ClickEquations Blog

The Max CPC and quality score of a keyword determine its position, and position and quality score drive actual CPC. So exactly what effect does quality score have on cost?

We first answered this question one year ago, in the now famous ‘Economics of Quality Score‘ post. (This has since become the most visited page in the history of this blog.) You should go read this now if you haven’t already.

The central chart from that article shows the percentage discount or penalty you pay for every click based on your quality score.

If you know how many of your keywords are receiving each quality score, and the amount of your spend on each, it’s easy to use this data to calculate the total cost of poor quality scores, savings from great quality scores, and the net cost to your account.

Incidentally, ClickEquations provides this as a default report – isn’t that handy?

This Is Probably True

The only caveat to these calculations is the little-known-fact that quality score IS NOT a number between 1 and 10.

Google reports quality score to us mere mortal advertisers using that scale, but in the great AdWords super-computer a wider range of values is used – so your actual quality score may be 37 or even 68.2394.

We don’t know the range of numbers they use, the number of digits of precision, nor the relationship of one score to another.

And while this isn’t a secret truth, the fact is that I’m not much of a mathematician. So at the risk of public scrutiny and embarrasement, here’s the logic that lead to the above quality score impact calculations – feel free to issue corrections and admonishments in the comments:

CPC is calculated by dividing the ad rank of the advertiser below you by the quality score of the advertising keyword. The table was created by calculating the difference between dividing X by 7 and dividing X by 8. This difference, it turns out, is consistent regardless of what X is equal to.

Therefore, if quality scores were really whole numbers between 1 and 10, the chart above should be accurate.

Since they’re not, we don’t know (at least I don’t) the impact of a different range of quality score numbers which act as divisors. If a perfect quality score is really 83 and not 10, and a very good quality score is really 64 and not 9, there would be a difference in the percentage impact to CPC of earning a perfect quality score versus and very good one.

The assumption made in publishing these numbers as they are (which was disclosed) is that the real levels are proportionally similar. That could be wrong. Which means that the discounts and penalties on the extremes could be more or less. There is no way – short of a Google announcement – of knowing.

I believe the numbers to be directionally true. Perhaps as Jim Sterne said about web analytics in general, they’re ‘true but not accurate’.

What Is True

The details probably don’t matter anyway. Quality score does in fact apply as a discount or a penalty to your CPCs. And whatever the numbers, the farther your quality score is from the mean, the more severe its impact.

What matters is that we realize that high quality scores save us money (and get your ads shown more frequently and in higher positions) and that low quality scores cost us money (and result in less ad display and lower positions). In terms of data, everything after that are merely interesting.

In terms of action, we need to use that knowledge to drive our actions. We want to be aware of our keyword quality scores, and manage them, based on the fact that they drive our placement and to a very large degree our costs.

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: “The glory of paid search is hyper relevance and how absolutely data driven it is. If your goal is to be the best you can be at paid search, then your path goes through this book. When Craig talks I listen, mesmerized. You should too because being wise is great.”

- Avinash Kaushik Best-Selling Author ’.

Download Your Copy Today
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The AdWords auction is not a purely economic auction. If it were the high bidder would always win.

But in the AdWords auction the high bidder can wind up in 1st, 3rd, or 5th position – or even wind up out of the game with nothing.

Imagine a new kind of eBay auction; one where you could browse for a searcher or search query you wanted to have see your ad, and enter a bid. The auction would go on for a while – maybe a few hours – and you would even be notified when you were or were not the high bidder.

Like many eBay auctions there would be some jockying for position as the end nears. First you’re you’re the high bidder, then you aren’t, and then you are again.

Now pretend that as time expires, it turns out you were in fact the high bidder. But just before the display updates to say ‘You’ve Won’, a funny thing happens: eBay applies a secret multiplier to everyone’s bid. Some bids are multipled by 3, while others are multiplied by .3. The ranking order of the results is completely transformed.

You – the ‘high bidder’ – winds up in 3rd place. Someone with a rather low bid vaults to the top and they’re declared the winner. They pay only a fraction of what you had offered and yet win the auction and claim the prize.

If you were bidding in these kinds of ebay auctions, once you understood the game, would you focus purely on your bid?

Wouldn’t you want to learn all you could about the secret multipier and try in influence that? Wouldn’t you feel a little silly just bidding in earnest as if there were a direct relationship between your bid and the result?

