ClickEquations Blog

This post continues Chapter 4, which began in the previous post.

In that post we discussed how Google uses Quality Score to rate keywords and ads on their performance and relevance. We looked at the first of three reasons why they have Quality Score, which as to make it harder for bad guys to run bad ads. Today we examine the other two reasons.

Quality Score as Preferred CustomerProgram
Just as it’s in Google’s interest to prevent or penalize bad advertisers, it’s in their interest to promote good ones.

High Quality Score advertisers have proven their ability to get high CTRs on both a keyword-level and in overall account averages. They buy more clicks from Google, albeit at a slightly reduced CPC, and have proven their ability to build, manage, and grow their accounts. And they’ve proven that they can satisfy searchers.

It’s entirely in Google’s interest to keep these advertisers – big spenders who by definition are satisfying searchers – happy and active. By getting high Quality Scores these advertisers get a discount on their CPC (more on that later) and an edge – the benefit of the doubt if you will – when they run new ads or enter new keyword categories.

Quality Score as Secret Sauce
The fact that Quality Score is a secret formula which has so much influence over the performance of your paid search account is a clear advantage to Google.

Suppose you’re dissatisfied with how frequently your ads are run, or their average position, or the price you’re paying per click. On just about any other advertising or marketing platform, this would be grounds for a serious conversation with your vendor.

But on Adwords there is no need for such a conversation, because all of the above problems are your fault; your keywords didn’t earn sufficient Quality Score to have more impressions, better position, or a lower CPC. So it is your responsibility to figure out how to improve your Quality Score.

The lack of clarity as to how to go about this (hence the need for this book) is you’re problem.

To help make clear how amazing and unusual this is, imagine Google’s rules applied in another situation. Suppose your monthly mortgage statement had variable pricing (no I’m not talking about your ARM) that was based on the ‘Quality Score’ your home received for the prior month, based on a list that included the attractiveness of your yard, the cleanliness of your home, the desirability of your neighborhood, and ‘other desirability factors’.

Would it bother you when you went to write that check that you weren’t allowed to see your score on any of these attributes, and weren’t provided any specific information about the way they were judged or calculated? Can you imagine signing a mortgage and agreement to make those payments with those terms and conditions?

Imaging Being Google
Better yet, imagine yourself the owner of a company with a large national client base.

With customers who had agreed to buy from you on a regular ongoing basis, despite the fact that you were going to change the particulars of the service you provided to them, and the amount that you charged them, on a regular basis.

And you were going to make these changes based on proprietary formulas of which they only had limited knowledge, and were given no fore-warning of the outcome – they were committed to paying regardless of the actual service or actual fees (with some basic range limits in place).

Wouldn’t that be great?

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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:

1. Preface: Quality Score in High Resolution
2. Chapter 1: Quality Score in High Resolution
3. Chapter 3: Reviewing Official Google Quality Score Information.
4. Chapter 4: Why Google Has Quality Score (Pt 1 and Pt 2)

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:

1. It acts as a bozo filter to limit or prevent ‘undesirable’ ads and advertisers
2. It acts as a ‘preferred customer program’ to reward top performing advertisers
3. 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:

1. Preface: Quality Score in High Resolution
2. Chapter 1: Quality Score in High Resolution
3. Chapter 3: Reviewing Official Google Quality Score Information.
4. Chapter 4: Why Google Has Quality Score (Pt 1 and Pt 2)

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:

1. Preface: Quality Score in High Resolution
2. Chapter 1: Quality Score in High Resolution
3. Chapter 3: Reviewing Official Google Quality Score Information.
4. Chapter 4: Why Google Has Quality Score (Pt 1 and Pt 2)

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:

1. Preface: Quality Score in High Resolution
2. Chapter 1: Quality Score in High Resolution
3. Chapter 3: Reviewing Official Google Quality Score Information.
4. Chapter 4: Why Google Has Quality Score (Pt 1 and Pt 2)

Register to be notified when the complete book is available.

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:

1. Preface: Quality Score in High Resolution
2. Chapter 1: Quality Score in High Resolution
3. Chapter 3: Reviewing Official Google Quality Score Information.
4. Chapter 4: Why Google Has Quality Score (Pt 1 and Pt 2)

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.