brand terms actually drives your account CTR history up, helping overall quality score

Types of Brand Keywords

The diversity of brand keywords can be surprising. But to really ‘answer the question’ (Secret Truth #1) it’s critical to figure out all the different ways your brand is being used by carefully examining your search queries (Secret Truth #2).

We typically see several types of brand keywords:

• Brand Pure Keywords
• Navigational Brand Keywords
• Brand Related Keywords
• Brand Plus Keywords

What we call ‘pure’ brand keywords are the most narrow and focused set. This includes the brand word or words themselves, mis-spelling and deviations, and not much else. These we isolate into their own ad group or even campaign.

The next set, and often largest by keyword count, are navigational keywords. The searcher is trying to find your company or even your website. Navigational keywords include ‘brand website’, ‘brand homepage’, ‘brand company’, ‘brand city-name’ and the all important ‘www.brand.com’ (yes, people google that) plus many others. All of these clearly navigational terms should be bundled into their own ad group.

Then come the brand related keywords. These include things like executive names, other terms and other phrases that may be connected with the brand. A lot of these will be developed as you query-mine the results you get from your initial broad match pure brand keywords.

Your business may have and need other clusters of brand keywords too. A business with a lot of retail locations would likely have a whole ad group full of ‘location and store locater’ words and phrases. There may need to be groups for your PR issues, your financial/investor issues, etc. Create as many as you need, and follow the ideas for campaign and ad group organization discussed in Secret Truths #3 and #4.

Brand Plus Keywords

The final set are those we call brand plus keywords. These include your brand plus category, product, or other keywords. These are the ones that are often mixed in with other non-brand keywords and that we’re most strongly recommending you separate out of your typical existing campaigns and ad groups.

Here’s the problem. Suppose you sell dog collars of your own making, and right now your dog collar ad group has the following keywords:

• dog collars
• puppy collars
• collars for dogs
• hemp dog collars
• MyBrand dog collars

Of course this is an over-simplified example and there would be many more keywords and perhaps spead over several ad groups. But the point is that if ‘MyBrand’ is the house brand item, that keyword should be put into it’s own ad group and we would strongly recommend moving it into the main brand keywords campaign, or more likely a separate brand-plus campaign.

The rational is the same as we’ve discussed for both campaign and ad group organization; the alignment between query and text ad is best served by a very specific kind of ad, and the numbers these brand-plus keywords produce will only confuse the performance and results when mixed with non brand keywords.

Obviously if you have tons of brands and categories, doing the separation can be a lot of work. As always, prioritize based on volume – get those brand-plus keywords that are attracting a lot of traffic moved into their own ad groups and if possible campaigns first. Finish the rest progressively over time.

Brands as Negative Keywords

When you’ve created nice brand focused campaigns and ad groups, your search query reports should show that the majority of queries the contain your brand keywords are matched to those ad groups. But there will be exceptions.

Every time a branded search query lands in one of your non-brand ad groups, take a look and see if you have a keywords that was targetted at that search query. If you don’t, add one.

Of course, if it’s a search query you don’t want, add it as a negative keyword to both the brand and non-brand campaign.

After query-mining for brand keywords in your non-brand account for a while (days to weeks, depending on your volume), when you’re confident that the keywords you’ve added to your brand focused campaigns are relatively complete and accurate, go ahead and add your brand keyword as a campaign negative to the non-branded campaigns.

This will assure that no branded queries are matched into those campaigns. They’ll be forced (more or less) to match into the brand focused campaigns you’ve created for that purpose. The users will see brand appropriate ads, they’ll be sent to brand appropriate landing pages, and your campaign and ad groups reports for both branded and non branded keywords will be more complete, consistent, actionable, and accurate.

What Do You Think?

This blog post is part of a series extending and amplifying the ideas in our free ebook ‘21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

What they’re saying: “Craig’s dug deep into AdWords and unearthed some important nuggets. They’re surprising, simply but eloquently described, and vital to your PPC advertising success.” – David Szetela – Owner and CEO, Clix Marketing’.

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We’ve written about the AdWords impression share metrics often in the past on this blog.

