ClickEquations Blog

Searchers never see your keywords, match types or bids. They do see their own search query and your text ad. Your text ad is the first opportunity you have to attract a potential customers.

Not surprisingly, your ability to write effective text ads plays a dramatic role in determining how many people you can reach and whether they’re the right type of customers. Yet, even the most seasoned marketers would fail at guessing which of their ads will be successful. That’s why PPC ad testing is fundamentally linked to profitable campaigns.

We’re big fans of testing and data based decisions, which is why we released Text Ad Zoom. Instead of relying on instinct and guesswork,  Text Ad Zoom lets you pick the best performing ads based on statistically significant data.

To celebrate the release of Text Ad Zoom, I’ve scoured the web to create the Ultimate List of PPC Ad Testing Resources. It’s one stop for advice test design, measurement and a healthy dose of copywriting ideas, so you have something to test.

While I tried to be as exhaustive as possible, I’m sure that I’ve missed some great resources. Please add your favorite articles, videos and white papers/ebooks in the comments section and I’ll add them to the list.

Finally, if you’d like to see Text Ad Zoom in action, and all of the other great ClickEquations features, request a demo or email sales@clickequations.com

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PPC Ad Testing & Measurement

There is an art and science to PPC ad testing. These posts cover the ins and outs of campaign settings, test design, ideas for testing and how to analyze the results.

• Basics
  • Learn the Basics of Testing Ad Copy: A PPC Primer by John Lee
  • Want to Double Conversions in One Month? Split Those Ad Groups by David Szetela
  • Measuring a Text Ad’s Effectiveness by David Szetela
  • Ad Text Testing – a PPC Manager’s Constant Friend and Companion by John Lee
  • Paid Search Ad Testing: Manage To ROI Or CTR? by Andrew Goodman
  • PPC Testing Part 1: The Ground Rules by Josh Dreller
  • Never Odd Or Even: PPC Ad Text Testing Made Easy by Jessica Niver
  • Simple PPC Ad Tests Can Drive Up Your Click-Throughs and Conversions by Andrew Rudnick
  • How To Write and Effectively Test Your PPC Ad Texts by Greg Meyers
  • How to Execute a Flawless Ad Copy Test in AdWords by Ryan Woolley
  • An Easy-To Follow Method For Ad Optimization & Testing by Crosby Grant
• Advanced
  • Secret Truth Series #18: Effective Text Ad Testing by Craig Danuloff
  • The Pitfalls Of A/B Ad Split Testing, Part 1 by Matt Van Wagner
  • The Pitfalls Of A/B Ad Split Testing, Part 2 by Matt Van Wagner
  • The Pitfalls Of A/B Ad Split Testing, Part 3 by Matt Van Wagner
  • Step-by-Step Instructions For Testing Low Volume Ad Copy by Brad Geddes
  • Statistical Significance: Not Just for Geeks Anymore by Brad Libby
  • Visualizing your Ad Test Results to Boost Confidence by Chad Summerhill
  • Best Practices and Text Ad Testing by Craig Danuloff
• Testing Ideas
  • 5 Ideas for A/B Testing Your PPC Ad Text by Amber Speer
  • Ad Text Optimization -- What To Test (And When)? by Dave Greenbaum
  • Ad Text Display URL – What to Test by Dave Greenbaum
  • Google Changes Ad Display Rules & Creates a New Testing Opportunity by Brad Geddes
• AdWords Settings and Features
  • Step by Step Guide for Using Adwords’ Campaign Experiments (ACE) for Ad Copy Testing by Bonnie Schwarz
  • To Optimize or Not To Optimize, Google’s New Ad Setting by Amy Hoffman

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PPC Ad Copywriting

Effective PPC ad copywriting distills every direct marketing principle into a few lines and a far too few characters. These posts were a bit harder to organize. I pulled all of the articles specifically focused on copywriting for beginners into one group. Lists of tips and mistakes to avoid were a popular set of headlines, though they’re not particularly different from the overview & advanced group, though easier to scan. If you’re looking for PPC ad inspiration, there’s not shortage in this list.

