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Chapter 4: Why Google has Quality Score (pt1)
This series of blog posts did eventually become a book about quality score – in June 2011 ‘Quality Score in High Resolution‘ will be released.
More details and ordering information can be found here.
When Google is asked why Quality Score is needed, they give a variation of the answer they always give; it improves relevance and optimizes the experience of our users.
Quality Score helps ensure that only the most relevant ads appear to users on Google and the Google Network. The AdWords system works best for everybody-advertisers, users, publishers and Google too-when the ads that we display match our users’ needs as closely as possible.
This answer is true, incomplete, and somewhat disingenuous.
Google uses the word ‘relevance’ like people at the airlines use the word ‘security’ (and the way they used to use the word ‘safety’). It’s a vague terms subject entirely to their own definition on a scale you can’t measure. In both cases the magic word effectively means ‘because we say so’ and there is no possible or allowable counter-argument.
Relevance helps everybody, and Google clearly strives for it – up to a point.
By their own admission, they have a price where relevance can be compromised. If a topically irrelevant ad gets a huge click-through rate, it will still earn a very high quality score. But there is nothing contradictory about this because Google defines something as relevant if lots of people click on it – problem solved.
Scores Have Consequences
The truth is that Quality Score is Google’s way of passing judgment on and rating a number of different aspects of your paid search campaigns. This rating is then used to make value judgments about your suitability to advertise for any particular keyword at any particular time.
It’s also important to note that Quality Score severely manipulates concept of an auction that many people still think about in regards to bidding on your keywords. Yes there is an auction going on, but it’s happening in an environment where everyone has a different multiplier on their money. Some are positive, some are negative.
This is enormously important, and a subject we’ll look at in great detail Chapter Z.
Three Reasons for Quality Score
I believe that Quality Score does three things for Google:
- It acts as a bozo filter to limit or prevent ‘undesirable’ ads and advertisers
- It acts as a ‘preferred customer program’ to reward top performing advertisers
- It provides a ‘secret sauce’ that ensures nobody knows how/why certain ads are run at specific times for certain prices.
Quality Score as Bozo Filter
Google needs a bozo filter because there are a lot of bozo’s trying to game their system.
At one extreme there are those who jump into Adwords with dreams or delusions of a quick buck, flooding the system with their own inexperience.
These people – who may be young and naive or who may be old and treacherous – may do nearly everything wrong. Their campaigns can have sloppy keyword selection, bad text ads, poor campaign organization, and most likely lousy landing pages with undifferentiated or even questionable offers. But they have money to spend and often are willing to bid somewhat or entirely irrationally.
So if Quality Score didn’t exist, if there wasn’t a way to throttle back the impact of these advertisers based on their poor campaign execution (not simply because they’re new or in any way undesirable) their dollars would allow their inexperience to pollute and in some ways distort the system.
For them, Quality Score is a handicapping system which requires that they earn and prove their way onto a level playing field. This limits or prevents them from distorting the experience and performance of established and proven advertisers – so it’s a good thing.
At the other extreme are the professional internet scammers. They’re the exact opposite of the new and inexperienced; they’re in fact often way more sophisticated than the average Adwords advertiser. The trouble is they’re up to no good – attempting to sell disreputable products or services, or somehow trick or swindle people in one way or another.
They tend to move fast, picking up on one hot trend or another, or morphing hundreds of times within the bounds of a long-running shady domain. They pick keywords, create landing pages, test relentlessly, make some money, and move on to the next area.
In this area Quality Score is genuinely a consumer protection service. It penalizes pages which use deceptive practices or language, fail to make proper disclosures, and show other signs of real or possible nefarious activities. And the ‘account history’ component of Quality Score acts a little like a ‘three strikes you’re out’ law, allowing a poor history to diminish the chance (or at least increase the cost) of new and future success.
In these and other cases, Quality Score is very clearly a penalty. Note that a poor Quality Score does not ban or algorithmically prevent advertising even when advertisers are guilty of the worst of these types of acts; it just requires them to compensate with extremely high bids to earn their way back into the auction.
I don’t find this to be unreasonable. Google isn’t the Internet Police, and they’re in business to make money. They take reasonable steps to promote good content and limit or penalize what they feel is bad content. And I’m sure in very extreme cases they would entirely remove or ban a site or web page.
