ClickEquations Blog

The more I work with our new Keyword Zoom feature the stronger my belief in query mining becomes. I’ve always known keywords were a trick, a distraction, and the wrong way to think about success or failure in PPC. Now that trick has been exposed and specific action can be taken on a keyword-by-keyword basis.

Ignoring this opportunity is negligent.

Suppose you were buying a basket of fruit from a local marketplace every morning. But all the vendors only sold baskets, you weren’t allowed to sort through and pick those that were ripe, avoid those that were rotten. You bought the basket, and got what you got. Even worse, you had to take them home and eat ‘em blindfolded.

So everyday that’s what you did. You enjoyed the luscious, winced at the sour, and spit out the rancid as quickly as possible. At the end of the meal sometimes your summary judgement was good and so your returned to that vendor the next day. Other times while there were some high points, there were too many lows and so that vendor was crossed off your list. It never mattered how much excellence there was, it was always the ratio of excellence to junk that rendered the final determination.

That’s exactly how you buy and judge keywords today. At least those with broad and phrase match applied.

There is a much better way.

Zooming In On Waste

As previously described, Keyword Zoom lets you look inside your keywords to see the search queries that the engine is matching and make immediate changes by adding negatives, creating new related keywords, and modifying the existing keyword options.

Unintended and inappropriate search queries matched to your keywords are wasting money every day all across your account. The most obvious place to start when utilizing Keyword Zoom is with those broad match keywords that are getting the highest click volume. They have the most search queries, and in nearly every case there are important improvements to make.

But to focus on serious waste, create a filter that finds all broad match keywords, with at least 10 clicks, and a quality score less than 7. This produces a list of keywords that desperately need help – and that are often easy to help in ways where a few minutes of effort can produce a lifetime of improvement.

Broader Than You Wanna Be

Note that bad queries are not causing the quality score problem. Quality score is only calculated when the query is equal to the keyword, so this is not an exercise to improve quality score. But the low quality score indicates that the keyword is getting low CTR even when the query is identical to the keyword, so it’s often even worse for other queries that are being matched to that keyword.

A huge percentage of the time your low quality score keywords will be generic terms attempting to cover a category or some other rather non-specific topic. Here are the kinds of keywords we often find with low quality scores in PPC accounts:

• military jackets
• water pipe repair
• best down pillow
• lost car keys
• debt settlement plan
• acne treatment

It’s easy to see why the PPC manager wants to reach these people, but it’s also clear that on broad match the search engine will find hundreds or thousands of queries that ‘match’ that keyword, and many of these will be completely and obviously inappropriate for whatever we’re selling or offering.

The engine will happily match ‘duvets’ to ‘pillow’, ‘annuity’ to ‘insurance’, or ‘dog therapy’ to ‘pet treatment’. They’re reasonable semantically, but wasteful financially. It takes pro-active action to avoid paying for these non-convertable queries again and again.

In one of these cases, a single negative would have saved $32 or over 6% of the spend in a 30 day period on a single keyword, boosting ROAS on that keyword by over 15%. That’s a single keyword in a single month – but add key negatives to the most clicked keywords in your account and consider the savings over a year and you have an option for very significant account improvement.

On The Positive Side

Finding and adding negatives is a quick win, and there are many of them. But in the process you’ll notice an overwhelmingly larger opportunity to expand keywords, improve match types, create new add groups, and generally improve your targeting, quality score, and revenues. I’ll cover that in more detail in a future post.

Ever since the release of Keyword Zoom, we’ve been talking a lot about search queries and keywords. Keywords are the gateway in PPC advertising that connect your business to prospects. But, how do you find keyword niches that are profitable?

In this webinar presented by Compete and ClickEquations, you’ll learn 2 unconventional keyword research techniques:

• Competitive intelligence to find keywords with strong intent before you launch your campaigns
• Search query mining to improve your targeting and cut unprofitable clicks after you launch

Watch the recording:

The Keyword Zoom feature is best applied to your most active and important keywords.

To quickly identify them, use the one-click segmentation features in ClickEquations.