• Basics
  • Paid Search Ad Copy: Five Things Newbies Don’t Know by Andrew Goodman
  • A Beginners Checklist for Writing Benefit-Focused Ad Texts by Pete Hall
  • PPC 101 Writing Successful Creatives by Frank Watson
• Tips & Mistakes to Avoid
  • The 4 Keys to Writing a Paid Search Masterpiece by Jeremy Hull
  • 9 Mistakes When Creating Ad Text by Amber Speer
  • 9 Tips to Write Effective Google AdWords Copy by Saad Kamal
  • 7 Ways to Be Sure You’re Writing the Best Ads Possible by Amber Speer
  • You Will Never Write the Perfect Ad Text, but Here Are 2 Ways To Keep Getting Closer by Joseph Kerschbaum
  • The 6 Next Steps After Your AdWords Content Optimization by Joseph Kerschbaum
  • Paid Search Ad Copywriting: 7 Heavenly Virtues by Andrew Goodman
  • 8 Essentials For Crafting Killer Paid Search Ad Copy by Alan Rimm-Kaufman
• Overview & Advanced
  • Secret Truth Series #17: Lament Of The Text Ad Copywriter by Craig Danuloff
  • Effective PPC Ad Copy, Part 1 by Ron Jones
  • Effective PPC Ad Copy, Part 2 by Ron Jones
  • Paid Search Ad Copy: Kicking It Up A Notch by Robert J. Murray
  • Two Advanced Tactics for PPC Copywriting by Josh Dreller
  • The Right Brain Of Paid Search Ads: Tips & Tricks For Creative Ad Copywriting by Josh Dreller
  • Tailor Your Ad Copy to Buy Cycle Stages by Mona Eleseseily
  • Killer PPC Ads: The Final Word by David Szetela
  • PPC Advertising: Art or Science? by David Szetela
  • The Secret Formula for Writing Mesmerizing Headlines by Sherice Jacob
  • How to Train PPC Copywriters: Five Pay-Per Click Copywriting Best Practices by Dave Greenbaum
  • Creating Killer Ads Using Bing Dynamic Text by Jen Barrett
  • Why and How You Should Rethink Ad Writing and Bidding Strategies by Bryon Watson
  • Writing Ads: Bust out of a Rut by Perry Marshall
  • How Can I Make it Better? Part 5: Improving Ad Text by Rob Boyd
  • Kick Your Quality Scores Back Into Gear with a Few Ad Text Changes by Amber Speer
  • Using Ad Text to Find the Right Clicks by Andrew Rudnick
  • Stop Spending Thousands of Dollars on Unqualified Traffic by Writing Smarter Ad Texts by Amber Speer
  • Write PPC Ads that Scream and Stand Out From the Pack by Joseph Kerschbaum
  • How to Write Ad Texts that Promise and Landing Pages that Deliver by John Lee
  • Catch the BEST Leads, Not the MOST Leads by Using Qualifiers in Your Ad Text by Amber Speer
  • The Benefits of Using Benefit-Driven Ad Texts: What’s in Your Tackle Box? by Joseph Kerschbaum
  • Catch More Clicks and Conversions with Better Ad Text: Use the Right Lures! by Joseph Kerschbaum
  • Ad Text Evolution: 5 Changes to Your AdWords Ads & How They Affect Your Bottom Line by David Greenbaum
  • Ad Text Tips and Tricks for the Content Network by Erin Sellnow
  • What Your Text Ads Say About You by Erin Sellnow

Videos, Webinars & Slide Presentations

If your brain is numb from reading about PPC ad testing and copywriting, check out these videos and presentations instead.

• Write Killer PPC Text Ads
  
• PPC Text Ad Statistical Analysis
  
• PPC Ad Text Best Practices from PPC Hero
  
• How You Can Write Killer Ad Copy


• The Van Wagner Ad Sets Optimization Model


• Test That Ad (Panel presentation at SMX)


• Writing & Testing Ad Copy -- Connecting With Your Customers From The Very Start
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• Require Registration
  • Paid Search Testing & Experimentation: Optimizing for Superior Results
  • Writing Killer Text Ad Copy: 1001 Secrets for Success
  • Beyond the Text: Getting the Most from Your PPC Ads
  • Breakthrough in PPC Ad Testing and Optimization: Using Ad Sets to Improve Even Your Best PPC Ad Campaign
  • PPC Testing & Optimization 2010: Best Practices

It was exactly two years ago today that I posted the first bit of what I thought was going to be a quick series of posts to dispense with this issue of quality score once and for all.

The idea seemed reasonable enough (they all do when they pop into my head): write a chapter (post) a day for two weeks or so and nail a clear definition and tactical plan for all things quality score.

Two years later and I’m pleased to say I’ve nearly got it. Six chapters are back from the copy editor, four more are in her hands, and the last couple will get there soon.

What took so long?

There were a number of factors:

• It’s a big topic. Quality score is not one simple thing nor does it have one simple impact. It’s complex and pervasive in AdWords. Way moreso than it first appears.
  
• Google hasn’t fully explained it. They’ve said a lot about it, but they had left a lot of big obvious questions unanswered.
  
• It’s subtle and complicated – Therefore it’s a bit difficult to explain clearly. This was probably the biggest time sink, trying to boil down the material to be comprehensive and not confusing or just plain dull.
  
• This isn’t my full time job. Life at ClickEquations and outside of it takes up a little time.
  
• My attention wanders. Bob Dylan has played 188 shows since that first post was written, for example.

Why It Matters

Of course, none of that matters. What matters is that every time someone does a search where one of your keywords might match and one of your ads might be shown, quality score determines if it’s shown, where it’s positioned, and how much you pay. Your success in paid search is literally defined by how effectively you earn good or great qualty scores.

It’s something we all should understand.

The role of quality score in paid search is unique: it is both grading your past (quality score is a measure of the success of any keyword) and at the same time influencing your future (quality score is a prediction of future success which it then plays a role in making come true).

Anything that accurately tells you how well you’ve done and then determines how well you’re going to do should be paid a lot of attention. I argue in the book that quality score should drive which keywords are in your account and which ones get deleted. It should drive the organizational structure of your ad groups. It should drive the copy in your text ads. And it certainly has a lot to do with how you’ll have to bid.

It doesn’t make sense to spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per month advertising via paid search and not deeply understand such a core aspect of the paid search process.

Imagine playing a game every day – for money – and not knowing all the rules?

Yet this is how most people have effectively been forced to play. The basics of quality score are well known, and that’s a big improvement over 2 or 3 years ago when the subject was almost universally ignored. But as soon as you get past the basics, past the generalities, into the land of ‘what exactly should I do with this keyword’, you get to a place where even the very best in the business (and I’m lucky enough to talk to a great many of them with some frequency) just haven’t been sure what to do. The facts, at that level of detail, haven’t been available.

Or they’ve been shattered and scattered into different pieces in different places, with pockets of incorrect info mixed liberally throughout just to make it fun.

Is this any way to conduct business or spend millions of dollars? It really isn’t.

I have some fun analogies in the book about what other businesses would be like used similar terms & conditions and communication strategies. Nobody would accept it and nobody would do business with them. But who can stop advertising on Google just because they’re not getting all of their questions answered?

