Professionals who’ve spent any time in paid search – at an agency or in-house – can tell you how much of a big deal Quality Score (QS) is to us in the industry.

We base our strategies on it.

We lie awake at night wondering how to improve it.

We use it as a justification for nearly every change we make.

Recently, Larry Kim at Wordstream took another look at our favorite obsession in his post “Revisiting the Economics of Quality Score: Why QS Is Up to 200% More Valuable in 2013.”

He isn’t the only one. If you do a Google search for any PPC firm + “quality score,” you’ll find veritable ass-loads of blog posts on it:

But nearly every study done on QS measures its impact on just one metric: Cost per Click (CPC).

It’s an important stat, don’t get me wrong – but looking at only CPC doesn’t matter much to our clients at the end of the day.

Why? For one, cheap traffic isn’t always good traffic. For a lot of businesses, the terms worth getting clicks on are the ones with the highest competition and the most cost-ineffective CPCs.

My point is: Our bosses and our clients don’t care about CPCs in and of themselves. They want more leads. They want cheaper leads. They want more-cheaper leads!

So, with that in mind, I wanted to look at QS under two different lenses: Conversion Rate (CR) and Cost per Acquisition (CPA).

The QS Study

We anonymously looked at 27 accounts with the following parameters:

• Had to be small businesses – after all, they stand to gain (and lose) the most from paid search
• Had to have conversion tracking enabled
• Keywords in the account had to have at least 1 impression
• Keywords with QS below 2 were ignored as there wasn’t enough volume to be statistically significant

That gave us a keyword base of ~40,000 in the study and an impression base of ~26,000,000.

We analyzed performance on that group over calendar year 2012.

The Results by QS

The first question we wanted to answer with this study:

Did getting a higher QS lead to better CR?

The answer might surprise you:

*Note – Product categories and labels have been altered for privacy reasons.

No, not really.

It makes sense that there’s a huge jump going from 2 to 3 QS. That’s basically the difference between your ads showing up often and not showing up at all.

But improving from 3 all the way up to 9 has literally no Conversion Rate benefit!

You only see massive benefit in Conversion Rate moving up from 9 to 10.

The next question was:

Did getting a higher QS lead to better CPA?

This answer was less surprising:

Yep. It’s a massive deal.

QS can cut your conversion costs by over 90% improving from 2 to 10.

But even going from 6 to 10 can improve your conversion costs by over 50%!

Here’s the data table, if you’d like to just stew in the numbers for a minute here:

QS Study Takeaways

The question you really need to be asking – QS aside – is:

What are your client’s goals?

Do they want more conversions?

Being QS obsessed, or doing bid adjustments based on QS might not be the way to go if the client just wants a better conversion volume.

In fact, this study saw a greater CR at QS4 than any other besides QS10.

Do they want cheaper conversions?

This is where QS has to be your absolute mission. The benefits to CPA by even incremental QS improvements were incredible.

Improving your QS by 1 meant an average CPA reduction of 22%!

The post Better Quality Score = Better Results? appeared first on Portent.

Google AdWords is a mystical beast sometimes, capable of dumbfounding and goring the best of us. My cost-per-click cohort, Elizabeth, kindly tipped us off to Google’s most recent Quality Score update – and it appears the latest changes are starting to affect the paid search landscape in a big way. For some, scores have dropped considerably, prices have gone up and general unrest has befallen bidders. With that said, it’s a good time to reiterate a few things at the crux of achieving good quality scores, especially given the apparent added weight Google is placing on certain key variables in their algorithm.

Keyword House Cleaning

Assuming you’re seeing a lot of “GREAT” to “OK” and “OK” to “POOR” trends, look closely at the CTR (click-thru rate) column in your ad groups. A quick correlation should reveal itself. If your keyword CTR looks poor over a long stretch of time – 1.5% might not necessarily be bad for your business if you’re still converting – Google will probably still treat it poorly. To that end, consider deleting any poorly performing keywords in an ad group (if they aren’t absolutely vital to your conversion rates).

Granulate Your Ad Groups

In the past, you could get away with keeping synonymous terms in the same ad group. Now, Google will ding you harder if you do. Let’s say you sell lodges in the Swiss Alps. Your keywords are mostly lodge related, your ads say lodge, your landing page says lodge; but you’d also like to bid on the synonyms – hotel, inn, bed and breakfast, etc. Failing to segregate those terms might not only cost your dearly on those terms, but AdWords might penalize all the other keywords in the ad group as well. So, keep them as organized as possible.