But most of the time they simply penalize. Which means that most of the time statements about their policies and decisions being driven by their pure desire for a great user experience, remember that each sentence ends with an invisible ‘unless the advertiser is willing to pay a lot of money per click.’
<Continued in the following post.>
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About This Post
This series of blog posts did eventually become a book about quality score – in June 2011 ‘Quality Score in High Resolution‘ will be released.
More details and ordering information can be found here.
Other Posted Chapters:
Chapter 3: Reviewing Official Google Quality Score Information
This series of blog posts did eventually become a book about quality score – in June 2011 ‘Quality Score in High Resolution‘ will be released.
More details and ordering information can be found here.
The official Google descriptions of Quality Score do a masterful job of explaining and positioning the important component of Adwords, and yet leave us just a little confused and uncertain of what we should do.
Let’s look at some of the most complete and visible Google official statements regarding Quality Score – with some commentary.
A Quality Score Overview
In this page from Google Adwords Help, we get a great overview of Quality Score. It begins with four clear and reasonably definitive statements:
- The AdWords system calculates a ‘Quality Score’ for each of your keywords.
- It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query.
- A keyword’s Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance.
- In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).
This gives us proof Quality Score exists, assurance that it’s not an entirely one dimensional measure, confidence that it can change at any time, and a promise that a higher Quality Score is in our interest.
But it also begins building the uncertainty; quality is based on relevance which itself is undefined and based on numerous (soon-to-be-named) factors. But then it’s based on performance, an entirely undefined term. And finally it turns out we can’t completely count on higher positions and lower costs if we earn high Quality Scores, because that’s only true in general.
How Quality Score is Used
In that same help file, we’re also told of four different ways that Quality Score is used:
- Estimating the first page bids that you see in your account
- Determining if a keyword is eligible to enter the ad auction that occurs when a user enters a search query
- Affecting how high your ad will be ranked (AdRank = Bid x Quality Score)
- Influencing your keywords’ actual cost-per-clicks (Actual CPC = (Ad Rank to beat ? Quality Score) + $0.01)
This section confirms that Quality Score drives how often, in what position, and at what price your ads appear. That should be enough to convince us Quality Score is VERY important.
How Quality Score is Calculated
In another page from Google Adwords Help, we get to the heart of the matter. We knew Quality Score existed and we knew it was important. What we really want to know is what drives the calculation and ultimately what can we do to get the best Quality Score possible.
While we continue to refine our Quality Score formulas for Google and the search network, the core components remain more or less the same:
- The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on Google
- Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
- The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
- The quality of your landing page
- The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
- The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
- Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
- Other relevance factors
They begin here with a disclaimer: Google’s going to keep changing the way they calculate Quality Score, so before providing even a vague summary of the way it’s currently calculated we’re warned that the calculation can (and probably does) change at any time and from time to time.
With that out of the way, we get a solid list of factors impacting Quality Score. Three refer to CTR, three reference relevance, one mentions landing page quality, and one again uses the word performance.
The click-through-rate factors are the history of the keyword itself, the history of the display URL, and the history of the overall account. It’s been said that CTR history for the Ad Group and Campaign are also tracked and considered – although it’s very interesting that these aren’t included on the official list.
We’ll look very closely at the role of CTR in Quality Score in Chapter X.
Relevance is always a matter close to Google’s heart, so it’s no surprise to find it within the Quality Score calculation. In particular, they’re looking for alignment between the search query (the words the searcher types), your keywords, the text in your ads, and the concepts on your landing pages.
Or are they? The list doesn’t include landing pages in the relevance discussion, but instead simply refers to landing page quality. This requirement is widely believed and frequently repeated, however.
We’ll examine all the issues of relevance for Quality Score in Chapter Y.
While we’re talking about landing pages: In other places Google has referred to landing page load time, availability of a privacy policy, and other attributes as the important ones for Landing Pages in terms of Quality Score.
We’ll review the impact of landing pages on Quality Score in Chapter Z.
The geography of the person searching is a Quality Score factor, interestingly described as an Account level factor here, although elsewhere described by Google as one of the factors considered in the real-time calculation, which would make it far more likely and logically considered at the keyword level.
And in case there wasn’t enough uncertainty in the list thus far, they conclude with a simple coda: Oh ya, we take other things into consideration too.
Taking Stock
These aren’t the only official Google words on Quality Score, but they’re the broadest and must fundamental. These establish the core of what is officially known about Quality Score in terms of what it is, when it is used, and how it is calculated.