Google’s Role

At which point we have to stop and praise the truly amazing copywriters at Google. There are dozens of extremely well written posts in the AdWords help system, and blog posts and responses in the help forum, and still they managed to not explain to us precisely how we’re being rated or what we should do to score higher and do better. The broad strokes are extremely clear, but the details are entirely lacking.

To be fair, their job is to provide an overview to millions of advertisers, the vast majority of whom need exactly the level of detail they get. And I genuinely believe their writing is incredibly accurate, clear and concise. But it doesn’t go as far as serious advertisers spending real money need or I think deserve.

Some of the key people at AdWords agreed that ‘advanced users’ desired and required a different kind of information. And they were willing to share – in very large part – the information that was necessary to produce this new resource. They were really open and really helpful.

By all appearances they are happy to have a more complete picture of quality score out there, but the opportunity or the format hadn’t presented itself, or maybe nobody had every found the right way to ask them about it before.

Get Yours

In any case, I believe and hope this book will be useful to all of us who who have been craving more depth and details about how quality score is calculated, how it impacts the account, and how to manage it more effectively.

ClickEquations clients will be getting a free copy.

Learn more and order your copy today.

If the wind holds up, books will be out in time for SMX Advanced in Seattle. Maybe we’ll have a little QS-Geek party.

I was wrong. A couple of times.

The subject was ‘how quality score works’. And in both cases I wrote long detailed posts on this very blog, and I have come to learn that these particular posts were not accurate.

My revised world view was provided courtesy of our friends at Google. They have been kind enough to help me to better understand quality score – the gory details and the dark recesses – over the past six months or so, and I’m going to share some of what I’ve learned.

Actually, I’m going to share all of what I’ve learned, but only some of it will be here on the blog. For the full story, you’ll have to get yourself a copy of my upcoming book ‘Quality Score in High Resolution‘ which will be out in June.

If you’re a ClickEquations client, you’ll be getting a courtesy copy.

Otherwise you can pre-order your own copy for a limited time at a 46% discount off the not-so-tiny retail price.

Now on to my most recent mistake.
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The Actual Truth About Quality Score and Search Queries

A few months ago I wrote a post called ‘Match Types & Quality Score – The Truth At Last‘. It turns out the title probably should have been ‘Match Types & Quality Score – More Confusion and Inaccuracy’. I thought I had it right, but my source was reading between the lines in the detailed study of the official word and various conversations over the past few years.

Now this is embarrasing for many reasons. Chief among them is the fact that I’m not a fan of all the how freely incorrect information and poor advice flows through blogs and tweets and even from the conference podium in this market. I generally work hard to know my song well before I start singing, as some old man once said when he was younger than he’s now. But I blew it on this one (and at least one other which I’ll admit next Monday.)

I am glad that I get to correct the error. I wrote this book to clear up the many mistaken assumptions and recommendations I regularly see passed off as quality score information and ‘tips’. The fact that the research process exposed some of my own errors is a fair price to pay to set the overall record straight.

When I sat down with Google to ask for their help in research and tech-editing the book, I told them that I really didn’t want to do all this work and get it wrong. But I knew there were many specific points that I couldn’t be sure of, because the published material wasn’t detailed enough. I was very pleased and excited when they agreed to help. Over time they answered every question I asked, and only rarely with a ‘no comment’.  This includes responding to the ’11 Hard Questions About Qualty Score‘ I posted a few months ago.

The Details of My Mistake

The crux of the mistake I made concerning the role of search queries was taking the fact that google says ‘quality score is calculated based on keyword performance only when a keyword perfectly matches a search query’ too literally.

One of the things I learned while writing the book and trying to follow all the threads presented in the AdWords help files and official information, is that whenever someone (including Google) says ‘quality score’ you’d better quickly ask ‘which one’ (the book lists eight of them).

In this case I fell down the very easiest hole – the statement above refers to what I call ‘visible quality score’ the number we all see next to our keywords in the AdWords interface. Visible quality score differs from the versions of quality score used to calculate important things like ad rank and CPC in a number of ways.

The statement above is entirely true in terms of visible quality score – the numbers you see are only impacted by queries that equal the keywords – but that does not mean, as I claimed in the earlier blog post, that the quality score from queries identical to a keywords is used to make decisions or calculations about queries that are not identical to the keyword.

To be fair and complete (and slightly mysterious) there is a second cause of my error. This one is based on what I think is an intentional misdirection Google uses when talking broadly about quality score. Google is expert at shaping our perceptions and expectations, and one of the ways they do this is by creating impressions that aren’t literaly true but serve some other purpose – sometimes even for our own good.

Suffice it to say that when that blog post was written I still held some nieve (although almost universally held) beliefs and I am no longer so afflicted.

The third element of my mistake, this is more of a proof or an error-of-oversight, is the fact that the core description of the calculation of qualty score includes ‘the relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query’. So Google had in fact already definitively confirmed that search query was considered. I knew that but overlooked it’s implication when writing that post.

How Search Queries Influence Quality Score

When quality score is being calculated, after a query has been made and before the advertisers and pricing has been decided, AdWords looks at a wide range of factors to assign your keyword a quality score. One of those factors is relationship between the current search query and the current keyword. That relationship can dramaticaly impact the resulting quality score, which means that different search queries matched to one keyword may see significantly different rankings and significantly different CPCs even if they achieve the same ranking.

Search queries are a part of what determines quality score, just not the quality score you see in your account every day.

Doubling Down and Getting It Half Right

I compounded my error by going on to say that the solution to the problem of search queries not impacting quality score, was to create new keywords in order to give each query what amounted to ‘access’ to its own quality score.

The point I was making may have been wrong, but the idea still has merit. By adding a new keyword from what was once just a search query, you do gain the ability to see the quality score for that query – because now it will be identical to the keyword.

