ClickEquations Blog

When you finally get a paid search tool (like ClickEquations) that allows you to see each search query that people typed matched directly to the keyword you bid on and the match type you set, you’ll soon notice that all of your Exact match keywords aren’t entirely exact.

Doing a little research and experimentation while preparing for SMX, I just came across a great example of one reason why this is true.

Look at the ads to the right. Which one is not like the others?

One of our clients sells products to help Fido keep himself together, and I did some searches on that topic. Then a search for ‘Premium dog collars’. That’s the search which delivered the ads you see.

Google however remembered that not long ago I was concerned with the other end of the animal, and slipped the Poop ad into the mix.

Had I clicked it, my search query of ‘Premium dog collars’ would show up, correctly, for the exact match keyword/phrase ‘dogs eating poop’.

Just so you know.

Heading to SMX in San Jose? Come see the new version of ClickEquations at our booth, or catch me in the Quality Score or Text-Ad Testing workshops.

ClickEquations readers and customers know that we consider search queries, the words users type to initiate their search, as a vital part of paid search reporting and management.

Just yesterday our post pointed  out that keywords themselves aren’t really important, they’re just a way to attract search queries. In High Resolution PPC (our upcoming e-book) we talk a lot about using the match type, negative, bid, and other options to tune campaigns around search queries.

If they were gone, paid search would return to the dark ages.

But apparently an in-test version of Google search results makes search query tracking impossible.

Yikes.

For now, we’ll assume this is a by-product of the fact that it’s a test. It seem unimaginable that Google would take away (rather than enhance) this ability.

Hopefully someone at Google will re-assure us that search query reporting will remain. Until then, we’ll keep watching and report on any developments.

UPDATE: Found in the comments of the post referred to above, I haven’t seen the original

Here’s a comment from Matt Cutts on the issue:

“Were continually testing new interfaces and features to enhance the user experience. We are currently experimenting with a javascript enhanced result page because we believe that it may ultimately provide a faster experience for our users. At this time only a small percentage of users will see this experiment. It is not our intention to disrupt referrer tracking, and we are continuing to iterate on this project. For more information on the experiments that we run on Google search, please see: http://googleblog.blogspot.com…..-test.html.”

What if your ads didn’t run?

You picked the keywords, placed the bids, people searched, but your ads didn’t show up?

It happens every day. In almost every one of your campaigns.

It’s documented in a metric called Impression Share (in Google Adwords, no MSN or Yahoo equivalent yet.)

Impression Share displays the percentage of the time that your ads were displayed to people who entered search queries which match your keywords (at their specified match types).

100 minus Impression Share is the percentage of the time your ads didn’t run when you thought they would.

If your campaigns are profitable, the missing impressions are missing profit. Who can afford missing profit these days?

Three things stand between you and this extra profit:

1. Getting your Impression Share metrics.
2. Knowing what they mean.
3. Taking the steps necessary to drive Impression Share up.

Finding Impression Share
To get an impression share report most people have to go to the Reports tab in Adwords, build a Campaign report, and edit the fields to include IS, Lost IS (Budget), Lost IS (Rank), and Exact Match IS. You can’t access these metrics at the AdGroup level (a shame we’ll decry another time).

Impression Share Options in Google Adwords Report Configuration

If you use ClickEquations, you can see Impression Share right in the Campaign reports, or in any report or dashboard built in Excel with ClickEquations Analyst.

Impression Share Metrics in ClickEquations

Understanding Impression Share
There are four Impression Share Metrics. IS, IS Budget, IS Rank, and IS Exact. The first three are relatively straight forward. The last is a bit confusing.

• Impression Share = The percentage of the time your ads where shown (for this campaign) out of the times it was eligible to be shown. Eligible means the search matched your keyword, your account was active, the geo-targeting and day-parting and other settings were right, etc.

The next two metrics explain the Impression Share you didn’t get. If your Impression Share is 70%, then your Lost Impression Share is 30%. But why didn’t your ads run those times? The next two metrics tell you:

• Lost IS (Budget) = The percentage of impressions lost due to budget constraints
• Lost IS (Rank) = The percentage of impressions lost due to low Ad Rank (cost-per-click bid x Quality Score).

So Impression Share + Lost IS (Budget) + Lost IS (Rank) = 100%. These tell you what you got and what you didn’t get, and why.

The last one is trickier. For that reason I don’t think it gets the attention it deserves. And I’ll admit that I didn’t understand it until today when I started digging into this topic while doing some analysis work.