They still leave us with a lot of questions.
This is a good time to point out that the goal here is not to be paranoid. It’s understood that there are reasonable limits to how clear Google can be both for competitive reasons, to limit additional gaming of the system, and for their own legitimate business interests.
But we believe too that there are necessary levels of completeness and accuracy that advertisers need to be able to make reasonable, informed, and smart business decisions. The information Google provides in these and other documents (many of which we’ll review in later chapters) at this point isn’t adequate – hence the rest of this book.
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About This Post
This series of blog posts did eventually become a book about quality score – in June 2011 ‘Quality Score in High Resolution‘ will be released.
More details and ordering information can be found here.
Other Posted Chapters:
Chapter 1: Quality Score in High Resolution
This series of blog posts did eventually become a book about quality score – in June 2011 ‘Quality Score in High Resolution‘ will be released.
More details and ordering information can be found here.
Quality Score is a number which Google assigns to every keyword you bid on in Adwords. It’s an important number, because it is used as part of the formula that determines when and where your ads are shown, and the formula that determines how much you pay each time someone clicks on one of your ads.
The Quality Score of each keyword is calculated, in real-time, when someone executes a search for which your keyword is an eligible match – meaning that your text ad might be displayed.
The calculation is complex, and the details of how it’s determined and the final Quality Score assigned to each keyword in each circumstance are kept secret by Google.
Google has, however, shared some information about the factors which influence Quality Score.
They’ve said that click-through rate (CTR) is the most important component, both at the keyword, account, and display URL levels. They’ve said that relevance – generally defined as topical symmetry between our keywords, text-ads, landing pages, and the search queries we’re matched to, is also a factor and appears to be the second most important.
They’ve also described lesser factors – including various attributes of landing pages, the geography of the person searching, and the super vague and mysterious ‘other relevance factors’.
This list (their exact actual disclosure is in the next chapter) certainly gives us an idea of what factors influence Quality Score, but it is far from precise. We still don’t know how each factor is rated or the amount of influence each factor has over the final score a keyword is given in different situations.
This lack of specificity combined with the important role it plays in the success or failure of our Adwords paid search accounts is the reason there is so much speculation about Quality Score.
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About This Post
This is preview material from our upcoming Google Adwords Quality Score in High Resolution ebook. Comments and discussion are most welcome – changes and updates will be made before the final book is released.
Other Posted Chapters:
- Preface: Quality Score in High Resolution
- Chapter 1: Quality Score in High Resolution
- Chapter 3: Reviewing Official Google Quality Score Information.
- Chapter 4: Why Google Has Quality Score (Pt 1 and Pt 2)
Register to be notified when the complete book is available.
The Preface: Quality Score in High Resolution
Quality Score is a relatively new and not broadly understood component of Google Adwords. It’s a magic, semi-secret, and constantly changing number that determines when and where your ads appear, and how much you pay for clicks.
Google has described and defined Quality Score, but the official information is less than entirely clear, complete, and forthright. We don’t know exactly how quality score is calculated or applied.
As a result, the internet is filled with half-truths, assumptions, interpretations, silliness, rumors, and bad advice surrounding Quality Score.
This (ebook) is an attempt to gather the known truth, clarify what is probably true about the officially unknown, debunk the clearly untrue, and most importantly provide clear and actionable recommendations about how PPC managers can act in their best interest where Quality Score is concerned.
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About This Post
This series of blog posts did eventually become a book about quality score – in June 2011 ‘Quality Score in High Resolution‘ will be released.
More details and ordering information can be found here.
Other Posted Chapters:
Announcing: Quality Score in High Resolution
Since our Quality Score post series appeared here last November, this blog has spent a lot of time discussing Google Adwords Quality Score.
Our Economics of Quality Score has been our most popular post ever – by far.
But their remains a log of interest in Quality Score, a lot of questions and uncertainty, and it seems a need for something approaching a definitive reference to the subject.
So despite the fact that I’m supposed to be finishing the full High Resolution PPC ebook that has been in development for some time, this weekend I took a detour to start a sequal: Google Adwords Quality Score in High Resolution.
This ebook will include some of the material previously published on this blog, but a lot of new material as well. Beginning today I’ll start posting chapters here for review, comment, criticism, etc. I could really use feedback – positive or negative – as we go. Questions and suggestions for topics and coverage too.