Suppose you bid on the broad match keyword ‘dog food’ and it was frequently getting matched to the search queries ‘organic dog food’ and ‘cheap dog food’ among many others. Now further suppose that when AdWords looked at the ‘relationship between these queries and the keyword’ what they saw was, relative to the query ‘dog food’ itself, very positive for the query ‘organic dog food’ and fairly negative for the query ‘cheap dog food’.

In that case, the quality score visible in the account would reflect the performance of the ‘dog food’ search queries. But the queries ‘organic dog food’ and ‘cheap dog food’ would get real-time qualty score calculations, and the resulting impression counts, positions, and costs, based on their own merits. But you would never be able to see those differences.

If on the other hand, you added ‘organic dog food’ and ‘cheap dog food’ as their own keywords (probably in phrase or exact match, but that really doesn’t matter) then the visible quality scores that would appear for these keywords would (ultimately perhaps not immediately) reflect the full detail of their performance and value as AdWords saw it.

By splitting them out you’d be able to make their ‘invisible’ quality scores visible.

A Lot of Shadows In A Short Hallway

I hope this post clarifies the facts about search queries and quality score. I regret and apologize for the original mistake.

This episode highlights a lot about the complexity of quality score – both in terms of how it works and how we as paid search managers get information about it. The complexity of both of thse is one of the main reasons I took up the task of figuring this stuff out and writing this book. This post has turned out long enough, so I’ll say more about that in the near future.

In the meantime, if you’d like to support this project, please consider taking advantage of the pre-sale pricing and offers.

This is a repost of my monthly column at Search Engine Watch.

When you’re dealing with a niche and high value product, competition for active buyers in paid search can be fierce. And expensive. Consider this example from enterprise security:

It’s basic economics: the smaller the universe and higher the value of click, the higher the CPC. If you’re in B2B or marketing another complex purchase, you likely need to be in front of this audience.

But, it’s not the only way to reach them. And you can pay 90 percent less.

Target Prospects When They’re Ready to Learn

Buying isn’t a linear process, but prospects generally go through some various phases of consideration before they purchase. The classic marketing AIDA model is a good way to think of the phases of search activity. It stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action and looks a little like this:

 

Somebody searching for “networks security software,” for example, is likely in the Action phase. Their search goals are focused around the execution of their purchase vs. research about the problem.

That same person would like search “how to improve network security” or “network security advice” well before they’re ready to buy. When prospects are in the awareness stage, they’re looking for education, not a sales pitch.

They’re also much cheaper to target.

I know this from personal experience. I manage the paid search campaign for ClickEquations, a SaaS platform to help people measure and manage their paid search advertising more effectively. As you can imagine, reaching Action searchers is pricey.

However, that same audience often searches for education about how to manage paid search efficiently. You can offer them a white paper. Educational clicks are 90 percent less expensive:

Ready to Learn

Ready to Buy

In addition to reducing your cost, you get the benefit of reaching customers before the competition and the ability to establish yourself as a thought leader.

Successfully targeting learners vs. buyers requires a different approach. Here are three tips for reach your prospects when they’re ready to learn.

Tip 1: Get Their Contact Information Without Asking For It

It’s common knowledge that adding form fields decreases conversion rate and increases your cost-per-conversion in most cases. But, how much do you really give up?

Jon Miller, co-founder and head of marketing at Marketo (disclosure: I’m a customer), wrote a really interesting article where he quantified the cost of adding more fields to his landing pages:

Conversion rate decreased 30 percent and cost went up $10 per lead! Not surprisingly, the most expensive field to add was phone number.

Asking for a phone number is often a sticking point for sales and marketing. Sales wants and needs the number to reach out to prospects, but, for early stage, educational content in particular, prospects are reluctant to disclose it and you miss a chance to establish a relationship.

As Miller points out in the article, however, there are other ways to get the data.

One solution to consider is Jigsaw Enterprise. It’s a Salesforce company that’s directly integrated into the platform. What distinguishes it from others is their data source: it’s crowdsourced as people enter contact information they have to credits for the info they want.

It’s also automatic. You can set up the system to auto-append information that isn’t associated with the record (which I recommend rather than over-writing something a prospect or sales rep has entered):

 

The data, which is appended every 12 hours, isn’t perfect or complete and the system isn’t priced for small businesses. But it does offer an automated way to increase conversions without losing all of the contact information your sales team needs.

Tip 2: Integrate Offline Conversion Tracking

Finding the keywords and setting up a landing page are relatively straightforward processes when you’re targeting learners. As you would expect, these people need to be nurtured and marketed to over time before they move into the Desire and Action phases.

That exacerbates an underlying issue with complex sales: long sales cycles and offline conversions. Not every educational prospect will be equally valuable. That is say: not every lead is qualified.

Ultimately, we want to adjust our marketing mix and paid search buys based on what closes, not just who flirts with us.

From a PPC perspective, however, that presents a challenge as we have to tie together three systems:

• Search engine data
• Our PPC tool
• Business outcomes from our customer relationship management (CRM) database

The trick to connecting the three systems together is the use of an external ID for each keyword. That unique key allows you connect front end data (clicks, cost, CPC) with online conversions (form submissions) and the later stage activity (opportunities, sales, retention).

A key can be any alphanumeric value, for example extid=18MQGH1MGKKQAG3T0.