• Exact Match IS =  The impression share of your campaigns as if your keywords were set to Exact Match. That’s the official Google definition – the one that seems generally misunderstood.

So let’s try it a different way. Exact Match IS tells you the percentage of the time when your ads were displayed for search queries that exactly match the keywords in your campaign.

One minus Exact Match IS is the percentage of the time when someone typed EXACTLY your keywords in as their search query and Google still didn’t show them your ad.

Using Impression Share
The IS metrics are great because they tell you things you could otherwise never know about your campaigns.

Foremost, they tell what you’re getting and what you’re missing in terms of impressions – and from there the calculation of missing clicks, conversions, and even revenue/profit is rather simple (see chart 2 below).

This is huge. We can finally at least partially answer the perennial question ‘How much more could I make from my paid search campaigns?’.

Start With Exact Match IS
Although it somehow seems offered as an afterthought metric, I’d recommend starting by looking at your Exact Match IS.

This simplifies the world and if you’re buying anything near the right keywords provides a sense of how you’re doing in terms of getting shown to the people looking for you.

Google Exact Match IS (Chart from ClickEquations Analyst)
(Click to enlarge)

Exact Match IS Graphed As Revenue & Click Opportunity
(Click to enlarge)

If your Exact Match IS isn’t high (as usual there’s not simple way to say what that means, but let’s go with 70% or higher) then you really need to work your way down the list and think about your keywords, bids, quality score, ad copy etc.

Think about it this way: if Google doesn’t think it’s worth their while to show your ads to people typing in exactly the keywords you’re buying, how can you expect them to think running your ads is worth it for search queries you aren’t even directly buying?

Now Look At Impression Share
Let’s assume you have good to great Exact Match IS (you worked that out over the last 90 seconds right?). Now look at regular old Impression Share.

Google Impression Share (Chart from ClickEquations Analyst)
(Click to enlarge)

Here you’re likely to see something ranging from confusion (some highs and some lows) to a real bloodbath (all lows or at least no highs).

The reason these aren’t all 98.7%? The only easy answer is if you’re lucky enough to have some %’s in the IS Lost Budget column. And I say lucky only because that column is at least definitive. You can spend more and get those impressions.

Lost IS (Rank) theoretically explains the rest, but really it doesn’t explain very much.

Rank means Ad-Rank. Ad-Rank is Bid x Quality Score. Bid can simply be an insane fee you pay despite what something is worth, you probably don’t want to ‘win’ that way. Quality Score is determined by many things, as we’ve been over.

So Impression Share provides an easy way to see something, and know something that is very important to know. But it doesn’t provide a magical simple path to improving the problems it helps you find.

End of Part I

To solve our problems we’ll have to follow the path through our campaigns.

Impression Share forces us, if we look at it hard enough, to understand the roles of both bids and quality score, to think about our match type strategies, to organize our campaigns more effectively, to include the right keywords not just the most keywords, and to broadly see how interconnected the many options really are in a paid search campaign.

We’ll dig into that work in a follow up post later this week.

Google is again modifying both the calculation and impact of their ‘Quality Score’ metric. As with most Google changes, the stated goal is improving search quality and user experience. The coincidental result is that Google will make more money.

There are two changes this time:

• Quality score will now be ‘position adjusted’ to take into account the location of the text-ad when the click-through occurs. This makes it ‘more accurate’. Makes me wonder why this didn’t happen a long time ago. This increases the value of extensive text-ad testing.
• Quality score can now cause an ad to move above another ad it would normally rank below IF this jump pushes the ad to the top of the page (rather than the right edge). (That’s a bad quick summary, read the Google announce for the details.)

You can read some worthwhile thoughts here and here and here or here or here.

Beyond these details what strikes me is how important quality score has become to paid search management and results.

Quality score drives bid requirements, quality score drives ad position, quality score drives impression share, and now quality score drives the chance to leapfrog your way to the top center of search result pages.

What Do We Know About Quality Score?

Although quality score plays a central role in how your money is spent and made in Google Adwords, it is officially a ’secret formula’.

Like PageRank on the SEO side, Google makes only vague pronouncements while pundits and practitioners share theories and recommendation endlessly – but nobody can tell you definitively how to maximize your quality score.

It still isn’t even that easy to see your quality score, although it is getting easier. Google recently changed the way they display quality score – giving it an integer value – but it’s still under a ‘work for it’ pop-up in the Adwords interface. On the positive front, they have finally added quality score to the API (thank you!) so third-party tools can begin to make use of it.