Zooming on Head Keywords

The one-click head segment is a customizable feature that allows you to identify those keywords that are most important or influential on your  business.

By default, we create a ‘head’ segment of the keywords that drove 80% of your revenue over the past 30 days. But you can configure your own definition of head keywords in the Settings tab.

Choose to find top keywords based on Clicks, Revenue, or Cost.

The right choice depends on your business:

• Retailers will want to use Revenue or Cost.
• Lead-Gen or B2B firms will likely choose Cost or Clicks.
• Media firms would likely use Clicks or Cost.

Next, Define the date range (use a long one to wash out individual events or short-term bursts) and the threshold percentage. Experiment with threshold percentages, between 70 and 90 – again the right answer depends on your business and account performance.

Remember that the ‘head’ keywords are reassigned based on your definition only once each week – on Sunday night. So if you change your settings, check back the following Monday morning to see the effect. And only keywords and performance on the Search Network(s) are included – no content or display network keywords are included in the counts.

To use the Head Keywords segment to prioritize for Keywords Zoom:

1. Choose the ‘Head Keywords Only’ command from the Filters and Views menu
2. Sort by the metric used to define your head keywords (Revenue, Clicks, or Cost)
3. Select the top keyword, click the Keyword Zoom icon
4. Tune, Tune, Tune.

Filter For Better Zooming

Another – simpler and more generic – way to find keywords that are good candidates for Keyword Zoom is to use a saved filter.

The characteristics of a keyword that can usually be helped by Keyword Zoom include a good number of clicks (usually 10 or more), a broad or phrase match type, and position on the search network (as opposed to content/display).

If you define (and save) the following filter you can view only these keywords with just one click.

Creating this filter applies it, and in the future you can choose it from the Apply Saved Filter menu. Then just sort by Clicks and start zooming.

Zoom Anywhere

These are just two ways to prioritize to find opportune places to use Keyword Zoom to improve your results (like we did).

You can also use it on your brand keywords (using the one-click brand segmentation feature) or just search/filter/sort on criteria that make sense to you. If there are queries there is actionable information.

As you spend time with this new feature, we’d love to hear your comments on how you’re using it and the results you’re able to achieve.

Even though we occasionally rail against them, keywords are functionally the center of the paid search universe.

Their selection is the single largest point of control you exercise over your account. They hold the bids the (at least indirectly) impact how much you spend, and probably most importantly (and unfortunately) they’re the level at which clicks and CTR and conversions are reported.

Readers of this blog know we think the action is a level below -- where the specific search queries that have been matched to the keywords live, along with the text ad copy that people who execute those queries view and click through.

The belief is that there aren’t good or bad keywords, just queries that are worth more (when matched to the proper ad copy) and queries that are worth less (no matter what ad copy they’re matched with).

This is the reason we were the first paid search platform to offer detailed search query reporting. And even today our ClickEquations still offers by far the most complete and detailed query reporting in the industry.

But it we wanted to take it even further.

Making Search Queries Actionable

In the July release of ClickEquations queries become actionable. We’ve made it possible look inside the performance of any keyword and directly manipulate the queries that have consumed expense or driven revenue and tune the relationship between those queries and specific ad copy.

This is a huge breakthrough, and we call it Keyword Zoom.

To access Keyword Zoom you just double click on any keyword.

This which allows you to see:

• The search queries that the keyword attracted and how each performed.
• The ad copy that was shown to the people who entered these queries.
• Complete performance statistics and metrics for that keyword.

And enables you -- easily and in one place -- to:

• Turn a search query into a new negative keyword so you never pay for those kind of queries again.
• Turn a search query into a new keyword of any match type to capture more related queries and conversions.
• Edit existing ad copy or create new ads or variations to improve the alignment of queries to text ads.

The Power of Relationships

This is a killer feature because of the way it brings all of these capabilities together into one place and enables a fast and friction-free way to tune the performance of any keyword. You could have theoretically done these things before, but:

• By isolating the search queries from a single keyword, as opposed to presenting the list of all queries in an ad group or even campaign, it’s easier to focus on the implications of those queries to the keyword settings (bid and match type) and to think about how to act upon the query information.
  
