The paid search industry on the outset appear content and convinced that CTR is the answer to quality score problems; therefore, it is a simple piece of the web marketing experience that warrants little to no attention, optimization or speculation. It is cut and dry…

Or is it?

The most obvious no-brainer to optimizing quality score is writing better performing ads. <- Common theme in almost any blog post on the topic. Another common statistic that corroborates this theme: Hal Varian has suggested (see the pie chart in this video) that roughly 60% of the Quality Score formula is your click through rate (CTR). This is not a bad theme at all. It does help. Tricked you, didn’t I? You thought I was going to ‘dog’ writing better ads didn’t you?

Craig Danuloff says:

CTR is by far the largest factor, and considered at many levels – from the historic overall average CTR of your account, to the CTR of the Ad-Group the keyword is in, to the recent CTR of the specific query-keyword-textAd combination.

One conclusion you can draw from that statement is that one should dig into CTR on multiple levels…CTR as a high level statistic is great but it hides a lot more than it exposes in some cases.

What if you do not want extra clicks? A lot of advertisers need to qualify visitors through ad copy before the click occurs. If you want to qualify prospects heavily and choose to keep your CTR lower -or- you’re casting a wider net with broad terms -or- whatever the reason your CTR might be considered sub par but acceptable for what you’re selling…there is that “other” 40% of your quality score to play with and it can mean the world in costs and volume to you. Granted, that 40% can be broken down into roughly 35% relevancy and maybe 5% landing page…and landing page is usually an easy fix. Relevancy, on the other hand, can take a lot of time and hard work.

I want to show you the good that can come from a solid, intensive, long-haul, qualitative approach to quality score optimization in the finance niche:

First, a few disclaimers -

- This is an affiliate marketing account. Pure marketing. Tastes so good. Mmmmhmmm. Yummay. (Being an affiliate in this particular space isn’t a huge advantage at all…quite the opposite in fact. Standards are high for quality and the payouts are typically half the budgeted cost per action for the in-house advertisers…it’s an uphill battle.)

- IMPORTANT: This took years to curate to this level. Quality score optimization is NOT an overnight fix. It’s a long-haul, work your butt off, manual deal. I was lucky to have the time to make it a priority.

- Bids are automated by truly automated bid management software. This freed up my time to strategize, organize, marry reports for correlating data and agonizingly work toward better quality scores.

On to the goods!

Non branded keyword quality scores for general keywords:

Note: I spent a fair part of the day in the top 3 positions but dropped it mid-afternoon on account of day parts. When I was clocking things, I received clicks in the #1 position for around $2.60. Remember this blog post? Hmm…me thinks quality score has something to do with it. My bids weren’t over $5 max.

Also peek at the avereage position (it’s 4) of all the keywords in this ad group…the average cost per click (under $2) and the decent volume! Whaaaaat! But wait, there’s more at the account level below!

Ad Spend & Click Volume & Avg CPC from July (our biggest month this year)

Note: Check out them account level apples! This is not a tiny account by any means…average position was above 4 for the month of July, average cpc was near $1.50 and we received over 170,000 clicks. In the consumer finance niche. Fun times!

60%+ of this account had 10/10 quality scores in July. 95%+ of the account had quality scores 7/10 and higher.

I haven’t ever documented this publicly. I didn’t see the need and honestly, I am publishing this against my own desire for secrecy and privacy into what I do and have done for the last couple of years. Why am I doing this? To debunk the idea that quality scores are simple, easy to optimize and that there shouldn’t be software or tools (granted, George did say ‘garbage’ tools…and there is a lot of trash in the ppc space, no doubt!) to manage this end of the ppc pipeline. It’s “easy” to identify ads that have problems…but the quality problem is much bigger than that. I have yet to see a ppc account that is meticulously organized – even my own, I am not even close to perfect…probably the furthest away of them all – but if I consider my accounts the worst of all, and I have been focusing on quality scores for some time…I don’t even need to complete that line of thought, right? Just sayin’…

Contrary to me owning “the domain” (QualityScores.com ) and building some good reporting tools to assist me in my path to the highest possible quality scores…I do not consider myself an expert in the quality score space.

If you choose to start focusing on quality in your accounts, I would start learning from these experts:

Craig Danuloff -

Read his book: Quality Score in High Resolution. This book is worth well over $150 in my opinion. In fact, I would argue that you should never ever write about quality score until you have read this book. Twice.