So rather than re-hashing or re-writing, we’ll suggest you go read our Impression Share Series to extend and amplify the comments made in the fifth Secret Truth.

Finished?

There isn’t much more to add. The one point worth clarifying or reiterating, is that Impression Share is worth reorganizing for. We talked about several rationals for creating focused campaign organization in the Secret Truth #4 post, and hinted at the Impression Share relationship.

Because Impression Share is reported only at the campaign level, it is always an average. Looking at the number for campaigns that contain keywords and ad groups with highly disparate performance, clarity of target, match type distribution, and other characteristics makes it a worthless and probably misleading number. In order to trust Impression Share, your campaign organization must be focused and internally consistent.

Maybe one day Google will share with us Impression Share at the ad group or even the keyword level. Wouldn’t that be grand?

Until then, to get the most out of impression share it the first trick is to monitor it closely, and the second is to make sure your campaigns are well organized. Actually all of the ideas presented in Secret Truths 2-8 and 14 can help you get the most from this great metric.

What Do You Think?

This blog post is part of a series extending and amplifying the ideas in our free ebook ‘21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

What they’re saying on twitter: “Very, Very, Very nice e-book from @clickequations called ‘21 secrets to PPC’. Easy to read, and full of good and funny stuff! – @Eloi_Casali”

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Of the 21 Secret Truths in the book, #4 was in some ways the most difficult to write. It’s one of the most abstract ideas in the book, perhaps the least intuitive, and it really needed at least a couple of full-blown examples.

All of which made it tough just due to the space constraints available. The book was designed to be quick and easy to read, and every entry was allocated exactly one page. But on this one I really appreciate the chance to offer extended remarks and comments.

The idea is simple, if hard to compress into a single sentence: Campaigns don’t do anything to your account performance, they’re constructs that should make your reports more informative and actionable. As such, using them simply as the top level of a hierarchical logical organization of your keywords is a waste.

What Campaigns Do and Should Do

In our experience, campaigns are most typically used to define and create a categorical breakdown of an account. A clothing retailer would by default have a shoe campaign and a sox campaign and a hats campaign. Inside of those would be the associated ad groups.

The result of this is that when you look at campaign reports and performance – which you do all the time because both AdWords and 3rd party tools like ClickEquations naturally present the campaign level data to you quite prominently – you see the summary performance (impressions, clicks, revenue, costs) for the campaigns based on those groups.

Here’s the problem: Seeing the results rolled up based on those categorizations isn’t very useful.

Sure it seems nice to know that shoes has a 4% CTR and a 250% ROI while hats has a 5% CTR but only a 150% ROI. But is it really useful?

The problem is averages. What you see in these rolled up results, perfectly reasonably, are averages. On average in the shoes campaign the CTR was 4%. And as we’ll discuss in more detail in a later post, averages are the enemy of accuracy. They mask facts and trends by their very nature.

Average can be put to great use – they’re statistically useful. But they can be inappropriate too.

What’s hidden in typical categorical organization is the clarity you can get if you further break down campaigns based on other, additional, distinctions within your campaigns. Basically you want to think about the different types and classes of ad groups the campaigns contain, aspects that would cause dramatically different performance, and collect those types of ad groups into campaigns based on those similarities.

Breaking Campaigns Down

There are several types of ad groups that you might want to segregate. Ad groups that contain brand keywords are obvious. Brand keywords get vastly higher CTRs, better conversion rates, and often lower CPCs. If you have brand keywords mixed in your general campaigns, they’ll really distort the average numbers reported.

Often within different target product or offer segments in your businss you’ll have keywords that carry different business intents. You may have some keywords that bring in a lot of new customers, generate high traffic volumes, but aren’t very profitable. Call them loss leaders, or new client introducers, or just keywords aimed at revenue more than profit.

On the other hand, you likely (hopefully) have some keywords (well organized into tight ad groups!) that just kill it in terms of pure good old profit. They have your best conversion rates, highest average order values, and for them you manage very tighly to maximize these already good returns.

If stuffed within your shoes campaign are some ad groups that are high volume but marginally profitable, and others that are super profitable, doesn’t that doom the rolled up campaign results to be rather meaningless? What are they going to tell you?