• By making the transformation from search query into either positive or negative keyword a simple two-click operation (assuming you don’t want to customize any options, more of you do but there is power in having that choice) the process we call query-mining stops being a rare effort and becomes a core task in the search management workflow.
  
• By showing the full query list right next to all the text ads those searchers are seeing, it becomes far easier to reimaging and rewrite ad copy to be vastly more relevant and persuasive. Queries show a diversity and richness that it’s hard to imaging when just looking at or thinking about keywords.
  
• By showing the ad copy click and conversion performance for each different query you can for the first time see when ads are great for some searchers but poorly targeted at others. Just as keywords usually aren’t really bad or good (because some of the queries they catch are great and other queries matched to that same keyword are wastes) it frequently turns out that ad copy isn’t necessarily all bad or all good either. One text ad may work great for some queries and lousy for others -- now you can know this and act accordingly..

What’s happening here is that we’re for the first time exposing a 360-degree view around the keyword, showing how it relates to queries and ad copy and how those each relate to each other. To get a better sense of it, check out this video:

This ability -- the view and the fluidity with which it makes changes possible -- proves a whole new way to improve your paid search results. We’re very excited to bring you this capability in ClickEquations.

To learn more and get a complete demo of ClickEquations, attend one of our public webinars or contact us to schedule a personal discussion or demonstration.

The ability to prioritize and focus is a key skill for any paid search manager. With campaigns stuffed with hundreds-of-thousand or even millions of keywords, organized into hundreds or thousands of ad groups, and presenting metrics from zillions of clicks and conversions, there is always too much to do.

No paid search manager has ever finished their work and gone home early. Some may have gone home early, but they weren’t finished.

There are many wise and legitimate ways to prioritize. Perhaps the most important comes, ironically, from the ‘long tail’ that consumes so much of our media attention and has forced the culture of keyword expansion (a de-focusing force) upon us. The priority is at the head end.

The Big Head

In the last release of ClickEquations we introduced one-click segmentation features. One of them automatically tags some subset of your keywords as ‘head keywords’. The user-customizable definition starts as the smallest number of keywords that are responsible for 80% of your revenue over the last 30 days. In other words your 30 biggest earners.

In our 250,000 keyword demo account, between 200-900 keywords are normally tagged as ‘head keywords’ depending on purchase histories of the preceeding 30 days. That means using this one-click segment takes 99.8% of all the keywords in the account out of the way, and allows you to easily spend your time getting those .2% into tip-top shape.

Think about that for a second. Two-tenths-of-one-percent of our keywords drive 80% of our revenue. What a great opportunity to prioritize and focus.

• Most of us don’t spend enough time writing text ads – maybe for this small group we can find the time.
• Many accounts have too many keywords per ad group – maybe these winners can at least earn their way into super-narrow ad groups.
• Even query mining takes time – perhaps for these big-ticket words we can devote the attention required to add some negatives and promote some exact matches and push our profitability even higher.

With a management goal of getting everything right surrounding 500 keywords, there’s even a chance, admittedly slim, that we’ll finish and go home guilt-free for a change.

More importantly, it presents one clear signal we can use to prioritize. Again, it’s not the only one. It may not be perfect for everyone. But the idea of separating the urgent from the important from the interesting is critical in PPC and doesn’t get nearly enough attention.

A Bunch of Long Tails

If you’ve followed along this far in this series, you may have already guessed the rub with keyword prioritization.

We’re much bigger fans of search queries than we are of keywords, and our natural inclination would be to take any keyword that is garnering a lot of clicks, consuming a lot of expense, or generating almost any revenue at all and dive deep into the search queries that were matched to that keyword and add more negatives and new positive, more specifically matched, keywords.

In effect we want to create mini tails around our top performing keywords – extending the range and specificity of the keywords and flattening the curve that leads to the long tail.