Ignoring The Secret Number

Yet make no mistake, this is how the AdWords auction works. Everyone bids in the same currency (effectively) but that bid is then transformed by a secret number before the winner (or rankings in this case) is declared.

The secret number, in this case, is quality score.

Your bid is not multiplied by quality score, but quality score transforms the results of your bid none-the-less.

To see the actual way bids are calculated, read Secret Truth #10 in the book.
(Note: the download sign-up will have some downtime today, 3/27, sorry)

Bids impact, but don’t drive, CPC. Repeat that to yourself a few times. “My bid does not drive my CPC – My bid is only one factor that impacts my CPC.”

My View of Bidding

I’ll admit it. I kinda have a chip on my shoulder about bidding.

I’m not a big fan of over-simplification to begin with (hence the whole ‘high-resolution’ thing) and with bidding there are only two modes – over-simplified and mind-bendingly complicated. Guess which one most everyone chooses?

As described earlier, the idea of bidding-for-position is obsolete and inaccurate. And now we see that bidding does not directly define CPC.

Bids indicate the maximum amount you want to pay for any single click. But they’re only one factor in the determination of your ad position, and beyond that they’re not a factor in the calculation of CPC.

None of this is to say that bids don’t matter. They matter a lot. They have an impact – changing them has an impact and not changing them has an impact.

Plus, bids are concrete. Bids are accessible. Bids are easy to understand, even if they summarize or stand for something that on further inspection isn’t entirely true.

What Bids Do and Don’t Do

There are four key steps in the AdWords Auction. Let’s examine the role your bid plays in each:

1. When someone executes a search, quality score is calculated for the keywords in your account which may be eligible for the auction. Bid plays no role in the calculation.
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2. AdWords determines whether or not your ad (via your keyword) is eligible to be in the auction. Bids are a direct factor, because there is (despite the retirement last year of the Minimum Bid metric) a minimum bid to trigger display for any particular query. This is by no means the only eligibility requirement.
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3. AdWords calculates Ad Rank to determine your position in the results. Bid is direct factor, as discussed in Secret Truth #9.
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4. CPC is calculated to define how much you’ll pay if the ad is clicked. Bid isn’t involved beyond via the role it played in the deciding your Ad Rank. Really this is a Quality Score driven issue.

Putting Bids In Their Place

The punchline is that bid management and quality score management should, at worst, get equal attention in the process of managing paid search.

A year or two ago, almost nobody was talking about let alone working on quality score. Now the topic gets a lot of attention, but the confusion remains thick and the specific action steps are often not well defined. Quality score reporting has improved dramatically, but there still is a lot of information that we’re missing. We’re making progress, but there remains a long way to go.

There are two more Secret Truths concerning quality score, and two more concerning bidding, so we’ll cover more specific ground in those sections of the book and in future posts in this series.

Earlier I asked you to stop thinking about position purely as a result of bidding. Here I’m suggesting that you also stop thinking about cost-per-click as a direct bid result as well. These shifts will help you to have reasonable expectations for bidding, and to remember to consider and pay appropriate attention to qualty score in order achieve your position and cost related goals.

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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Another great misconception, or over-simplification, of paid search is the idea that you bid for position.

This is a deeply held belief. It seems hard to shake even for those who know better.

But as many people know, position is determined by both bid and quality score. Yet how many thousands of discussions, presentations, webinars, books, blog posts, software interfaces, and tweets talk about bidding for position as if it were the only factor?

How can you discuss bidding and position and not mention quality score? Ignorance and denial account for a lot of it. A yearning for simplicity is no doubt another factor. But saying it does not make it so.

• Position is determed by a number called Ad Rank
• Ad Rank is = bid x quality score
• Most keywords display at a huge range of positions in any given day or time period
• The quality score used in the calculation is unique to the query and go of the searcher
• Quality score is ONLY calculated when the query is identical to the keyword (match types and negatives don’t matter)
• The impact of landing page quality score is not considered AT ALL in calculating position
• There are special rules and requirements to jump to the ‘top’ from the ‘right’ (link)

These just some of the facts.

Yet today and every day, tens of thousands of paid search advertisers will look at their average positions, and their bids, and on those facts alone decide to change their bids. Or they’ll let algorithms that don’t consider quality score do the same.

In many cases it’s like filling the bucket faster instead of filling the hole.