By contrast, suppose you take very small number of mega-profitable ad groups out of the shoe campaign, and make a new campaign called ’shoes-high-margin’. Now every day/week/month, you can look at those campaign stats and quickly get an accurate idea of if that profit gravy train is on track. If there is a dip, you’ll see it quickly. If there is a surge, you’ll know that too and can respond with more budget or perhaps even more keywords.

Lousy performers need the same treatment. We all have keywords (and perhaps ad groups) that just aren’t doing well. Maybe we should kill them but just don’t have the heart. Maybe we’re working really hard to test better ad copy and tweak negatives and match types. In any case, for now they’re losers.

Mixed into our everyday campaigns, the losers hide in the shadows. We don’t clearly see how much they’re really costing, or how far below the averages they are. Often they live on for months and years. Drag them into their own campign, get forced to stare every month at $29,000 spend and $1213 revenue, and your motivation and decisions just might change.

Plus, the reporting on your core campaigns, minus these misfits, is much more accurate too.

Looking For Wow!

Hopefully this clarifies the point. If campaigns are simply logical categories they’re data is of limited use. If they’re grouped logically and by performance or at least goal then the numbers they produce are meaningful.

Here’s the real goal: You want to be able to see a number in your campaign report and say either WOW or OH SHIT. There should be numbers in those reports that have expected ranges and reasons behind them, and if they change you should be able to know that it’s a big deal.

If they’re all huge roll-up averages that jump around, or that stay constant because even huge swings within them are masked by other shifts elsewhere, there will never be and Wow or Oh Shit moments based on campaign reports.

And beyond saving you that little drama, it means that important things are happening in your campaigns, and you’re missing them.

We don’t want that.

There are two related topics: How to best actually reoganize campaigns, and the impact of Impression Share on the campaign organization decision. I’ll tackle the first one in a follow up post in the next few days, and talk more about Impression Share and in terms of campaign organization when that topic comes up in the natural sequence.

What Do You Think?

This blog post is part of a series extending and amplifying the ideas in our free ebook ‘21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

What they’re saying on twitter: “Very, Very, Very nice e-book from @clickequations called ‘21 secrets to PPC’. Easy to read, and full of good and funny stuff! – @Eloi_Casali”

Download Your Copy Today
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This series of blog posts goes ‘behind the scenes’ to extend and expand on the content in our free ebook ‘21 Secrets of High-Resolution PPC’. Request your copy here.

Paid seach campaigns are organized into campaigns and ad groups. Why they’re organized and how they should be organized is something that doesn’t get discussed enough.

The secret to ad groups is hidden in its name. Ad groups are a way to organize text ads. If they were a way to organize keywords, they’d be called keyword groups!

Properly building ad groups is incredibly important. Yet it seams that most people spend far too little time designing and constructing their ad groups. This happens primarily because the goals aren’t clear.

The Goal of Ad Groups

The goal of an ad group is:

• To perfectly align questions (search queries) with answers (text ads).
• Every query that comes into an ad group should smack straight into some ad copy that directly and perfectly addresses its topics, issues, intent, and desires.
• It not good enough for all the keywords in an ad group to be similar or narrowly focused or contextually similar or anything else.
• If the people whose queries come into a group don’t see text ads that satisfy them, the ad group is a failure.

Rebuilding Ad Groups

It’s also rare to find paid search managers spending a lot of time re-organizing ad groups. Which is a mistake because taking what is learned from real-life data and experience and shifting things around is often the most effective way to jump start a campaign that is stuck with performance below your expectations.

Ad group reorganization doesn’t happen a lot in large part because it isn’t easy enough to reorganize within our tools. But the ‘clarity of vision’ problem applies here too. Without a clear set of organizational goals how can you know that something is wrong or how you should fix it?

There is only one legitimate way to analyze the success of an ad group: Take the list of search queries the ad group has attracted, say over the last 30 days. Put this list next to the text ad copy that has been shown to the people who executed those searches.

If you can’t look at any of the text ads on that list, and be completely comfortable that it is clearly and directly aimed at answering the question implied in any and every search query on the other list, then you have work to do to improve your ad groups.