Fragmenting our top performing keywords in this way can really skew the results of a head-defining approach like that described above. So over time we’ll have to move towards using top performing ad groups – each narrowly defined themselves – or tag-based clusters of keywords, to gain the focus we seek.

The goal and ultimately result will be the same, but the process will be much different.

Finding Your Priorities

For most people the benefits of a simple ‘head keyword’ definition far outweigh the limitations, at least unless they’ve already done a tone of query mining. The ‘head keywords’ approach is the right place to start and can be a great prioritization tool.

Longer term it should also be a goal to outgrow this technique. With aggressive query mining and organizational narrowing it should be considered a success when the process isn’t effective anymore and you need to move on to one that’s more sophisticated.

However you choose to do it, every paid search manager should be able to answer this question: Which 2% of my keywords do I have to execute on perfectly, and which 98% can I manage to much looser standards.

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: “Everything you know about AdWords is the basics Google wanted you to know. Just enough to get you hooked. But what if there was fundamental secrets that they neglected to share? Would you want to know them? Now you can! 21 Secrets Truths is what you must read, no, act on, before your competitors do.”

- Bryan Eisenberg Conversion Expert and New York Times Best-Selling Author ’.

Download Your Copy Today
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Paid search doesn’t exist in a vaccum, although it frequently operates in one.

We spend our days, brain power, and sweat building and rebuilding links in the chain of customer attraction and conversion only to have other important links in that same chain be effectively mismatched, perpeturally ignored, and often broken.

These realities have a direct impact on our results and yet have been pushed out of sight and out of mind too much of the time.

It’s no secret that the people responsible for driving traffic to the website very often aren’t in control of user experience once visitors arrive. This disconnnect is undoubtedly responsible for more waste and poor performance than even the worst bidding strategies, the poorest match type choices, or almost any other optimization mistake.

We began this series with the premise that each search is a question and each text ad an answer, or more accurately the promise of an answer. The answer of course has to be delivered on the landing page and website that the user is invited to visit.

A great many of the subsequent items in the series have focused on diversifying the questions you’re targeting, and differentiating them in terms of at least the ad groups and ad copy. Of course they should also be differentiated in terms of landing page too.

In some cases this is simply a matter of choosing the right landing page, but much more frequently it should also be a matter of creating new landing pages. Even if you have a large site with lots of highly targeted landing page candidates to choose from, your keywords and the search queries they attract will cover many different intents and personality types and buying cycle stages that aren’t addressed on existing versions of those pages.

Of course, almost nobody actually builds landing pages that aligned with all of their user segments because the resources aren’t available. Website developement tools, which for years ignored the basics of SEO but almost a decade later have finally included simple capabilites like title tag optimization and friendly URL structures, need to step up and make these types of page variation creation and management as easy as CSS has made on-the-fly font size or other design changes.

A precisely targeted and tactically aligned landing page is only the first step in the post-click conversion process. Many of the others – offer quality, purchase path, checkout process, etc – get even less attention than landing pages, on most sites. Yet despite some level of commercial visibility and conference session coverage, very few websites get any testing or tuning after deployment.

The exception seems to be in the lead-gen world, where offers are few in number and very high in value, extensive post-click testing is a necessary element of survival. But retailers and b2b marketers, in what seems like the vast majority of cases, do not have a culture of testing or the post-click resources are really necessary to work on an on-going basis on the entire start to finish process.

Is that your experience? Is there a good explanation for this?

The Real Issue

There are two problems with all of this.

First, paid search is judged and measured, and tuned and optimized, based on the results it produces despite the fact that it only controls a part of the sequence. PPC may be sending qualified buyers who are bungled post-click. Yet PPC generally gets the blame and has to adjust.

Second, full revenue potential is not being realized. Forgetting who is responsible and why, the fact that full end-to-end optimization isn’t happening is limiting our results. Those additional sales would benefit the entire organization, including of course the PPC team and the site owners and everyone’s larger business and economic interests.