Craig has written a ton of killer stuff on quality scores at both Search Engine Land and Click Equations. He is, in my mind, the Godfather of quality scores. If I could have anybody’s knowledge on the topic, I am trying my hardest to know what Craig knows…but I undoubtedly fall very short on the topic of quality scores.

Brad Geddes -

Read his book: Advanced Google AdWords.

Brad is, in my opinion, one of the most definitive resources for ppc knowledge in the space. Brad is the King of AdWords and has a killer quality score analysis tool at CertifiedKnowledge.com (subscription based).

The bottom line

The bottom line is that Quality Score is underrated and little is really known beyond what Google tells us. There may be a handful of respectable folks out there truly exploring and discovering all they can about quality score…my dream is that all ppc’ers learn more about it. Quality score is a fascinating concept that is catching on in the social space, at other search engines and more.

You will be hard pressed to convince me that I could have achieved the above results without an insane focus on quality from the account to the keyword/ad level and beyond. Please keep in mind the fact that I had epic bid management software on the bid side – bids are incredibly important to the success of a paid search account. Bids are not to be discounted – except through quality scores.

Learn more about quality scores. Dig in. You will be quite surprised…I know I have been floored over the last couple years with the depth, the misconceptions and the weight that quality scores play in advertising. Did you know Facebook has a quality score (hidden…?) Twitter does too…

Finally, we end with the beginning in mind – this quote has quickly become a favorite of mine for so many topics – quality score, social media, seo, web marketing, conversion rate optimization, copywriting, paid search, media buying, programming and more – it’s always true in my opinion:

“The less you know about a subject, the less you believe there is to know in total.” - source

James Zolman (@jameszol) is a guest author at DreamSystemsMedia.com. He is the founder and CEO of QualityScores.com, a quality score analysis, optimization and consulting company.

How will Google Adwords +1 Button change Internet Marketing? Does it affect PPC? Will it help or hurt CRO? Can it really increase CTR? What’s the Math?

In a recent email from Google Adwords was the following notification:

In the coming weeks, your search results and ads on Google will include a +1 button, which users can click to recommend your ads. You don’t need to make any changes to your account in order to take advantage of them. The final landing page URL of your ads can also appear on the Google profile of any user who +1’s your ad.

That time has arrived.

What this means is that now when your ad receives a +1, Google notes its final landing page URL. When the same URL appears in an organic search listing, the organic listing will include the same personal annotations as would an ad. The ad button also works both ways. Therefore, if a user +1′s one of your organic listings, then the ads Google resolves to with the same final landing page URL will include the same personal annotations. The idea is that this will increase the chance of your ads getting noticed. In theory this will also increase your CTR.

_

Google Question and Answers:

per a Google Adwords Representative

Will a +1 click/vote through a Google Ad cost the advertiser anything?

You will still be charged per click on your ad the same as always — a plus 1 does not count as a click.

Awesome. Adsense +1′s don’t cost extra for the advertiser.

Does this work for  Google Boost Ads as well?

“Yes.

And… Yes. I concur.

Does the +1 affect Adwords Quality Score?

Google Reps response:

+1′s (whatever their source — organic search, ads, or +1 buttons on publisher sites) are a signal that affects organic search ranking, but +1′s do not change quality scores for ads and ad ranking. By adding +1 buttons to your pages, you give your visitors more chances to +1 your content, resulting in additional +1 annotations on Google search results and search ads. Studies have shown that customers turn to advice from people they trust when making purchase decisions, so more +1 annotations could lead to more, and better qualified traffic coming to your site from Google search.

The way we measure Quality Score for your ads has not changed. We continue to use historical AdWords performance information, clickthrough rate (CTR), and other signals to calculate your Ad Rank and cost-per-click (CPC). That being said, if personal annotations from +1′s on your search results, search ads, or website increase the CTR on your ads, your Quality Score is likely to improve as well.

-

So the +1 button does not directly change quality score, but could indirectly change quality score by increasing the Click Through Rate (CTR). This is a good thing for companies that foster customer relations and customer service. Having a higher CTR, increasing quality score, and then saving on the cost-per-click (CPC) means a better ROI for the business. This also turns out to be a better user experience for Google users because they finding those quality companies. This is a win-win-win scenario.

The Problem Pests

The first step in this equation looks pretty good, but this math problem has a few pest issues. ….LANDING PAGES.