A lot of that work involves adding and deleting keywords, shifting or duplicating match types, working on bidding and quality score, and other similar tasks. But none of these efforts can be fully or correctly completed if you don’t first commit to building ad groups around the ads they contain and not around the keywords they contain.

The Ads Are The Targets

This is the distinction that matters. Build ad groups around ads. Fit in keywords that attract compatible queries.

Ads are the target. Build a nice small target. Then hit it. Hit it as squarely and cleanly as possible. Don’t allow anything in that isn’t a bullseye.

There may be many great keywords that just don’t fit. You may have to add negatives to that particular ad group that are perfectly valid keywords elsewhere. That’s fine. You can build as many ad groups as you need to have each one be tight and focused. But if you allow unaligned queries into your ad group, the downhill spiral begins:

• Queries that don’t target the ad copy get impressions but not clicks.
• So CTRs drop
• And what may be perfectly good queries are under-served by inappropriate ads (ei they’re wasted)
• Quality score suffers for the keywords, target URLs, and overall account
• Money is wasted in the process, and cost rise in the future (due to lower quality score across the account)

If the search engines let you dynamically decide which ad to show based on the search query, you could build ad groups around keywords and then direct each person to a highly targeted text ad. But they don’t, so you have to work the other way around. Build highly targeted text ads then construct ad groups that only bring very specific people to them.

It’s easy to remember: they’re called ad groups.

What do you think?

This blog post is a companion to our free ebook ‘21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

It will be available for download later this month.

Reserve Your Copy Today

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This series of blog posts goes ‘behind the scenes’ to extend and expand on the content in our free ebook ‘21 Secrets of High-Resolution PPC’. Request your copy here.

Keywords are over-rated.

One of the underlying themes of High-Resolution PPC is that the popular notion of how paid search works is wrong. Or more accurately, that it’s vastly over-simplified in a way that harms those who believe it.

Keywords are a great example. As promoted by the search engines and most of those who talk about them, keywords are the center of paid search. Keywords define your targets and attract your prospects. Keywords take your bids, costs are hung on them, and they collect the statistics used to judge performance.

All of this is reasonable. And a few years ago when prices were lower, competition was relatively tame, and the resulting profits were high, it was good enough.

Not anymore.

What keywords really do is act like magnets. They attract people who execute searches based on certain search queries. The strength of their magnetism is based on the match types that are applied to them. Exact match keywords only attract search queries that are identical to the keywords, but the more prevalent phrase and broad match keywords attract – or might attract – a huge range of queries.

In the simple and traditional discussion of paid search, search queries do not exist. Keywords are their proxies. Keywords are as specific as the conversation gets.

In that version of the world, the focus is on keyword performance (such as click-through rates) and results (in things like return on ad spend). By looking at these numbers, people make important judgments and decisions. Ultimately keywords are deemed ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

But while all this is happening, something much more important is going on, and being ignored. Before every click, the keyword is matched to a search query. Keywords that aren’t using exact match are seeing traffic from dozens or hundreds of different search queries.

For each keyword, some of these search queries deliver excellent performance and results while others are complete wastes of time and money.

By looking at these queries, and how they perform, our judgments and decisions can be far more accurate and effective. We can cut waste, double-down on winners, and even more importantly setup our campaigns and ad groups to much more effectively answer the questions that the searchers we’re paying for are actually asking.

That’s why search queries are far more important than keywords.

It’s easy to demonstrate why you have to look past keywords and focus on search queries.

• Suppose you have a keyword that’s performing terribly. It has very few clicks, a low quality score, and a terrible ROAS. Your inclination might be to pause or delete it right? But what if you looked at the search queries and found that out of 87 different queries you’ve paid for thus far, every single conversion came from just one variant – and that query seemed to convert every time it was clicked. You’d want to save that query wouldn’t you? Killing the keyword would have thrown that baby out with the bathwater.
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• Or suppose you have a keyword that is killing it. It has a huge CTR and is making tons of genuine profit. All’s well right? Until you look at the queries and find that there are ten or so relatively frequent queries, all of which share a common root phrase, that almost never convert. Adding that phrase as a negative would cut costs and boost profits even higher. Ignoring queries in that case is like a great team that allows one weak player to ride along and lower the stats. Why do that?
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• And lastly, much of what you’ll learn by putting search queries first isn’t that one keyword is good or bad, but that the questions being asked are not being well answered – the alignment of queries and ads (questions and answers) is off due to organizational problems in your campaigns. And when you fix these we’re not talking about boosting the performance of one or two keywords but rather the chance to radically shift (meaning improve) the performance of your entire account. But if you don’t look at the queries there is no way to know that they contain questions that aren’t being answered.