I’m reluctant to announce a target time frame for the entire book to be complete, but I hope it’s measured in days not weeks. We’ll see.
More on the purpose and goals of the book in the next post, just about 1 hour from now.
Ask ClickEquations Your Quality Score Questions
Hey, this is Alex. If you follow the ClickEquations Twitter account or read our Paid Search Professionals Newsletter, you know we’ve been talking about Quality Score and trying to dispel some of the myths and bad information out there.
Well, we decided to put the question directly to you: What do you want to know about Quality Score?
We’re trying out Google Moderator to let people submit and vote their most burning Quality Score questions. Ask us yours by
- Submitting your questions directly at Google Moderator
- Leave a comment on this blog post and I’ll add it in
- Email your question to me and I’ll add it, marketing@clickequations.com
We’re starting with our first reader question about position adjusted Quality Score below.
Question: How Does Position Adjusted Clickthrough-Rate Affect Quality Score?
Dear Craig,
I recently attended a major search marketing seminar and asked some of the speakers about the strategy of starting out aiming for position 7 on the page, which is supposed to have a few benefits:
- Less smart competitors
- Easier to win
- Less cost of course…
BUT every single one of them I asked all came back with the old advice of ‘ya gotta bid high when starting out & get a high CTR or you’re dead’ line… I’m wondering if you can give me more specific advice:
Is ad position taken into account when deciding what a good CTR & a bad CTR is?
That is, does Google recognize that, if say 5% in position 1 and 1% in position 7 is ‘normal’ for that kw, then 10% in position 1 & 2% in position 7 is a good result (relatively) and therefore give you a good Quality Score for that position 7 ad and associated keywords?
I was told that that bidding for position 7 will create a low CTR, the argument in a nutshell is:
- We know CTR is a big chunk of the QS calculation
- Bid x QS = AdRank, will be lower because you have a low CTR, because you went for position 7
Intuitively this doesn’t make sense. Surely Google’s smart enough to see what’s ‘good’ & ‘bad’ for each keyword…
Cheers,
Mike
Answer: Yes, Google Does Factor in Position
Hi Mike,
Thanks for your note.
You are right. Google does take position into account when judging the CTR of an ad for Quality Score. Here is their own admission of such: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/10/improvements-to-ads-quality.html
Not sure I get the target POS 7 thing, but that’s another matter. Because of the way bid and QS and Rank and neighbors are mixed in, targeting any position via the one variable (bid) that you directly control is a bit tricky. We’ll be expanding on this in a future blog post.
But in any case, a low POS does not mean a low QS.
Best of luck,
-Craig
Surprise: Your Bid Doesn’t Determine Your Cost-Per-Click
The fall-out from Google’s Hal Varian Quality Score Video continues.
One early impact was finally understanding exactly how quality score impacts your cost-per-click.
A more interesting idea to get your head around: Your bid is not used in the calculation of your cost-per-click.
Isn’t that amazing?
How CPC is determined
Using the information from the Google video, and some other Google-documented facts, let’s look at the exact sequence of steps that determine the position and cost-per-click of your ad.
- Joe Smith types his search query into Google and clicks ‘Search’
- Google and (using their ‘infinite wisdom’ machine) decide which advertisers have keywords and match types and budgets and geo-targeted day-parts that make their ads eligible to be shown.
- Google calculates, in real-time, the Quality Score for each eligible keyword.
- Google multiplies Quality Score x MaxCPC for each eligible keyword to determine the Ad Rank of each keyword.
- The eligible keywords are sorted by Ad-Rank, highest to lowest.
- Starting from the top of the list, the CPC for each keyword is calculated by taking the Ad Rank of KW below it, and dividing it by the KW’s QS
.
So if my Ad Rank is 50 and my QS=7, and the following keyword’s Ad Rank is 45, my CPC = 45/7 = $6.42.
Bid Is Not A Direct Factor
Notice in Step 6: The bid was not a direct factor in the computation of the cost-per-click. It has a major influence, but it’s indirect, by determining your Ad Rank, which determines which keyword your rank above and that keywords rank is used to determine your CPC (by dividing by your quality score).
The ramification of this, beyond being a cool way to trip up friends at PPC cocktail parties, is that we have to rethink the idea of changing bids to change our costs or positions. There is an effect and relationship, but it is far less direct that we typically think.