We have landing pages for our Google PPC campaign to track our PPC and they are “NoIndex” pages. How will this benefit or hurt us?

In your case, if you have a different landing page for Google PPC, any +1 to your PPC ad won’t also show on your organic listing- but would  +still show on the ad. If you put a +1 button on your Google PPC page and someone +1′s it, then when someone in their network sees your ad, they will see the annotation below it.

Hmmm, that doesn’t sound so good.  Would an Extreme Canonical Trick help?

+1s are tagged currently at the URL level. So, if you have a landing +page just for Google PPC, then if someone +1s that ad, you will only see the +1 annotations below that ad and not on the organic link. If the same URL is used for both PPC and Organic listings, then any +1s to that URL (whether on the landing page itself, on the ad, or the organic link) will show up for all links to that page.

While I am sure that there a few geniuses out there that have this problem already solved the rest of us like to create separate landing pages to track Google Adwords, and to improve conversion rates. Optimization of landing pages was one of the benefits that Google Pay Per clicks offered without the hassles of including SEO. Many search engine marketers (SEMs) enjoyed the flexibility of design available within the safe haven of pay per clicks. Because search engine rules demand webmasters show the search bot spiders and the human users the same page, this +1 adwords creation is going to bite into landing page and conversion rate optimization. This seems to be more than a little problem, in my professional pest control opinion, this is an infestation waiting to explode!

Gaming the +1s to increase CTR?

Per some spammy emails  you can buy Google +1s, doesn’t this open up a new black market?

According to Googler Fredrick Vallaeys, “No, Google +1 only influences your circle of friends/connections.”

Don’t mind me, Just a pest control guy… and that is the Search Pest Report.

-Thomas Ballantyne
Director of Marketing for Bulwark Exterminating
Follow me on Twitter —> @Thos003

Announcement:

Retiring the position preference setting

In early May, we’ll be removing the option to set position preferences. Learn more about what this means for your campaigns.

More and More Complexity

It’s no secret that managing an enterprise-level PPC campaign is complicated. You could be managing hundreds or even thousands of keywords and keyword combinations, a couple different versions of ad copy for each, different landing pages, etc. Put them all together and you could have literally hundreds of thousands of possible combinations and you are expected to figure out ideal combinations to produce the best results and the strongest ROAS. Plus you’re responsible for creating ad copy, optimizing landing pages, and still trying to get home before dark.

PPC is more competitive and sophisticated than ever, and management-types are tightening the screws on every ad dollar that walks out the door. A lot of these management-types have no idea just how sophisticated the ad space has become and simply want to see their SEM team do more with less. The Ad Director webinar helped put all these factors in context.

Getting Management to Understand PPC Complexity

The Ad Director team did a great job of explaining just how complex running an effective PPC campaign has become and why some decision makers still don’t understand what their SEM teams spend their days doing. It’s not easy managing 50,000 keywords, ad copy, and landing page combinations across different categories, products, and services.

Each of these factors has to be managed, and the sheer volume of information and variables makes it extremely time consuming for you and your team, even with bid management software and tools.

Thriving on the Complexity

Rachel Charlton at Ad Director explained that all of the data created by these layers of complexity are actually a gold mine for getting the best possible results. Webtrends put out Ad Director a while ago but it was beneficial for me to understand exactly what Ad Director does and how it is different from traditional bid management tools.

The Ad Director people made the distinction between more data and more ad spend. A true optimization platform thrives on more data. If your campaign blows through money but is data poor, optimization might not be the best solution for you. You might be ok with simple bid management tools. But if you are managing serious complexity, a true optimization platform will help you squeeze PPC gold out of the data without spending more money.

True Optimization vs. Bid Management

Ad Director is “self-learning” and actively and continuously collects data from your PPC campaign. Sounds like other bid management tools… Ad Director also continuously updates bids, ad position, and keyword/ad copy/landing page combinations 24/7 based on millions of pieces of data and based on the goals, metrics, and parameters you specified. So, does the platform you use simply tell you what happened yesterday or does it tell you what it has already done with more data than you could possibly process to improve the bottom line? It seems to me that is the difference between bid management and true optimization.

Even if you only spend half your day analyzing data reports from traditional bid management tools, a true optimization tool would have finished that hours ago and would have already implemented bid changes and updated ad copy/landing page combinations. Plus, if you’re doing all of this analysis and updating yourself, you still have to find time to do all of the creative, strategic, and management stuff you would probably prefer to spend your time on anyway.