The only downside of moving from keyword management to search query management is that it takes time and effort. This is true. But it’s an iterative process, it can be managed on a clearly prioritized basis (ie you don’t have to do all of it at once), and the fact is that if you don’t do it you’re just wasting tons of money and foregoing a lot of sales and profit. There is no way around this.

If our job is to answer questions, then search queries have to become the center of our attention.

What do you think?

This blog post is a companion to our free ebook ‘21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

It will be available for download later this month.

Reserve Your Copy Today

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The first truth from our new ‘21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’ was leaked, on this very blog, in our New Years Day post.

That post, entitled ‘They’re Searching For Answers’ introduced the idea that every search is a question, and text-ads are an attempt to answer those questions.

(We’ll wait while you go read it.)

This is not just our first ‘Secret Truth’ but a kind of a guiding principle behind the entire collection.

It’s important because it turns the focus around and clarifies the fact that users (prospects, customers, searchers, whatever you want to call them) are driving this process. It’s demand driven marketing. They’re in control. We’re here to satisfy them, and only get to stay in the game as long as they think we are or at least might satisfy them. Our role is to anticipate and fulfill their needs. We can’t manipulate them.

In addition to getting us out of a dominant mindset and into a subservient one, this idea is also critical because so much of how we organize, target, option, value, and otherwise manage our campaigns – as we’ll explain in the 20 Truths to follow – can be guided and judged by how well it helps us to better align our answers to their questions.

Nearly every choice you make in the configuration of your paid search campaigns either clarifies or distorts alignment.

• If you put a lot of keywords into an ad group, they attract a wide range of search queries and the alignment between any one query and the provided ad copy can suffer.
• Organize ad groups into campaigns in the wrong way, and the campaign-level numbers you see won’t tell you if things are aligned or not.
• Use a lot of broad match, alignment will range from perfect to extremely remote.
• Bid too low, and your competitors will out rank you (and sometimes show when you don’t) for the most aligned queries.
• Fail to geo-target adequately and you’ll align with the right queries but from the wrong people – same bad result.

So it helps to have this simple prime directive : target the questions you want to answer, and then answer them directly.

When this rule isn’t followed, a lot of innocent keywords, text-ads, and landing pages pay the price.

Consider one example:

• If the keyword is ’snow plow’ running on broad match
• The search queries include many things like ‘who can plow the snow off my driveway in Allentown PA’
• The text ad copy says ‘J-Deere 150″ Plow Extensions for Your F-150″.

In this case the keyword is likely to have a terrible CTR and conversion rate. It might be judged a ‘bad keyword’ and paused or deleted.

But in-fact the problem is that we’re delivering answers that have nothing to do with the questions being targeted. What’s needed is more keyword negatives and probably a lot of keyword expansion (to grab all the words and phrases that broad match is eligible to capture in ways that we can organize and answer them far more accurately).

Poor results here are predictable. And the reason for them can clearly can be seen in the results. But many times we look at the metrics for our keywords, text-ads, and landing pages (not to mention campaigns and ad groups) and draw conclusions without taking the time to see if we were answering the question they were asking.

Paid search advertising is the process of paying to answer questions. It only sense to work very hard to answer them well.

Understanding that this is what we’re doing is the first step.

What do you think?

This blog post is a companion to our free ebook ‘21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

It will be available for download later this month.

Reserve Your Copy Today

21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC is our soon-to-be released ebook that shares what we think are the guiding principles for efficient and effective paid search management.

The idea for ‘High-Resolution PPC’ was hatched two or three years ago, as we looked deeper and deeper into how paid search really worked, and how large and complex paid search campaigns should be managed.