This is a gigantic problem. It’s a failure of tools, training, resource allocation, and people. Paid search is a 40B industry for a few search engines, but on the spend side it’s made up of hundreds of thousands of relatively tiny advertisers who don’t have the scale, knowledge, or resources to get anywhere near optimization.

Something has got to change. Any ideas?

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: “Everything you know about AdWords is the basics Google wanted you to know. Just enough to get you hooked. But what if there was fundamental secrets that they neglected to share? Would you want to know them? Now you can! 21 Secrets Truths is what you must read, no, act on, before your competitors do.”

- Bryan Eisenberg Conversion Expert and New York Times Best-Selling Author ’.

Download Your Copy Today
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One of the ways I sometimes describe quality score is as a bozo filter. It’s a mechanism that enables Google to discourage and prevent bad advertisers.

There are two kinds of bad advertisers; unintentionally bad advertisers and intentionally bad advertisers.

Unintentionally bad advertisers just don’t know what they’re doing. They jam too many keywords into ad groups, use broad category terms and phrases, write insipid copy, and send all traffic to the home page.

Quality score discourages (or instructs if you like) these nieve young advertisers with low quality scores.

Intentionally bad advertisers aren’t likely to make any of those same mistakes. They build highly targeted ad groups, use multi-word keywords, tune ad copy assiduously, and create custom landing pages.

Yet quality score whacks them too. How can this be?

Quality Score as Stick

The answer almost universally is found in the way landing pages effect quality score. If you read all the Google help files on landing page quality score – which you should – you’ll quickly discover that it’s essentially a citizenship guide.

They’re telling you everything a page and site needs to do to be good and nice and helpful. It also is good advice for most businesses looking for both conversions and long term positive brand identification and customer satisfaction.

But these tactics and techniques may not be the best way to maximize short term conversions. Hype, deception, and murkiness may actually better accomplish that. And that’s exactly what landing page quality searches for and penalizes. And it’s penalized quite heavily.

In fact, getting a poor landing page quality rating can cause many or all of your keywords to become ineligible for a huge portion of the search query auctions where they would otherwise likey rank quite highly. Or it can drop your quality score so low so fast, that the incremental cost-per-click you have to pay is quite considerable.

The other risk of being a bad guy in landing page land, is that quality score penalties based on landing pages can extend to your entire account – beyond just those keywords that were originally pointed at the poorly rated pages.

Once you get a bad reputation they begin to either decide you’ve got one of those business models they don’t want advertising or are otherwise some type of undesirable advertiser. It can be very tough to dig out of that hole.

Quality Score as Carrot

It’s a lot easier for Google to tell the bad landing pages from the not bad ones, than it is to tell the good ones from the great ones. So for the most part – almost the entire part – quality score slams those who do bad (or try to) but does very little to assist those who make great landing pages and sites.

As long as you don’t make poor landing pages, and especially deceptive or otherwise unfriendly ones, you’re almost always OK from a quality score perspective. Think of it as a pass/fail grading system.

Reading the quality score official writings doesn’t give you this impression. They make it sound like really targeted landing pages with perfecly aligned copy will actually drive quality score up. I don’t think it’s technically true, and have had highly placed people from the Google quality team confirm this.

What I think is happening in this case is Google is in this case telling you what you should do, what they want you to do, and even what is good for you to do, but over-reaching what they can actually quantify and apply.

Over time, it would certainly not be surprising if their ability to distinguish truly great landing pages from those that are just good improves. The calculations and applications of quality score continue to evolve and change. The current advice is good, the only point here is that right now if you’re not bad then you’re probably OK.

Landing Pages are About Conversion

Landing pages are an interesting element to think about in terms of AdWords because they’re the only system element that resides outside the system. Keywords, bids, match types, target URLs, and everything else exists inside their little world.

Landing pages are post-click. They’re instruments of conversion. For most advertisers Google doesn’t know if you’re clicks are converting, and since that’s the goal is really is hard for them to judge your success.

It’s good and reasonable for them to ensure that people who search on Google aren’t led into a dark alley and whacked on the head. I think that’s what landing page quality does today.