You need four things to use this approach:

1. System To Generate External IDs: This can be as simple as a spreadsheet or a more sophisticated platform that creates them automatically. Each key has to be specific to the keyword.
2. Hidden Form Field to Capture External IDs: The IDs will be appended to your destination URL as a parameter. A hidden form field on your landing page will grab that ID from your URL. If you’ve ever setup a Salesforce form and added in a campaign or lead source variable, it’s the same approach.
3. Method to Export External IDs with Values from a CRM: You need to be able to create a report or list that associates each external ID with a latent conversion and value from your system (e.g., “1 Opportunity” and “$500″).
4. Tool to Connect Paid Search Data with External Conversions: Once you have an ID for a keyword and a value for that ID, you need technology to stitch together the two so you can measure, report, optimize, and bid on business outcomes.

Note that outcomes data, by its very nature, will be sparser than micro-conversions. You can optimize on earlier actions and do a biweekly or monthly review with the later stage data.

Tip 3: Retarget Prospects on the Display Network

It used to be that search marketers only got one, maybe two, chances to convert someone on a landing page before we lost them.

That changed with the introduction of retargeting, or remarketing as Google calls it. Briefly: remarketing allows you to show display ads only to an audience of people who have been to your site and exhibited some desirable behavior.

A classic business-to-consumer example is shopping cart recovery, or the targeting of buyers who added items to their shopping cart but who did not check out.

There is a parallel in B2B marketing. Prospects who visit your landing page, but don’t fill out your form are the most likely to convert from a display campaign and worth chasing with ads for a few days at least.

Setting up a remarketing campaign is relatively straightforward.

First, create what Google calls “Audience.” Set up a separate campaign for retargeting. Go to Campaigns > Audiences > Add Audience. If you don’t see the Audience tab, select the drop down arrow to add it.

 

In the “Create and manage lists” section, you’ll need to create three lists:

1. People who visited your landing page.
2. Those who visiting your thank you page (i.e., converted).
3. A custom combination of list 1 and not list 2 (i.e., those who visited, but didn’t convert)

For each list (1 and 2), you’ll have a tag to put on your landing page (list 1) and your thank you page (list 2). This allows Google to cookie your audiences appropriately.

There is a lot of strategy in how to design and prioritize remarketing lists. I recommend you read Brad Geddes excellent article on the topic for more detail.

To be read for a remarketing campaign you’ll need:

• Banner ads to run on the display network. You’ll want text ads too, as some sites don’t accept banner ads.
• Separate campaigns for better budgeting and bidding.
• Proper tracking and attribution. Last click will only make it look like your retargeting campaign deserves all of the credit.

And We’re Only Just Getting Started…

Complex sales require marketing that supports how buyers purchase at every stage. Paid search is an integral part of that mix. If you’re locked out of active buyers because of CPCs or simply looking for a way to expand your PPC buy, targeting prospects when they need education is a great strategy.

To learn more about B2B paid search, I recommend you read The Buyersphere Project by Mediative (formerly Enquiro) and Ryan DeShazer’s recent column, “The Reinvention of B2B Paid Search.

The previous post (Bid Management Is Dead) probably should have titled “You’re Not Ready For Bid Management”. If you go back and read it again under that title it’s somewhat less controversial.

But it probably would have garnered a lot less tweets and comments, so looking back maybe it wasn’t a bad decision.

Bidding Isn’t That Important

The phrase from the post that got the most attention, aside from the title, was ‘bidding isn’t that important‘. Many of the thoughtful comments from some of my favorite PPC’ers were defending the honor and importance of bidding. Obviously they’re correct.

But ‘bidding isn’t that important’ was preceded by ‘For most paid search advertisers’ and I’ll stand behind the full sentence and even repeat it: For most paid search advertisers bidding isn’t that important.

The point of the post was intended to be the one made by the cute little skiing analogy – advanced tactics aren’t necessary until after you’ve mastered, or at least made substantial progress on, the basics.

Every month get to look inside dozens of new paid search accounts. From clients to prospects to folks I meet on airplanes who just want me to help them with their quality scores, I see exactly how all these accounts are configured in terms of keywords, match types, ad group organization, bids, and all the other factors.

It’s rarely a pretty sight.

Is The Keyword Bid-Ready?

The vast majority of paid search accounts that I see are terribly constructed and poorly managed. They’re filled with entirely too many broad match keywords. They have way too many keywords per ad group. Their ad copy is completely uninspired, and worse shows no signs of having been well tested. Their quality scores reflect these facts. And their bids do not seem well chosen.

This is who the last post was aimed at. The huge number of account managers – and sadly I don’t even think they know who they are – that need to work very hard on fundamentals before getting deeply into bidding strategies or tactics.

My advice in these cases is to fix these problems in the order I just complained about them. In such massively sub-optimal accounts, bidding is not a priority.

My worry, because I see it several times each week, is that these advertisers and even professional search managers hear so much about bid management as a core element of paid search that they’ve been missed the fact (not surprising because I’ve never heard it mentioned anywhere else) that there is a pre-requisite to bid management. It’s a 300-level course and you can’t take it until some other requirements are complete.

What The Pro’s Know

As several of the smart folks from RimmKaufman pointed out, paid search management is an iterative activity, and search managers can walk and chew gum at the same time. Ideally, you’ll make the best bid decisions possible at every stage of campaign development and tuning. If you’re playing the game at their level that is absolutely correct.

But with respect I’d suggest that the RimmKaufman’s (and their lucky clients) and Zaharias’s and Summerhill’s and Fergie’s are all PPC PHD’s (and beyond). These folks and anyone like them obviously wisely spends considerable time and resources on bid intelligence.

What Many Others Don’t

Unfortunately, it isn’t easy for most paid search advertisers or managers to know if they or their account or keywords are bid-ready. Ironically in an industry with as much shared knowledge and free resources as any there is neither an automated account grader nor a simple and widely accepted set of rules-of-thumb to simplify self-assessment.