But also like PageRank the scores tend to clump around certain values, and the distinctions between close numbers aren’t obvious.

Also, and this is just a hunch, I’d bet nearly anything Google doesn’t maintain or use the number as an integer. So two keywords from two different bidders that both show a QS of ‘7′ might in fact be one with a 7.0001 and another with a 7.9998.

Four Conclusions

1. Google has an awesome business. They sell a product with secret specifications which are subject to change, and charge whatever they want without even telling anyone why or how. Nobody but the Mafia selling protection services to local merchants ever got away with this before.
2. Advertisers have to really play the ‘chase the quality score ghost’ game. Obsess about CTR’s and align as many of the other known factors as possible. Live with the fact that you’ll waste time trying to please the QS algorithm because there’s no published list for how to get into quality-score-heaven.
3. Advertisers should continue to clammor for more openness from Google as to what counts, how much, when, and how we’re charged accordingly. Neither #1 or #2 should be true.
4. I need to spend a lot more time thinking and writing about Quality Score. It’s a big deal.

A nice surprise from Google today, with the release of independent statistics for ad-group performance on the Google ‘Search Network’ – sites like AOL and Ask.com.

This is no doubt related to the Google-Yahoo deal and clammoring on this blog and elsewhere about the issues involved in integrating those reports. It’s great that reporting is now separate – next we need separate bidding options like they provide for the Content Network.

Interestingly, in one of our campaigns the search network bid is set to ‘auto’. I don’t know what that means. Are they going to auto-lower bids on search partners? Better than keeping them the same as bids on the Google network, but I’d still prefer advertiser control.

Most of the comments and analysis on the Google Quality Score updates, including my own, had mentioned the fact that the changes as described seemed to deal a death-blow to the old ‘good-ok-great’ Quality Score ranking system, but didn’t mention any replacement.

Brad Geddes apparently has the scoop that there will be ‘more transparency’ in the new system:

More visibility coming to Quality Score. The ‘OK, Great, and Poor’ will be replaced with a much more transparent system. At present, the easiest way to see many changes is to run a keyword report and sort by minimum bid high to low. With the new system, you will eventually be able to run a report and sort by Quality Score so that you can get a much better view of your keywords quality score.

Excellent. Hope they’re available in the API!

I always wonder if Frank Luntz invented the name Quality Score for Google.

It just sounds like the man behind ‘climate change’ (which was otherwise known as ‘global warming’) would call something a ‘quality score’ when it actually functions as ‘advertising tax’.

The Quality Score is Google’s way of handicapping your keywords/text-ads, in the sense of both ranking and limiting their appropriateness and therefore likelihood to run.

The idea, as Google portrays it, is that keyword/ad/landing-page combinations which are more appropriate for a given search get a higher score, and those less appropriate get a lower one. A higher score helps ads run more frequently and be positioned higher, while a lower quality score drives them to be run less frequently and positioned lower.

This of course all aligns with the idea of putting user experience of searchers first, as better ads (more relevant and ‘voted’ so by clicks) get higher quality scores.

And oh ya, the lower your quality score the more you have to pay for the chance or priviledge of running your ads at all.

This is where the prime directive gets sold out – ads with lower quality scores (to a point) can run and even rank highly if the advertiser is willing to pay enough.

In some cases quality scores were so low that a ‘Minimum Bid’ was put into place, which is the moral equivalent of saying that we have no available seating for dinner this evening, unless you can find it in your heart to slip the maitre de a Benjamin.

Beyond a certain point, however, keywords have been shut down entirely (and marked ‘inactive’ until the words, ads, landing pages, or bids were modified and re-evaluated.)

Quality score is calculated using yet-another-secret-google-algorithm, but we know it reflects the symmetry of language between the query, keyword, ad, and landing page, click-through-rate performance, load time of the landing page, and other elements.

Quality Score Revised

The way Quality Score is calculated and applied is being changed, which as just announced in a blog post entitled ‘Quality Score improvements’. Luntz would be proud.

Here’s what they say about the changes:

A more accurate Quality Score

Most importantly, we are replacing our static per-keyword Quality Scores with a system that will evaluate an ad’s quality each time it matches a search query. This way, AdWords will use the most accurate, specific, and up-to-date performance information when determining whether an ad should be displayed. Your ads will be more likely to show when they’re relevant and less likely to show when they’re not. This means that Google users are apt to see better ads while you, as an advertiser, should receive leads which are more highly qualified.