Why Doesn’t Everyone Know This?

Many of the ‘Secret Truths’ make me wonder if the engines intentionally mislead advertisers. That probably could be the subject of a couple of good posts someday. Most of the time I come to the conclusion that they just tell a an over-simplified version of the truth, like most marketers do, and let everyone run with it in the wrong direction.

It’s easy to see why the engines like all the misconceptions about bidding, and position, and quality score. Every time you don’t understand they make more money. The fact that they didn’t intentionally mislead you is an awfully nice coincidence.

Why Doesn’t Everyone Act Accordingly?

What gets measured gets done. That’s a useful old saying for anyone in online marketing. Ad rank is not measured, or reported. That’s probably reason #1 that more PPC managers don’t obsess about it.

Bids are concrete and easy to change. It’s easy to understand spending more and spending less, and accepting that one buys more and the other buys less. Quality Score is a mystery wrapped in an enigma. We’ll visit those waters again in the next few posts.

The whole thing reminds me of the joke about looking for your keys where the light is rather than where you lost them. Bidding is clear and simple. Quality Score is confusing and hard. So lots of time is devoted to bidding.

The truth is that bid management and quality score management should have equal billing, and Position/CPC management should be recognized as being the result of doing both.

It starts with a new mindset: You don’t bid for position. You Ad Rank for position.

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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Match types are deceptively simple controls. They’re relatively easy to understand, and almost everyone takes advantage of their basic capabilities.

But the difference between using match types and mastering match types is enormous.

Match types can be used like a machete – to clear large areas while making sure that nothing is missed, or they can be used like a scalpel – to target very specific queries while leaving adjacent queries undisturbed. The best paid search managers use them as both.

Match Types Decide Who’s In Control

The great simplification of a keyword-biased view of paid search is the suggestion that adding keywords to your account determines the people who will see your ads and be attracted to your landing page or website. Keywords determine who might see your ads, but match types decide who will see them.

Keywords without match types are indescriminate. Keywords without match types give the search engines free rein to show your ads, and attract clicks, from just about anyone they want to.

This is because by default keywords are set on broad match. Broad match means that you want the search engine to match your keyword to any related search query. Deciding what is ‘related’ is the job of the search engine, and from a pure semantic and contextual point of view, they do a remarkable job of it.

But for broad really is broad. Most keywords have a massive range of related search queries. And without suggesting malice, the engines have a vested interest in making that range as wide as possible.

As advertisers, we have exactly the opposite goal. We want to show our ads, and pay for clicks, from the narrowest possible range of related queries – just wide enough to include the folks who actually want what we’re offering. If nobody else saw our ads it would be fine with us.

Therein lies the rub. Broad match keywords are huge nets designed to catch everything in their targeted areas – the good, the bad, and the ugly. So they’ll usually deliver some great visitors mixed in with a lot of not-great visitors.

The non-broad match types, by contrast, create focus. When used properly, they exclude the unrelated and inappropriate.

The bottom line is this: broad match puts the engine in control. Phrase and exact match take control back.

Three Rules of Broad Match

Broad match keywords serve an important purpose, and you should use them. But I’d suggest three rules:

1. Use broad match keywords as much as you have to, and no more.
2. Use any specific broad match keyword only as long as you have to and no longer.
3. While using any broad match keyword, try to continually drive down its volume (and probably its cost)

Broad match keywords exist because as a starting point it’s hard to know which search queries people use to express a specific intent. Without this knowledge you have no way of directing search ads towards those people. Broad match keywords give you a way of advertising to them.

The cost is imprecision and therefore waste. Sometimes the good will outweigh the bad, othertimes it won’t. But in either case, the use of broad match should be a starting point and nothing more.

Once you see the search queries that broad match attracts, it’s time to start query-mining:

• Add negative keywords
• Add new phrase and exact match keywords
• Adjust bids on all three match types to reflect their relative importance and returns

Every step along the way, you catch less queries by accident and more queries on purpose.

The Match Type Keyword Trap

Some time ago I wrote a lot about match type and a strategy for using multiple match types together for the same keywords. If you haven’t yet, get our Match Type Keyword Trap whitepaper for details of how to use match types properly.

