ClickEquations Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quality Score as Stick

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quality Score as Carrot

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

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

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

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

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

Landing Pages are About Conversion

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

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

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

Mistaken Identity

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

What Do You Think?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Age of Quality Enlightenment

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

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

Protection From Yourself

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Freedom To Waste Money Endlessly

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

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

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

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

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

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

So Why Do It?

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

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

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

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

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

At the quality score session at SMX Advanced London yesterday, a question was asked about what to do with low quality score keywords. It was framed as a query of when you should turn off keywords because they were below a certain quality score level.

I helped answer the question, and then tweeted some quick advice on the subject. It got a few RT’s and the interest and some more thinking drove me to elaborate in this post.

While the virtues of high quality score, and the techniques to try to achieve it have been covered here often, the truth is that for many reasons most accounts sometimes have keywords with low quality scores – which we’ll define as those of 5 or lower.

Broadly speaking you should work to improve those scores, and often if you can’t the best answer is to pause or delete those keywords. But that isn’t always wise or feasible.

B2B Keywords With High CPCs

Patricia Hursh of SmartSearchMarketing.com made the great point in her presentation that for B2B Marketers with very expensive keywords, often it’s much better to write copy that *discourages* unqualified clicks, which results in low CTR and thereby poor quality score – but much better ROI.

Ideally you’d query-mine those keywords as completely as possible – to find related words on which you can earn good QS – but that won’t fully solve the problem and so her advice is wise.

Quality Score Collateral Damage

The other case is keywords that are important to your business or goals and have low qualty score that you just haven’t yet been able to increase. When making the decision to leave these running, consider their impact on your overall account-level CTR.

If these keywords have huge impression counts and really bad CTR (the cause of bad QS if you don’t have landing page penalties) then the cost of leaving them running isn’t just the over-bidding you’re likely to have to do on those keywords. Those bad keywords will actually help lower the quality score (albiet only slightly) on all the good keywords in your account.

But if those keywords have only a relatively low impression count as a percentage of your total account, the ‘collateral damage’ of leaving them running will be very slight. So go ahead and run them guilt-free if you really want to.

The folks at Google are masters of the art of positioning.

Nearly every element of their products – at last the core ones like AdWords and Gmail – and even moreso their public statement describing features and rule changes – make them look unbelievably helpful and benevalent.

Obviously, much of what they do is really great and has benefit to us as users and advertisers. So this isn’t that surprising even if the skill of it is impressive.

But other times, when what they’re doing is primarily in their own interest and of limited value to the advertiser, they’re still somehow able to describe everything in a way that makes you want to thank them for being so kind. Remember the announcement of expanded-broad-match, or the non-announcement of session-based matching?

All of which leads, unexpectedly, to Secret Truth #12 – From the advertisers viewpoint, quality score really is a measure of qualty.

Who Beneits? Follow The Money.

In a perfect world it really is in Google’s interest to create features and set rules that benefit searchers, advertisers, and Google themselves.

• If users aren’t satisfied with they’re Google experience they won’t come back, or at least may not conduct as many searches.
• If advertisers aren’t satisfied they will cut budgets or bids.
• If Google isn’t raking it in then the free Odwalla drinks in the lobbies may have to go

Of course, not every decision can share the benefits equally. Most don’t. For a lot different reasons, and much of the evaluation is naturally subjective. But broadly speaking quality score does share the wealth pretty fairly.

• Users have a better chance of seeing ads that will satisfy them relative to their query and intent.
• Advertisers get more traffic from ads that satisfy users at a lower price, and are discouraged from wasting money on inappropriate ads.
• Google satisfies its searchers, its advertisers, and maximizes revenue.

Let’s look at each of these in a bit more detail.

Quality Score And Searchers

I was on a panel at SMX with Nick Fox of Google last year, and he explained quality score as being in many ways a ‘wisdom of the crowds’ system.

If a lot of people who searched was matched with a particular keyword clicked on a particular ad, that ad is by definition of high quality. It was ‘voted’ as being good by the people who matter. It’s hard to argue with that logic.

This why CTR is by far the largest and most important element of the quality score calculation.

Quality Score And Advertisers

The fact that high quality scores reward you with more impressions, higher positions, and lower CPCs, while low quality scores do the exact opposite, is good for advertisers. If you accept (for the moment) that the quality score calculation has effectively rated the likelihood of your keyord-ad combo to succeed in attracting a particular searcher, they it’s good for you as an advertiser that AdWords shows your ads more when it’s got a higher chance of success and less when it has a lower one.