Ad Director still relies on strategic management and timely direction from you and your team, but it takes a whole lot of the monotony out of PPC management and it does it with a level of sophistication and efficiency that seems to justify a serious look.

Please check out the “Difference between PPC Bid Management & Real Optimization” webinar by Webtrends, as it is loaded with golden nuggets of PPC goodness – and let us know your thoughts!

Moderator: Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster

Q&A Moderator: James Zolman, CEO, semvironment

Speakers:

Addie Conner, Director of Search Marketing, Course Advisor Inc.
Craig Danuloff, President, ClickEquations Inc.
Nicholas Fox, Business Product Management Director, AdWords, Google Inc.

NOTES:

Addie Conner, Director of Search Marketing, Course Advisor Inc.
Topic: Fact vs. Myth with Google Quality Score

1. There is a different CPC forumula if you are the only advertiser on the page? Fact.
2. Quality score is lost once you  make changes? Myth, QS is changed, but not lost.
3. Match type impacts QS. Myth.
4. Conversion rate impact QS? Myth.
5. Ad Rank QS included landing page quality? Myth.
6. Certain tuypes of site/business models carry a quality score penalty? Fact.  There is a Google FAQ about this.  There is a penalty, but not a blacklist.
7. Long tail keywords are given lower quality scores? Myth.
8. It takes two weeks for Google to determine quality score? Myth.  QS is a real-time factor and QS is determined really based on the amount of clicks your campaign is getting.  A campaign getting 10 clicks a day takes longer to build a QS compared to an account that gets 100k clicks a day.
9. Absolute CTR is the most important QS metric? Myth.  CTR relative to others is the most important QS variable.  You need to compare relative to other in the auction at that rank, this accounts for 95% of your QS rating.
10. QS is carried over to a new account if kw/creative all stays the same? Fact.
11. Landing page quality score is tiered? Myth.  Landing score QS is binary.
12. Quality score is the most important optimization method? Myth, what really matters is ROI.
13. You can help gain higher QS though high bidding? Fact.  Bidding high can put your ad in a position to increase your QS, but bidding high in and of itself will not help.

End Addie.

Craig Danuloff, President, ClickEquations Inc.
Topic: Quality Score (QS) (duh)

Ad rank formula: Bid x QS = Ad Rank.  Working quality score is just as important as raising your bid.  Having a high quality score will allow you to rank righer while paying less, thus netting you a greater ROI on each and any campaign.

Check out the campaign impression share report in Google to get an idea of how bad your ads are within the target search market.  If your ads are not showing 70% of the time, than people typed keywords that you have bought specifically, but your ads are not showing because your QS is so bad.

There are many Quality Scores and QS is figured in real-time during a search:

1. Keywords QS.
2. Ad Group QS.
3. Account History QS.

What QS should you start to shoot for: seven (7).  Seven is the mark showing that if you are below seven you are probably penalized, while above seven you are probably benefiting from QS.

Final thoughts:

1. QS is very important.
2. There are clear steps you can take to improve QS.
3. Advertisers should demand more clarity.

End Craig.

Nicholas Fox, Business Product Management Director, AdWords, Google Inc.
Topic: What Makes a Good Quality Score?

Defining Quality:

1. Relevant
2. Reputable site
3. Honest page
4. Specific page
5. Fast loading page
6. Trust for landing page

The bulk of quality is the CTR.  Click through tells them that everyone that looked at that ad thought it was this % important.  We try to capture things beyond the CTR, but it by far matters the most.  Quality score is then combined with the advertisers bid to rank that ad in PPC.

What we can do as advertisers:

1. Key point is to focus on the user and think about what users would want.
2. Keywords:
   1. Thing about what the user would search for.
      1. Diamonds is better than diamond for jewelers.
   2. Keep keywords to 2-4 words in length.
   3. Don’t use to many keywords: 10-15 per ad is about right.
3. Creative:
   1. Invite the user to do something; be compelling!
   2. Be specific.
   3. Be transparent about what he user will get.

Match types have no effect on quality score (QS), ad position does impact quality score, QS does not suffer when your ads are not showing, ad conversion rate does effect your QS.

Summery: Focus on your users and your customer (come on, please get more specific then that!)  Go to: www.google.com/domorewithless