Mistaken Identity

It is worth noting that algorithmically sometimes they get this one wrong. The AdWords Help Forums are full of stories of people who claim to be good guys – not something you alway want self-assessed – and yet get poor landing page quality scores. Often it seems their pages do give the scent of badness even if it wasn’t intentional. But other times it seems clear the all knowing GooglePlex has erred. When this happens, it’s not fun, but reaching out to AdWords Support and requesting re-evaluation and perhaps some human intervention has proven helpful. Usually not as quickly as people might like, but it works. FYI.

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: “Everything you know about AdWords is the basics Google wanted you to know. Just enough to get you hooked. But what if there was fundamental secrets that they neglected to share? Would you want to know them? Now you can! 21 Secrets Truths is what you must read, no, act on, before your competitors do.”

- Bryan Eisenberg Conversion Expert and New York Times Best-Selling Author ’.

Download Your Copy Today
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Text ads are trying to answer questions.

Writing text ads is difficult because you have only 95 characters to stand out from a sea of competing messages and persuade the searcher that you’re the ad to click.

There are many strategies and tactics to accomplish this, and both technical skill and creativity are required. The process takes considerable time and effort.

And there is only one way to measure success. Testing.

But testing requires more than simply running a couple of ads simultaneously. It requires the conditions for a fair test, a clear goal, and valid measurement and analysis. Much of what passes for text-ad testing in paid search lacks one or more of these requirements.

Let’s look a little closer at each to better understand how to properly test text ads.

Conditions For Text Ad Testing

Text ads cannot be effectively tested too early in the process of optimizing your account or ad groups.

If you haven’t yet optimized the keywords, match types, ad group organization, and negatives then the search queries coming into the ad group will be too diverse. If people are asking 25 different questions it’s impossible to compose any single answer that will satisfy all of them. If you try to test text ads too early, you won’t be able to trust the results. Maybe you’ve got a lousy text ad, or maybe the ad is just running against a lot of very untargeted or unqualified search queries.

So before even beginning to worry about text ad testing, make sure you’ve read and implemented Secret Truths #1 – #8. When the vast majority of the queries coming into an ad group are similar, you’re read to test text ads.

Of course, you have to write some text ads when you setup an ad group. And you should monitor and review their performance and make changes as necessary. But hard core text-ad testing – statistical comparisons – isn’t reasonable or necessary until the ad group has been properly constructed and intelligently optimized and – in terms of search queries – stabilized.

What You Can and Can’t Control

Another factor to consider in text-ad testing is the reality that paid search is a dynamic environment. Keywords get added, negatives expanded, bids change, competitors impact average positions, and other account modifications take place on a regular basis. There are variations in activity and results based on day of the week, week of the month, month of the year, weather, news events, sales, inventory, competitor promotions, and more.

So in the time it takes your ad group to get a sufficient number of impressions or clicks for a good test, how can you be sure that it is the ad copy that you’re really testing?

The answer is that you really can’t. There are no static environments in PPC. But all the ads in the test are subject to almost all the same environmental conditions, so many would argue these external influences don’t influence relative performance. That may be true, it may not. But you can’t control for many of these variables, so we ultimately have to accept them as a fact of life, a limitation in the system.

Whenever possible however, try to limit those changes you do control during deliberate text-ad tests. Don’t introduce new keywords or negatives or dramatically shift bids. Chance are if you find the need to make radical changes of any of these types you’d be better off making them and then restarting your tests.

Clear Text Ad Testing Goals

The goal of text ad testing is to determine which ad copy delivers the best click-through and/or conversion rates.

• Most ad testing focuses on CTR. That’s clearly the direct goal of the ad, and helps to drive up quality score.
• Conversion rate should be tracked and considered, even if CTR is the primary goal. There are many ways to incite a click, but Google gets paid for clicks while you get paid for conversions.
• The conversion-per-1000-impressions metric (CP1K) is a great way to blend these two goals and find the truly optimal ad copy. (I hope to write more about CP1K in the near future).