This work is perhaps the most important campaign optimization a paid search manager can perform. The benefits are extensive:

• You stop paying for bad queries
• You catch a higher percentage of the good queries
• You can pay (bid) appropriately for both the good ones (with high exact match bids) and the bad ones (with lower broad match bids.
• Your new keywords will raise impression share
• Your new keywords will increase impression and click volume
• Your new keywords should earn better quality scores (long story that, we’ll get to it in an upcoming post) which drives position up, cost down, and therefore profits higher.

Alternatively, you can just leave those broad matches alone and hope the people doing unrelated queries just stop searching…

Measuring Progress

The proper use of match types is so important that all paid search managers should measure use and progress over time. Keep track of the percentage of revenue coming from broad match in each of your campaigns. If it’s over 50%, chances are you have a lot of work to do. The right number varies by business but around 30% is probably a good general target.

In ClickEquations you can use Best Practices to warn you when a campaign has over a specified percentage of broad match revenue. You can also see cost, revenue, and clicks by match type using the Match Type analysis report in ClickEquations Analyst.

Summary

Broad match is a powerful tool, but like many others needs to be used wisely and not over-used.

For too long in PPC the assumption was that keywords should be on broad match unless it was perfectly clear or proven that they or versions of them should be promoted or duplicated to the more specific match types. It’s time to start turning that thinking around, and require keywords to prove that they should be on broad match instead.

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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Sunday morning seems a good time to practice what we preach.

Earlier today I was poking around in our own AdWords account, doing a little prep work for my Tuesday presentation on Quality Score. I created some new ClickEquations Analyst templates that analyze the CTR components of Quality Score – we’ll talk about these sometime in the future.

One of the elements I was looking at was the CTR of search campaigns. In particular, the idea struck me to compare the impression volume with the CTR to try and identify the weighted impact on Quality Score of letting low performing CTR keywords run.

In the course of my examination, it became clear that two of our own campaigns have the devilish combination of low Quality Score, low CTR, and high impression counts. Time for a little further investigation.

One of the things I found was that an experimental ad group built to play around with keywords concerning Match Type was doing particularly poorly. More specifically the broad match keyword ‘match type’ had huge impression count and a horrible click-through-rate.

That’s when I found it.

Look at this search query report for the keyword ‘match type’.

Google is doing a pretty poor job of matching the keyword ‘match type’. And we’ve been paying for it, click by click.

The assumption that people typing ‘math’ actually meant ‘match’ is particularly strange. Or do they think I meant to buy the word ‘Math Type’ and they’re correcting my typo? And why are the people who are doing those searches clicking on this text ad anyway? –>

In any case, the only search query worth having from the whole list is ‘match type’ itself.

Normally that would have been caught in the exact match version, but since this was an experiment I had been running the broad match all alone. Clearly that was a mistake. Given these results, I added the exact match version, and paused the broad match.

Looks like both query mining and building match type keyword traps really are good ideas.

And the word ‘match type’ is not a great example of the effective execution or use of broad match in AdWords.

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

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

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

Should You Bid On Your Brand?

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

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

There are several reasons for this:

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

Types of Brand Keywords

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

We typically see several types of brand keywords:

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

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

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

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

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

Brand Plus Keywords

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brands as Negative Keywords

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

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

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

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

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

What Do You Think?

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

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

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

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

Finished?

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

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

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

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

What Do You Think?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Goal of Ad Groups

The goal of an ad group is:

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

Rebuilding Ad Groups

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

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

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

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

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

The Ads Are The Targets

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you think?

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

It will be available for download later this month.

Reserve Your Copy Today

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Why do some AdWords ads appear on top of the organic listing and not in the right-hand column?

So Google can make more money, of course.

How do you get your ads to appear on ‘top’? There is no guaranteed path, but here are the relevant facts.

1. There will not be top slots available for all keywords. Google decides which searches will display any top-listed ads. They also decide if there are 1, 2, or 3 slots available.
2. There is a minimum bid to get positioned on top. Of course it’s a secret. If you’re already at #1 on the right and want to force your way to the top, raise your bid – it may or may not work, Google will almost certainly get more money in either case, but at least you’ll find out.
3. If your bid is above the minimum required to be on top, but your ad rank (bid x quality score) your ad may ‘jump over’ other advertisers who had a higher ad rank but a lower bid. This jump will put your ad on top, while your competitors stay on the right.

There are significantly higher click-through rates seen by ads that make it to the top, above even those ranked #1 on the right. I’ve heard estimates as high as 3x-4x.