At the time we were managing accounts for a range of very large advertisers. Like anyone else we were striving to produce better results. But we were constantly frustrated by the limits of the data we could access, the inflexibility of the tools at our disposal, and the general level of transparency we felt the engines were providing into how the choices we made impacted the behavior and performance of our campaigns.

To address the first two issues, we accepted a venture capital investment, built an in-house product development team, and created ClickEquations. To address the last item, we began development of what was originally called ‘the methodology’.

The methodology was an effort to document the facts about how search worked and the process that one should follow to build and manage accounts. It started as a collection of ideas, beliefs, and habits we assumed were best practices. Over time we pulled back to look at the shape and sequence of the overall process, and dove in to examine individual elements, options, and interactions.

Eventually a framework emerged. Groups of items and options that fit together. Stages of the process that had natural breaks and measurable outcomes. The framework provided a structure around which all the steps, options, measurements, goals, interactions, and components of paid search management could be organized.

It got the name ‘High-Resolution PPC’ because one recurring theme of the exercise was the fact that everything we knew before was right, but far too over-simplified.

• Keywords mattered, but only in the way they attracted search queries, which had a lot to do with how and when match types were assigned.
• Bids mattered, but only due to their influence on ad rank which itself influenced CPC.
• CTR mattered, but it (and nearly everything else) was reported as an average and if you accepted the number without really thinking hard about how it was calculated you were likely to be misled. The examples continued endlessly.
• The list went on and one. Most of what we knew or thought was in fact true, but there was always a but. And if you know about the ‘but’ you would take different action than if you didn’t.

It seemed like the conventional wisdom was paid search at 300-dpi, but with a little effort and thought we could understand and act at 2400-dpi.

More accurate info. More precise actions. Better results. Higher resolution.

For the last 18-months or so we’ve continued to refine the High-Resolution PPC framework, and research and document the information on which it’s based. We’ve talked a bit about the process of managing paid search in this way (the original outline is presented here), and some of the posts on this blog over the past year have discussed elements of paid search in the terms we see and use them within High-Res.

But our new ebook is the first complete summary of what we’ve learned, at least in terms of the facts and philosophies we’ve come to consider the structural base of High-Resolution PPC.

To keep the book snappy, and a reasonable length, it’s written in a concise style – with just 1 page per item. Over the next month, this blog will feature a behind-the-scenes tour of the 21 truths, with expositions, examples, and with your help some conversations.

Sign up below to get your copy. And if you’ll be at SMX, SES, or OMMA in March, please visit the ClickEquations booth for a full color printed copy.

Get a free copy of ‘21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

The ebook will be available for download later this month.

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In advance of our new ebook, and some other projects just behind it, I built a new website focused on High-Resolution PPC.

To support that site, I created a new AdWords account and added two small ad groups with a total of 9 keywords and two text ads. Every keyword is a brand or navigational variation of the term ‘high-resolution ppc’.

That phrase is in the domain name and all over the home page, which serves as landing page for both ads.

This is a story of how quality score evolves.

At First, They Don’t Trust You

This is a brand new account. It has no CTR history. The ads are new. There is no visible URL history. The website has existed, and been indexed in Google, for a few months but with just a few pages and virtually no traffic.

The keyword ‘high resolution ppc’ does have a CTR history, because in our Clickequations.com AdWords account we buy the broad match version and aim ads at a page for ebook sign-ups.

I added six exact match keywords (shown right) to the first ad group. The initial bid was set to $0.10.

A few minutes after creation, they were all listed with a quality score of 3/10 and a First page bid estimate of $1.00.

Interestingly, Relevance was initially listed as ‘No Problem’ but 14 hours later is listed as ‘Poor’ for every keyword.

Because the corporate account had bid on the keyword, I looked in ClickEquations to see how it was doing. ‘High resolution ppc’ (broad match) has a quality score of 7 and a Max CPC of $0.10. Relevance says ‘no problems’. The ad copy and landing page for that keyword also use the phrase in just about every place possible.

Given the lack of history, and knowing that history matters, I accept for the moment the fact that it’s necessary to bid $1.00 per click for a phrase I made up (ie the competition is light, on both content and competitive bidders). So I raise the bid on the one exact match keyword ‘high resolution ppc’ to $1.00.