Statistically Valid Text Ad Testing Analysis

Assuming you have a clear goal in mind and a stable testing environment, test data becomes the next hurdle. How many impressions and clicks does a set of text ads need for a valid test?

The answer to that relatively straightforward question has eluded most PPC managers for years. I assume this is due to the fact that most of us aren’t trained mathemeticians or statisticians. (I’m certainly not.) And most of the software we use to create and edit text ads does not provided the statistical support we really need.

So we’ve slithered forward based on the conventional wisdom that suggests tracking ‘at least 100 impressions or 10 clicks before there is enough data to declare a winner’. Unfortunately this really isn’t very accruate or useful advice.

Statistically, it turns out that those of us who’ve been reacting to text-ads with anything near 100 impressions or a dozen or so clicks have regularly made essentially random decisions. We’ve paused the better ad many times, letting the loser run. We’ve sabataged our own results. Repeatedly. Over long periods of time.

Consider the example shown at right: Three text ads running in an ad group. About 500 impressions each.

Is there enough data to make a wise decision?

It seems pretty clear. The first ad at 1.98% CTR appears to be our winner. But the statistics tell us that it isn’t that clearcut.

I looked at the statistical significance and confidence intervals for these ads. We can only be 80% confident that the CTR difference between the first and second ad are actually different. Same for the difference between the second and third ad.

80% confidence is not very high.

It’s not considered high enough to be sure something is true in most activities where statistical confidence is considered. For scientific activities a 95% rate is the desired standard.

To understand the potential error in accepting these numbers, look (below) at the range of possible CTRs for each of these ads that we can be sure of with a 95% confidence.

The first ad may actually be as low as 0.82% CTR, or could be as high as 3.14%. That’s a pretty wide range – we just don’t know yet, with a high level of confidence, what the CTR of this ad is going to be. You can see similarly wide ranges for the other two ads, and in comparison see there is plenty of overlap in the potential which means if we really let this test play out, we may get a very different result.

So how many impressions would it take to get 95% confident in the differences?

If we let these ads run until they had around 1000 impressions each they’d achieve a 90% confidence. It takes nearly 1500 impressions per ad to hit 95% confidence.

The actual number needed for any given set of ads depends a lot on the CTRs and their relative difference. But it’s a rare circumstance when anything like 100 impressions or 10 clicks is adequate.

You can check the numbers on your own ads using two great tools:

• Vertster.com offers a simple, free, online utility that lets you enter CTRs for two ads and check the confidence level.
• Teascalc is an Excel sheet that costs $49 but offers a both confidence and interval data.

Making The Grade

Everything we do to create and optimize paid search accounts is done in hopes of showing the right people the right ad at the right price.

Their reaction to our ads is feedback on how well we’ve done at targeting them and organizing our accounts as well as on how aligned our answers are to their questions.

Fortunately for us if we do things right – in setting goals, creating testable conditions, and accurately measuring and analyzing we can get this feedback in clear, powerful, and actionable form.

Text ad testing isn’t just another wise and important step in paid search management. It’s the crucial step that pays off all the others.

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: “Everything you know about AdWords is the basics Google wanted you to know. Just enough to get you hooked. But what if there was fundamental secrets that they neglected to share? Would you want to know them? Now you can! 21 Secrets Truths is what you must read, no, act on, before your competitors do.”

- Bryan Eisenberg Conversion Expert and New York Times Best-Selling Author ’.

Download Your Copy Today
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Tomorrow June 8th @ SMX Advanced in Seattle I’m digging deep into AdWords Quality Score in the 10AM Session. But I’m not going to have time to cover the issue of what to do with poor performers. This post offers some thoughts on that topic, as an addendum offered in advance. I’ll post some version of the entire presentation online next week.

In the dark ages of AdWords, (before quality score) you couldn’t just bid on any old keyword. There was a minimum CTR requirement. When a new keyword was added to your account, Google gave you about 1000 impressions to prove that you could earn a click-through rate of at least 0.05%. If you didn’t meet or exceed that CTR level the word was paused. Game over.