If I had to compose a test, I’d start with these questions:

• What percentage of your revenue is driven by Broad Match keywords?
• How many keywords are in your average ad group?
• What is the largest number of keywords in any ad group?
• How many keywords attract over 25 unique search queries?
• How many text ads were testing in each ad group before you arrived at the ones now running?
• What percentage of your keywords, on an impression weighted basis, have quality scores below 7?

Questions like these and perhaps a half a dozen others, can give a sense of how well the basics of PPC have been implemented and executed.

The Truth About Bid Management (Part 1 of 100)

Yes bids need to get set along the way. The ‘perfect’ answer to all of the above questions is not reached easily or quickly. Yes bidding in an iterative process that ideally would be done and redone as this road to perfection is achieved. And the farther one gets the greater percentage of time and level of effort bidding deserves.

My argument ‘against’ bidding is really just the suggestion that there is a threshold – a minimum level of campaign quality – before fine tuning bidding should much of a priority.

I believe this both because until that time non-bidding activities have more impact, and because the data generated by an ‘under-developed’ campaign is dirty and a poor basis for any bid algorithm or strategy anyway. That last bit will be the subject of more posts in the near future.

So my esteemed colleagues are right. Bid management is not dead and can in fact be quite important. But I think that the point of the previous post was completely valid. For many advertisers, depending on the state of their account and their skills, bidding is overemphasized and over-rated. Bidding is also hard to get right, easy to get wrong, and I believe many elements of it are dramatically misunderstood.

Perfect fodder for future posts.

Regular readers of this blog know I have a lot of pet peeves related to paid search, but perhaps the largest is the fact that paid search management – the process and the software that supports it – is often referred to as ‘bid management’.

The use of the term bid management to summarize paid search management suggest a profound lack of understanding. Of course, many people genuinely think that’s what the discipline is called. They don’t really mean anything by it – they’re just repeating the phrase they heard.

My problem with the phrase is that it perpetuates a level of importance for bidding that is undeserved. For most paid search advertisers, bidding isn’t that important.

Putting Bids In Perspective

If you’re a good skier, sharp edges matter a lot. When you’re learning to ski, they hardly matter at all.

First you have to get comfortable just standing on skis, and then standing on them while sliding down the hill and riding over all kinds of terain. They you have to figure out what to do with the various parts of your body – ankles, knees, hips, arms, head – while all this sliding is going on. You have to learn to initiate and complete turns, and at some point you start subtly shifting your weight through the process.

Until you reach a certain point, it hardly matters if your skis are slabs of wood from a garden fence. As long as they slide downhill, they’re fine. But eventually your skills reach the point that their length, flex pattern, and ultimately fine tuning points like sharpness are both noticable and impactful. But only after a long list of much more fundamental issues have been resolved.

Paid search bids are like that. Initially, any bid that gets your keyword shown in the top 2/3 of the first page is fine. After that, it’s not worth worrying about it again until a lot of other more important skills are mastered, tasks are completed, and data is gathered. When they are, and only then, is it worth allocating serious time to bidding, and even attempting an intense and sophisticated approach to bidding.

Spending a lot of time on bidding when the other attributes of each keyword aren’t in very good shape yet is like sharpening your skis when you still fall down a lot. It’s not the place you need work.

First Things First

This ‘sharp edges’ analogy actually doesn’t even do justice to the problem with premature bidding.

Generally speaking, sharpening edges actually improves ski performance and have a very small chance of actually causing problems for even a beginning skier.

But bids actually cannot be reasonably be calculated for keywords that are not haven’t already been properly tuned in terms of organization and negatives and match types and ad copy. The data surrounding these keywords is garbage data – putting that into even a very clever bid algorithm or calculation results in a garbage bid suggestion.

So attempting to bid prematurely results in inappropriate bids which will *cause* poor performance and potentially skew the data that will be used to drive future decisions.

Bidding on a weak foundation isn’t just wasteful, it can be harmful. It produces bad numbers based on incorrect assumptions that serve to drive you further away from optimal future results.

The Fairy Tale

The idea that paid search success is driven by keywords and bids hasn’t been true for many years, but it remains the dominant narrative of our industry. Don’t fall for it.

In upcoming posts we’ll examine why you should bid no keyword before its time, the steps you can take to prepare keywords for bidding, the tests that will tell you when a keyword is bid-ready, and then finally we’ll take a long hard look at how to bid once it is actually time to do so.

Did you ever notice that every time you have first hand knowledge of anything written about in the press it’s clear that the largely or completely misrepresent the facts or misunderstand the issue?

Today the venerable Wall Street Journal wrote an article about session-based broad match and manage to entirely miss what should be the core point of the article.

Session-based broad match is an AdWords ‘feature’ that considers the past search queries of any users when deciding which ads to serve for them. So if someone does a search for ‘rental palace in Monaco’ and then does a search for ‘cheap dog toothbrush’ Google may decide to show an add your ran against the keyword ‘luxury Monaco rentals’ in reply to their toothbrush query.

The theory, which is reasonable, is that Google knows that user was very recently interested in those rentals. Why not show them the ad a few minutes later? That’s still relevant.

Missing The Point

In The Journal article they find advertisers who are not happy about paying for clicks unrelated to the users current query. They also find folks (like PPC RockStar himself David Szetela) who don’t mind and have had good experiences with the feature.

They then ramble on and back and forth about if what Google is doing is cool or uncool.

The 500lb gorilla never makes an appearance.

Why isn’t ‘Session-based Broad Match’ a user controlled option?

The article doesn’t even introduce the idea that the ‘solution’ to the grand question of ‘is it good’ or ‘should people pay for it’ is ‘let them decide’.

Perhaps in the Murdock tradition the WSJ now operates with the goal of only exploiting problems and not wasting any breadth (or ink) on solving them.