Additional Steps
Just to finalize, there are some steps after the above sequence before the entire process is complete.
- For the last keyword in the list, Google uses some minimum required bid to determine the price.
- There is a minimum CPC below which ads will not appear – so not every keyword on the original list is displayed. Google decides this CPC, and perhaps how many ads they want to appear. The point is that some (or many) eligible keyword’s ads are not shown.
- After the rank and price is set, Google checks the MaxCPC of each KW against the MinBid required for a TOP position (ads that appear over the organic listings rather than on the right) and may move some ads to the TOP. Note that this decision is based on MaxCPC not CPC, and an ad in Position 4 may jump over an ad in Position 3 to get to the top if it had a higher MaxCPC.
PS: I’m hard at work on my way-behind-schedule ebook ‘High Resolution PPC’. If you like this kind of how-it-really-works thinking about paid search, I think you’ll enjoy the book. Sign up now and we’ll alert you as soon as I can finish and you can download.
Quality Score Changes Revealed in ClickEquations
All the recent talk about Quality Score got me to finally figure out how to build a ClickEquations Analyst template that I’ve been wanting to for some time now.
It shows you all the keywords whose Quality Score has changed from the prior period. It could be yesterday vs the day before, this week vs last week, or last month vs the month before.
So you can try to figure out why. Or make a new bidding decision. Or just marvel at the mysteries of Google.
Like all ClickEquations Analyst reports, to use it you simply open Microsoft Excel, open the report, and open the ‘Quick-Change’ palette to select the date range you like to report on.
Click Apply and hold your breath, in this case, for about 90 seconds.
.
The image above shows a zoom-in on the core data the report provides. There is one tab in Excel for the Quality Score gainers and another for the losers.
Click the thumbnail image to the left to see an enlarged full page of the ‘Gainers’ report.
This new report will be released to ClickEquations clients as an Analyst template set update in the very near future.
If you can’t wait that long, email support and we’ll get you a copy.
You don’t use ClickEquations for PPC management, reporting, and bidding? Click Here.
The Economics of Quality Score
In the paid search world, Quality Score is the new black. Blogs, forums, conferences, and Twitter are full of discussions of what quality score is and how you can optimize it.
But the real importance of quality score has been a bit hard to pin down. Not any more – we’re going to reveal the exact $$ value of quality score.
UPDATE: Since this post was written, we’ve learned an important new fact about Quality Score – the numbers we’re shown are reported as integers between 1 and 10, but these are not the numbers or scale Google applies to in their formulas. Rather, they’re representative of the actual Quality Score in terms of 1 being poor and 10 being great. Knowing this, it seems unlikely the specific math and results described in this post are correct. The positive and negative effects of good and bad quality score remain true, and hopefully the numbers are roughly proportional. We’ll update this post further when we get more information.
Why Does Quality Score Really Matter?
The prominence of quality score has been based on it’s role in Ad Rank – the formula Google uses to determine the position in which your ad appears. Ad Rank = Bid x Quality Score.
But Quality Score also plays a very important role in determining how much you’re charged per click. This is a separate application of the value which occurs after Ad Rank is calculated.
The recently released Google Video by Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian helped clarify this point.
In the video Mr. Varian points out that your cost-per-click is calculated using the formula: Ad Rank of the ad below yours / your quality score.
So if you’re in position #1 with a quality score of 5, and the ad in position #2 has an Ad Rank of 10, your cost-per-click is 10/5 = $2.
So What Is Quality Score Worth?
Knowing this is how cost-per-click is calculated, we’re able to determine the specific impact of any quality score on your cost-per-click.
And therefore the exact cost or savings from any single-digit increase or decrease in your quality score.
Yes that’s right – we can tell you the specific change in your CPC that is due to the quality score you’re getting for each of your keywords.
For example, your QS=10 keywords are enjoying a 30% CPC discount as compared to if they were QS=7 and in the same position. And your QS=4 keywords are paying a whopping 75% premium for their position.
The table below contains the complete list. This details the positive or negative impact quality score is having on the CPC prices you’re paying.
These factors are true regardless of your bid, position or those of your competitors. These are the impacts of Quality Score on your cost-per-click, anywhere, anytime.
As you can see, there are serious savings to be had with high quality scores (8, 9, or 10) and very high penalty costs to low quality scores (6 or below).