It’s even good, in a slightly strange way, that they give you a discount when your quality score is high and make you pay a penalty when it is low. Like all taxes the penalty is meant (partially) to shift behavior.

They’re giving you a low score, making that (sort of) clear, and charging you more (less clear, but still true) – they’re really asking you to fix the problem or quit advertising.

It may be tough love, but it can be considered well intentioned.

Quality Score And Google.

Make no mistake about it. Quality Score is a revenue optimization algorithm.

Ads which get the most clicks (and therefore drive the most revenue) are promoted while ads that get less clicks (and generate less revenue) are supressed. And you can be sure the discount given for high quality scores is more than made up for in the volume of clicks and total revenue they generate.

This is where the win-win-win comes from. Google makes less money if you have low quality scores. They don’t need the bell curve. Every time you improve quality score, they make more money. They really don’t want to see you suffer with those QS=3 keywords!

The Devil In The Details

We could talk endlessly (and have) about the details of all the elements which influence quality score, and how fair or accurate they are in really predicting quality. Those are fair discussions, but broadly speaking there is little doubt quality score works and google is working pretty consistently to make it better – in ways that will continue to benefit all parties for the reasons described above.

It’s worth knowing the details of how it’s calculated so you can take actions to increase your scores. It’s worth knowing how it’s used so you can intelligently react to your scores.

But mostly it’s worth doing the work that results from that learning to actually improve your scores, or make the tough decisions to stop buying keywords where your score are bad and probably always will be.

Quality score is a tough and not entirely transparent task master. But I do believe that quality score is your friend.

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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The idea of creating highly targeted ad groups, so that all of the attracted search queries are well aligned with the included text ad copy, is one we’ve written about often.

One of the drivers is the fact that better alignment drives up click-through-rates and thereby quality score.

A number of recent conversations have suggested that this good idea, like many others, is being taken to absurd extremes.

I’m talking about the practice or ‘recommendation’ of limiting ad groups to a single keyword.

Single Keyword Ad Groups Have No Quality Score Advantage

The primary reason I’ve heard for this practice is improved quality score. But it won’t work.

The quality score of a keyword in AdWords is based primarily on the CTR, from a specific geography, of search queries that exactly matches a that keyword. There is an impact from the historical CTR of the entire account, of the relevance of the query-keyword-ad, and the potential of penalties from the landing page. There is no factor in that definition that would favor a single keyword alone in an ad group.

There is no ad group quality score. There is no benefit from keyword loneliness. There is no ‘lots of ad groups’ bonus.

Isolating keywords in-and-of-itself does not help quality score. There is really no way any keyword can impact, positively or negatively, another keyword in terms of quality score.

The Right Number of Keyword Per Ad Group Is…

So how many keywords should be in an ad group?

Assuming we want to maximize quality score and overall results, the answer is: as many as will attract search queries that are directly addressed by your text ads. You may recall that we want to work from the text ad (or text ads) backwards. So the number of keywords really isn’t important. What matters is the alignment of the search queries (and the intents they represent) with the text ads.

If there are a lot of different keywords needed to match and attract all the different search queries that people use to say essentially exactly the same thing, then your ad group should have a lot of keywords. If there is only one keyword that is needed to match and attract to every search query that is directly addressed by the text ads in your ad group, then your ad group should have one keyword.

But the one keyword situation is likely to be very rare.

You don’t want single keyword ad groups, you want single-minded ad groups. If they attract synonymous queries, the more keywords the better.

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FACEBOOK

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

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

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

This is a story of how quality score evolves.

At First, They Don’t Trust You

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay tuned….

UPDATES:

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

The Search Engine Marketing Professional’s Organization (SEMPO) hosted us for our latest webinar: Quality Score in High Resolution.

Quality Score is just as important at keywords and bids in PPC, but isn’t nearly as well understood. In this webinar you’ll find thorough explanation of what Quality Score is, what it means and how you can improve yours.

If you like the webinar, check out our Quality Score white paper.

This week on PPC Rockstars Mr. David Szetela and I get serious about AdWords Quality Score.

Listen in, but this one is not for the faint-at-heart.

Available at Webmaster Radio or on iTunes.