Make It An Option

At minimum Session-Based Broad Match should be an opt-in campaign-level feature. Or better yet there should be an option to bid differently for session-based impressions.

The problem isn’t the feature. The problem is that as an AdWords advertiser you don’t get to choose whether or not you use it. Google decides to show your ad and bill you for the click in a way most people didn’t intend, don’t understand, and may have valid opinions or business reasons to want or not want.

Bundling session-based broad match without offering any control reduces advertiser control and transparency – session based clicks are reported as such in one report but are generally hard to detect so many don’t know when they’ve happened.

In my experience the vast majority of advertisers are surprised when they first hear this ‘feature’ even exists. Few know they they’re paying for it, most likely in very small amounts but on a regular basis. That’s no way to treat your customers.

AdWords added many great and complex features this past year, and extended advertiser control with things like Modified Broad Match. They have the resources and capability to make Session-Based Broad Match an option.

And they should.

I have a New Year’s Resolution this year. I would like to be done with quality score, at least as a primary PPC obsession. I’ve been too deep into it for what seems like two years, and it’s time to move onto something else.

I’ve even decided what that something else would be – bidding. Seems like the only bigger and deeper mess in the world of PPC. Perfect for me to stew in for a while.

But Quality Score isn’t conquered quite yet. Not for a lack of effort. For about 18 months I’ve been reading, discussing, thinking and writing about it. I’ve even got hundreds of pages of a book on it just about complete.

But questions remain. All the available official help files and conference presentations by Googlers and discussions between the paid search Guru’s I trust still leave a number of open mysteries.

Fortunately, some good folks at Google have agreed to help me by answering some questions. They’ve said that they would like the complete truth out there, and agreed to help me capture it and be allowed to share it. So I’ve begun a series of ‘interviews’ with people at Google who’ve been identified as experts in this area. There are some more conversations ahead.

In preparing for these upcoming discussions, I’ve been refining a list of remaining questions. And I thought that sharing them publicly would be interesting and useful.

This is not a complete list of all the aspects of quality score that I’ve found mysterious, it’s just those that even at this late stage of this process remain confusing or unclear. If you’ve got other questions you’d like answered (or comments/answers to those I post here) please leave them in the comments and I’ll either confirm that I’ve got that topic covered or will try to get an official answer.

NOTE: I’m deliberately leaving questions regarding landing pages off this list. There are still some in that area, but we’ll leave those for another day.

Eleven Huge Questions I Still Have About Quality Score

In no particular order:

Does the ‘relevance’ element of quality score consider any semantic or contextual analysis or comparison between keywords, ad copy, and landing page text?

• The popular and default assumption about relevance might make this question seem strange, but discussions thus far have led me to question these precepts and make this question necessary.

Does relevance have a range, or like landing pages is it simply ‘poor’ or ‘ok’?

• Landing pages can hurt but they can’t help. Relevance is reported in a binary fashion, but it’s not clear if the impact is binary or gradient.

Historic CTR of the account is a listed component of quality score. What is the decay rate of this measure? (Is last week more important than last year? Is there data so old it no longer matters at all?)

• Account CTR history has a HUGE influence on quality score, but ‘history’ is in many ways ambiguous. Does the recent past have more weight? Does last year still matter at all? (There is clear evidence in some cases it does. How does this work?)

How is the history of the target domain (in terms of CTR or other measures) within AdWords a factor in the calculation of quality score?

• Most of the doc only talks about the account, but there are references to the domain history in comments that have been made. What is the role the domain history plays?

If quality score is always calculated based on a combination of keyword + ad copy, how is QS calculated the first times new ad copy is available for display or displayed?

• Testing and changing ad copy is a common and important aspect of account management – but changes to copy should impact quality score given that each new ad has no historical CTR. Do new ads have a minor or major ‘cost’ in terms of initially lower or estimated quality scores? If not, how and why?

In the ‘Economics of Quality Score‘ I used the fact that Ad Rank/QS=CPC to document the impact of different quality scores and QS changes. Given that real QS scores aren’t 1-10, is the post accurate?

• Can’t wait to hear the answer to this one.

Is geographic performance factored at the account or keyword level?

• One of many issues where different official references seem to contradict each other.

How often are visible QS numbers updated, and based on what range of historical performance?

• If we’re working to improve quality score, it matters what the visible QS number represents – even though it’s clearly not the QS the system uses anyway.

Is quality score calculated before or after eligibility for an auction?

• One of several chicken and egg confusions in the public record.

Is there ANY impact of performance or QS at the Ad Group or Campaign levels?

• A rumor that looked like it had been put away but one contradictory help file emerged and the web is full of references.

Google has claimed that QS is only calculated when query = keyword. So how is QS applied to queries that are not identical to keywords?

• There are two possible answers and we don’t know which is true: Do they use the QS of the keyword based on the times queries were identical, or is a different QS calculated for those queries in some way?
• Extra Credit 1:  Are phrase matched queries treated as identical to keyword for QS calculation purposes?
• Extra Credit 2: What about queries when there has never been one for that keyword that is identical to keyword, or when exact keyword is a negative in that ad group?

Sharing The Real Answers

Hopefully I’ll get complete answers to all of these soon. I’m sure there are nooks and crannies of the QS issue that neither I nor anyone will ever get to the bottom of. But early next year I hope to start sharing the sum of what I have learned, both in writing and in special sessions at some upcoming conferences and maybe in a few webinars.

Quality score is big and important and confusing, but it really doesn’t need to be this hard for everyone. I hope I can help create at least a good amount of ‘settled law’ on many of the issues that today are the topics of lots of confusions and occasional endless debate. Stay tuned.