How We Calculated These Numbers
We calculated these values by comparing the impact of quality score on the price established at a wide range of Ad Rank values. This analysis showed that when QS was applied as the denominator of the equation, the Ad Rank values didn’t matter – the impact of each step of quality score was consistent. (Check out the raw data). So it was a simple task to compute percentage of impact each different QS had on CPC.
Note that we set QS=7 as the neutral value because using ClickEquations to review a wide range of accounts we’ve seen that QS=7 appears to be the mean quality score across a very large and diverse set of keywords.
In other words, most keywords get QS=7, that’s the typical score. So quality scores better than 7 can be considered better-than-average and thereby beneficial, and quality scores lower than 7 are lower-than-average and detrimental.
Two Important Disclaimers
1) Since quality score is used to first compute the Ad Rank and then to influence the CPC, you wouldn’t actually have the position you do if you didn’t have that quality score.
So it isn’t exactly accurate to say that your keyword is paying 30% less for position 1 at QS=10 than at QS=7, because in most cases you wouldn’t be at position 1 if you did have a QS=7. I think the relative value for each QS remains valid and valuable.
2) Google very likely calculates quality score not as an integer but as a real number (you your QS isn’t actually 6 but rather 6.329498) which means the impact would be more linear and not in the big steps the charts suggest. Thanks to commenters for pointing out that this fact was left out of the original post.
What Does A 1-Point Change Cost You?
Based on the same numbers, this next table documents the economic cost or benefit of having your quality score move up or down by 1 point.
As you can see, if your QS=9, then moving up 1 pt (to QS=10) will give you a 10% CPC discount. Starting from that same QS=9 and losing 1 pt (to QS=8) will result a 12.5% % CPC increase.
A Clear New Reason To Improve Your Quality Score
Knowing that your quality scores are saving you up to 30%, or costing you up to 133%, should further motivate everyone to both know and work to improve your quality scores.
In ClickEquations we have a lot of features that can help you improve quality score:
- We list QS (and the related Min First Page Bid) right next to each keyword so you can watch them carefully.
- Our ClickShare metrics tell you which ad groups and keywords aren’t getting as many clicks as they should – and why – which can help you drive up CTR which is by far the largest driver of quality score.
- Our ClickVariance metric tells you when you’ve got keywords in ad groups which are under-performing based on CTR, so you can move them into their own groups and write more applicable ads, or pause/delete them – thereby driving up average CTR
- Our complete search query detailed reporting lets you add new keywords and phrases that users have proven that they click on
- Our multivariate text-ad testing tool is the best possible way to drive up CTR – often by 2X-5X which skyrockets quality score
- The Quality Score Distribution template in ClickEquations Analyst lets you keep a direct eye on how your entire campaign is doing relative to Quality Score – and we’ve just updated it to show the actual $$ saved and expended due to the quality score cost numbers released in this post.
Click To Enlarge
And A Warning
One small word of caution regarding the existing, and likely to continue, flood of tips on improving quality score. Be very suspect of anything which promises to improve quality score by any method other than improving click-through-rate.
Relevance has it’s place. But both the new Google Video and other recent disclosures make clear that CTR drives quality score. You will not have meaningful impact getting your keywords into your text-ads, grouping keywords in better ways, and many of the other tactics getting over-hyped in some quarters. Relevance plays a supporting role, as does landing page to an even lesser degree, but both are trumped and trounced by CTR. Get great CTRs and you’ll get great QS’s. There is no other route.
Summary
We hope you’re as excited as we are about the discovery of the true economic benefit and cost of quality score.
Another small victory for transparency in the paid search process. Which means another tool to help us manage PPC in High Resolution.
To learn more about quality score, read our complete Quality Score blog post series from several months ago, or check out the replay of our recent Quality Score webinar or our SMX presentation on Quality Score Tips on video.
Google Quality Score Video
Google Adwords Quality Score is perhaps the most talked about subject in PPCLand. It’s one we’ve spend a lot of time writing about over the past few months.
In this new video, Google’s Chief Economist, Mr. Hal Varian, provides a great overview of how Quality Score works in practice in the ‘Ad Auction’ which controls when, where, and for how much your PPC ads are displayed on Google.
This is absolutely must-see online video for anyone managing paid search campaigns. No matter how much or little you know about QS, this video is worth your time.
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