The ad did not start showing in the SERPS. So I went to sleep.

Money Talks
This morning I checked again. The ad from the new account is now in position #1, at the top. It still has a quality score of 3, and a ‘Poor’ rating for Relevence.

Someone explain how these keywords could be more relevant for the search queries, text-ad copy, and target URL – all of which contain the exact 3-word phrase.

It had zero impressions or clicks overnight. To boost my CTR, I clicked it the time I ran my search to check it. Cost me a buck, but my CTR is now 100%!

There were only 3 ads shown the first time I searched. The book ad, the one from ClickEquations, and one from AdWords themselves trying to lure innocents into PPC for the first time.

Interestingly, and perhaps coincidentally, after my $1.00 self-help click, the phrase now returns 14 AdWords ads – due to broad matching on the ‘ppc’ part of the search query no doubt. I guess once Google sees that people who search this phrase will click paid ads, the ads come a-runnin’.

What Happens Next
There’s nothing too revealing in all this. The time frames and data sets are tiny, the behaviour is more or less consistent with what we’ve been told about quality score. Yet I find the rare opportunity to view a case study with so few complications appealing.

It won’t be pure, of course. Some of you will go run the query, depressing the CTR. A few will even click the ad, wasting a little money

But over the next few weeks we’ll see what happens.

1. How long will it take to get the quality score up from 3 to at least 7?
2. When will Google recognize that the relevance is perfect, not poor?
3. Will the CTR on the new version of the ads beat the old ones that earned the quality score of 7?
4. How long until I can get the bid down from $1.00 (which clicks are not worth) to $0.10 (which they may be)?
5. Once the account grows, what will be the best way to monitor and control lifetime account CTR history, and visible URL CTR history?
6. How much is this experiment going to cost? (Note: It’s not entirely an experiment, the ad and site are real and will live on – the learning is a bonus.)

Stay tuned….

UPDATES:

Day 2 – Quality Score 4, CTR 40%, Impression 10, Clicks 4
Day 4 – Quality Score 5, CTR 45%, Impressions 11, Clicks 5
Day 4 – Lowered bid from $1.oo (former ‘first page bid estimate) to $.80)
Day 4 – Added new ad group with 1 keyword – Craig Danuloff (broad match) initial QS=5
Day 4 – Noticed that navigational keywords (www.highresolutionppc.com) have QS=7
Day 6 – Quality Score 7, CTR 41%, Impressions 12 (So it wasn’t a volume issue). Ave CPC to date = $0.87 Ave Pos 1.1
Day 7 – Lowered bid from $0.80 to $0.25
Day 7 – First Page Bid Estimates on other KW in ad group, dropped from $1.00 to $0.20 where QS rose to 6 from 3-4
Day 7 – First Page Bid Estimates on other KW in ad group, dropped from $1.00 to $0.30 where QS rose to 5 from 3-4

For much of last year, regular readers of this blog know that we’ve talked about the idea of ‘High-Resolution PPC’.

High-Resolution PPC is about clarity. It’s about removing the confusion surrounding how things work, which measurements matter, and what you should do to drive better paid search results.

In the coming weeks and months we’re going to share a lot more details and thoughts about this new way of understanding and managing paid search.

One huge milestone in that process will be the release, later this month, of ‘21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

This will be a free eBook available to anyone who requests it, and we’ll have special full-color printed copies if you visit us at the SES, OMMA or SMX trade shows in March.

The book shares the 21 core facts and philosophies upon which we believe effective paid search management is based.

They’re called ‘Secret Truths’ because this isn’t a summary of the popular notions that typically pass for paid search best practices. This is a ground-up reconsideration of what each component in the system does, and a rebuild of how you should manage based on this fact-based (rather than faith-based) view.

One person who’s seen the final book is Avinash Kaushik. Here’s what he had to say:

“The glory of paid search is hyper relevance and how absolutely data driven it is. If your goal is to be the best you can be at paid search then your path goes through this e-book.”
- Avinash Kaushik, Author: Web Analytics 2.0.

You can sign up now to be notified as soon the the download is released. (Note: If you signed up from previous mentions, we have your name so you’re already on the list.)