Yes, they did allow you to try to improve by writing a new text ad, or editing your bid to test a higher position. But after another 1000 impressions or so, if one-half of one-percent of the users didn’t click, the keyword was shut down again.

The Age of Quality Enlightenment

In the AQ era (after quality score) things are more complex. Poor performing keywords are sometimes denied all impressions, but more often they’re pushed down in position and generally shown less frequently but still shown occasionally.

More importantly, you are allowed to compensate for bad quality with high (or extra-high) bids, and still get your ads shown regardless of performance.

Protection From Yourself

There are many ways to look at this change. Advertisers didn’t like being denied the ability and opportunity to run ads in the rather abrupt way of the old .05% CTR threshold. It wasn’t entirely fair – obviously there is not one ‘good’ CTR for the many categories and business – and it didn’t recognize the different goals and success thresholds of different advertisers.

But the willingness and even bravery of Google to deny advertisers the ability to advertise should be considered.

They did it to protect user experience – if you couldn’t satisfy or at least interest that tiny percentage of the people that you’re targeting, it does pretty clearly suggest that your ads are disinteresting to a whole lot of people.

I think they also did it to stop advertisers from wasting good money after bad, and ultimately having a poor experience themselves. If some of your keywords perform and make money, you keep those and wish you could find more. But if they allowed you to aimlessly run poorly performing ads, at some point it’s likely that you (or whomever is writing your checks) decides that this channel really isn’t working and cuts off all funding.

This creation of scarcity – only a limited number of keywords work for you – leaves you willing to bid up those remaining keywords to maximize volume, and builds a desire to work harder to find additional keywords that do perform adquately. But in this world they have to perform or they’ll be turned off.

That was a clear signal, and it seems a lot of advertisers needed it.

The Freedom To Waste Money Endlessly

Today, there is a line below which your ads are ‘not showing’ because your advertising is failing on that keyword. It’s ostensibly based on quality score, but we all know that quality score is just a fancy way of saying click-through-rate. But it’s a more complicated calculation and is highly customized to the keyword – it’s clearly advanced from the old 0.05% and you’re out days.

But the line is far lower down the performance spectrum. We’re talking quality scores of 1, 2, and maybe 3 here. These are hideously low CTRs or keywords with terrible relevance.

The everyday bad performers are allowed to keep running. Keywords where something is very clearly wrong: those with quality scores of 3, 4, 5, (and even long-standing 6′s). Keywords where you are clearly and plainly underperforming other advertisers. Keywords where your ad copy is not compelling, your offer is not relevant to very many searchers, or something is just wrong.

By keeping these keywords running you’re wasting a lot of money. You’re over-paying on a per-click basis for the right to keep these stinkers in the game. And you’re lowering your account CTR history to the detriment of all your good performing keywords.

Google lets you pay up and keep spending. You’ll get less impressions per keyword, but with broad or phrase match they’ll find some crazy queries to match you to. You’ll get some clicks and spend spend spend.

But how many keywords with quality scores below 7 have ROI’s above 100%? Very very few.

So Why Do It?

Wouldn’t it be better to turn those keywords off. You tried. It didn’t work. Cut your losses and move on.

What is it you expect to change or improve over time?

I can think of only three valid reasons to let keywords with quality scores below 7 keep running:

• Profitable. It happens. If you’re making money then more power to you. Let ‘em run.
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• Rehab. If you’re really working on them, testing new creative, removing any relevance or landing page warnings, refining keywords and negatives and match types to find a winning combination – then by all means keep working while improvement is possible.
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• High Cost Low Conversion. As discussed in this earlier post, there are situations, often in B2B primarily, where it makes more sense to focus on conversion rates than CTRs. Managing PPC in this case plays be a different set of rules.

If you really can’t muster the willpower or courage to turn off failing keywords when one of these aren’t true, you really should consider opening a second AdWords account and move them there. At least that way it’s easy to see and measure the cost of this decision, and more importantly the collateral damage of poor lifetime CTR is avoided in your main – and hopefully moneymaking – main AdWords account.