Keywords no longer marked ‘inactive for search’

The new per-query evaluation of Quality Score affects you in that keywords will no longer appear as ‘inactive for search’ in your account. Instead, all keywords will have the chance to show ads on Google web search and the search network (unless you’ve paused or deleted them). Keep in mind, however, that keywords previously marked ‘inactive for search’ are not likely to accrue a great deal of traffic following this change. This is because their combined per-query Quality Score and bid probably isn’t high enough to gain competitive placement.

‘First page bid’ will replace ‘minimum bid’

As a result of migrating to per-query Quality Score, we are no longer showing minimum bids in your account. Instead, we’re replacing minimum bids with a new, more meaningful metric: first page bids. First page bids are an estimate of the bid it would take for your ad to reach the first page of search results on Google web search. They’re based on the exact match version of the keyword, the ad’s Quality Score, and current advertiser competition on that keyword. Based on your feedback, we learned that knowing your minimum bid wasn’t always helpful in getting the ad placement you wanted, so we hope that first page bids will give you better guidance on how to achieve your advertising goals.

It’s worth mentioning that the impact of these changes will vary from advertiser to advertiser; some might see no changes to their ad serving, while others may see a noticeable difference. As always, we recommend optimizing ads to prevent them from receiving a low Quality Score.

First Impressions
The core idea of calculating Quality Score on the unique characteristics of each search instead of coming up with a single score per keyword is clearly a step in the right direction.

The dynamic nature of the new Quality Score, however, may make it a lot more challenging to know and manage the implications of your Quality Scores. They don’t say if they’ll still report Quality Score in the Adwords interface, of more importantly if they’ll make any QS rating available via the Adwords API.

By scoring independently in each situation, many keywords may suffer what will in effect be a lower impression share – getting shown far less often than their potential – but it’s not clear that this loss will be reported or visible.

We may see volume drops for certain keywords and not have any clear indication that the reason is a low Quality Score in certain situations. And it’s not clear that there will be any feedback as to which situations – certain queries, certain network sites, certain times of day or whatever – are delivering low QS which therefore will make it quite difficult to take corrective action.

Similarly, while not having keywords marked ‘Inactive for Search’ sounds positive, it may be worse to have words running at extremely low impression counts if there is not a clear indication that this is happening or that it’s due to frequently low Quality Scores in the situations where the keyword is being scored and considered.

The ‘First Page Bid’ metric at least makes the process of bribing the matre de more transparent. There’s nothing worse than either slipping someone a $20 only to have them scoff at you because a $100 was necessary, except of course passing off a $100 when $20 would have done.

Having the price of admission clearly marked will enable advertisers to make their own decisions as to value.

One issue it would be great to have Google clarify is the way Quality Score is calculated, and therefore ‘First Page Bid’ too, over the life and history of a keyword. In the past the ‘Minimum Bid’ was frequently insanely and unjustly high for new keywords added to a campaign, and would decrease rapidly as a click-history was established.

This required paying up to $10 per click for terms without any competitive bids and which would later settle at bid prices as low as $0.10. Hopefully these types of ‘hazing’ fees for new keywords won’t be included in the new system – but of course only time will tell.

The Roll-Out
The new Quality Score changes are being rolled out slowly, so you may not see these in your account immediately. There will be another post at the Adwords blog before final system-wide launch.

Do you have Quality Score concerns? Post a comment!

Update: More info on new Quality Score reporting.

There are many amazing things about Google. The one I’ve always been the most intrigued by is their ability to manage so many projects so well at such a large scale.

We can hardly imagine the number of things going on there – big diverse programs, developments, acquisitions, global scaling issues, etc. Yet relatively speaking things seem to get done and run amazingly smoothly.

This extends to their ability to throw a party.

I spent last evening walking the famous “Google Dance” event with friend and advisor Avinash Kaushik.

If Martha Stewart threw a tech party, this would be it. There was no detail, no extravagance, no space or idea left incomplete. There were gifts, and caricature artists, and music, and food (of all kinds & everywhere) and light shows, and photo-booths, and volleyball, and on and on. With an industry full of people streaming in by the bus load.

And yet like the Google homepage it was simple, friendly, and casual.

I can’t imagine the effort that went into making this event so complex and so seemingly effortless.

It was a great event, but it inspired even more awe about what these guys are doing and will continue to do during work hours.