In the comments to the previous post on Modified Broad Match, Helena Papirnikova asked an interesting question regarding the role of match type in quality score.

This is an issue that has been clouded in confusion for some time, and I thought worth more discussion than just a comment reply. So here goes…

Match Type / Quality Scores Rumors

Many say that using more exact match within your campaigns is a way to boost quality scores. Others point out that match type has no impact at all on quality score.

Who’s right?

It turns out that the truth is somewhere in between. Quality score is only calculated when the search query is identical to the keyword. A broad match keyword like ‘dog food’ is matched to many different search queries – sometimes it’s matched to ‘dog food’ and sometimes to ‘cheap dog food’ and other times to ‘puppy chow on sale in Kansas City’.

But quality score is only calculated in those instances where the query is ‘dog food’. For all other queries, the quality score that was calculated when the query was ‘dog food’ is used.

Suppose you have a text ad that promotes low prices and free shipping. When the query ‘cheap dog food’ is matched to your ‘dog food’ broad match keyword, you actually get higher click-through-rates then you do when the query is simply ‘dog food’. But since the query ‘cheap dog food’ isn’t identical to the keyword ‘dog food’, a quality score is not calculated using this higher CTR. Instead, the quality score calculated based on the lower ‘dog food’ queries is applied.

The result is that your ad will appear less frequently, in lower positions, and at a higher CPC when the query is ‘cheap dog food’ and the keyword is ‘dog food’ then it would if you were buying the keyword ‘cheap dog food’ in either broad or phrase match type.

Match Type / Quality Score Facts

• Match type plays a role in determining which queries will be matched to which keywords
• Quality score is only calculated when the query is identical to the keyword, regardless of the keyword match type.
• The match type of a keyword is not considered and has no effect on the calculation of quality score for any keyword.
• When the search query is identical to the keyword, a quality score is calculated and applied. When a search query is not identical to the keyword (but matched anyway) the keyword will use a quality score that was calculated based on the performance of earlier searches where the query was identical to the keyword.
• If the same keyword appears in an account using different match types each should earn a nearly identical quality score. (Note: Minor differences in quality score may occur due to differences in ad copy and target URLs and the geography of searchers.)

So more exact match does not improve quality score – at all. The match type you set for any keyword is irrelevant. What matters is the keywords you choose to include in your account.

The Secret To Better Quality Scores

When you add a keyword to your account and use a broad or phrase match type, you attract queries that are related or similar to your keyword, but quality score is not calculated for these queries. When the CTR of those queries is lower than that of the identical query, you get an undeserved boost. When the CTR of those queries is higher than that of the identical query, you pay a quality score price.

The logic behind the suggestion to use more exact match is probably sound, but it suggests the wrong way to achieve the objective. You don’t need more exact match keywords, you need more keywords that are identical to the search queries that perform well (or occur frequently) in your account.

This shows the importance of intelligent keyword expansion. The match types of your keywords should be set to whatever is appropriate for each keyword – see our ‘Match Type Keyword Trap’ and ‘Modified Broad Match’ posts for more details on effectively applying match types.

Broad match keywords, particularly those which are generic or broad terminology terms, will tend to get lower CTRs on the queries that are identical to them and higher CTRs for the longer and more precise phrases to which they’ll match. Broad match helps you find more searchers but it does so inefficiently from a quality score perspective.

It’s critical to ‘query mine’ the keywords in your account (as discussed in this blog post) to find valuable search queries and turn them into new keywords. THIS is how you improve quality score, and increase both search volume and impression share while increasing ROI. (BTW, the Keyword Zoom tool in ClickEquations is the best way in the world to get this done quickly and easily.)

Negatives Don’t Matter Either

This is probably a good place to correct another common rumor. Adding negative keywords doesn’t directly impact quality score either. The reason is the same. When negatives filter out queries that weren’t identical to the purchased keyword, it has no effect because quality score was never calculated for those queries anyway.

This isn’t to say you shouldn’t add all appropriate negatives – just that doing so won’t improve your quality score on specific keywords.

There is an indirect benefit, however. Adding negatives in theory will improve your CTRs overall (by not showing ads to people who probably shouldn’t be interested in them) and these improved CTRs may be used in the way CTR is considered for account history, display URL, and specific geographies – each of which is applied in the overall quality score calculation.

Why It Works This Way

The relationship between match types, keywords, search queries, and quality score is a little confusing. Why does it work this way? Why doesn’t AdWords just calculate quality score for every query?

I can only speculate. I seems like if we earned quality scores based on the performance of all the crazy search queries that broad and even phrase is sometimes matched to then we’d be less in control of our own accounts than with the current method of only judging our quality when people are searching for exactly what we’re advertising (on a keyword level).

I also believe that broadly quality score is a tool Google uses to get advertisers to do the right thing. Expanding keyword purchases based on queries is the right thing to do – it improves the account in every way and would be a best practice even if quality score didn’t exist. Yet I expect that if fully understood the benefits to quality score will motivate many people who wouldn’t otherwise make the effort frequently enough.

Quality score is a rating of how effective you are at advertising on a specific keyword. By only making that judgment based on the results of people who searched with a query that was identical to your keyword AdWords is able to fully and fairly score your performance.

Lessons Learned

When you look at the quality score of any keyword in your account, remember that this is the quality score earned by the identical queries. For broad match and phrase match keywords, there are likely queries getting this quality score – and the resulting Ad Rank and CPC – that could do better if you turn those queries into their own new keywords. Adding an exact match version of an existing keyword won’t help. Making productive queries into independent keywords can help a lot.

UPDATE: Good discussion in comments below, and I’ve heard from Google that ‘something’ is not correct above – will update here as soon as I know what. Happy to get corrected share the facts!