Boost Lander Relevance

In a perfect world, we’d have a landing page tailored for every ad group. Speaking practically, we can’t always add 10 new web pages every time we go on a keyword research binge. Be smart about where you point your ads. A good rule of thumb is to make sure your keyword (or a close variation thereof) appears at least once in your landing page. It doesn’t have to be saturated, but if you don’t see your keyword appearing on an important page, borrow a much-used SEO tactic: make copy recommendations to the people controlling site content.

The post The AdWords Quality Score Hammer Has Fallen, Now What? appeared first on Portent.

It’s been said already that by creating this label Google is admitting that having your ads on any page but the first page is an exercise in futility and what we all already know, that you’ve got to get on that first page, be it paid or organic, to get the results you want. More and more people aren’t clicking through to the 2nd, 3rd or even 4th search results pages and instead change their search query if they don’t see what they’re looking for on the first page.

What does this really mean for Google though? It means more revenue, pure and simple. By placing that warning of an “bid is below first page estimate” it sends a small panic message to the advertiser.

Technically your ads are still showing (unlike with the previous inactive classification) but this encourages you to increase your bid for first page placement. And sooner than you would have with the inactive classification. If you see an inactive keyword, you either leave it or increase the bid, but it certainly takes longer for a keyword to hit the inactive amount than it does to hit the below first page placement amount. So essentially what Google is doing is creating the need to increase your bids sooner and more often.

And since Google’s AdWords system is an auction system, who wins when the price goes up?

“…ad prices are not set by Yahoo! or Google, but by advertisers themselves, through the auction process. Since advertisers set prices themselves via an auction, the prices must ultimately reflect advertiser values.”

It’s not the advertisers who win, that’s for sure.

Obviously I prefer the inactive classification over the new first page placement, mostly because the average position column already shows you whether or not you were on the first page or not. I’d rather know what the lowest amount is that I can bid while still showing, which is clearly not what Google would rather have me do.

The post More Revenue for Google with First Page Bids appeared first on Portent.

If you are managing a pay-per-click account, by now you’ve realized that we are living in a Quality Score world. And if you haven’t come to this realization yet, you should very soon (like right now would be good). In this brave new world the quality and relevancy of your keywords and advertisements are paramount to your PPC success. Optimizing your PPC account is a great way to enhance your relevancy, but be careful, because you could damage your Quality Score even when you’re trying to improve it.

To improve your Quality Score in both Google and Yahoo, you need to enhance your click-through rate. To enhance your click-through rate your keywords and ad texts need to be as highly relevant to a user’s search query as possible. This is where campaign optimization comes into play. Optimizing your PPC campaign is comprised of breaking down your keywords into smaller, tightly themed groups. This way you serve the most relevant ads to specific keywords. Breaking down your keywords into tightly themed groups can help your account take two steps forward, but you may take one step backwards if you’re not careful.

In regards to moving keywords and segmenting them into smaller groups, here is how to make sure you put your best foot forward. For example, when you break down an ad group with 100 keywords into 4 separate ad groups (each with 25 keywords), your natural inclination is to write all-new targeted ad texts for each ad group in order to increase your relevancy and your click-through rate (therefore enhancing your Quality Score) – and you are thinking correctly, this is a good strategy. When it comes to Quality Score, be aware that your keywords and ad texts are tied together in a symbiotic relationship. If you sever this bond, you actually harm your Quality Score.

So, how do you optimize your account and break down your keywords without serving your keyword/ad text relationship? Simple, when you move your keywords into their new ad groups, just make a copy of the already existing ad text and move it into your new ad group. If you don’t do this the Quality Score for every keyword you move will be “reset” which means you’re back to zero and you have to re-build your score from the group, up.

After you copy your existing ad text, you can write new ad texts and begin split testing to see which version works best. This way, you have maintained your keyword/ad text bond and you are now improving your Quality Score by inserting new ads in order to increase your click-through rate.

In summary, to improve your Quality Score you need to improve your relevancy by breaking down your keywords into tightly-themed ad groups. But be sure not to re-set your Quality Score (the very thing you’re trying to improve!) by copying your existing ad texts into each of your newly created ad groups.

The post PPC Hero Guest Post – PPC Quality & Relevancy appeared first on Portent.

• What are all the factors?
• How much weight does each factors carry?
• How can I exploit this to my advantage?!

Last week Search Engine Journal posted screen shots of tiny suspicious text beneath Google AdWords ads. The text icluded pScore, mCPC and thresh.



This spurred much discussion concerning what these terms mean and why they appeared. Google issued a statement to Search Engine Journal citing a "technical error." The company admitted the data displayed was indeed AdWords ranking information, but refused to share what the statistics meant. (Well obviously.) The discrepancy was not limited to any one country. This Search Engine Roundtable post shows the Netherlands saw AdWords quality score text too.

One day, after eons of research, we may decipher AdWords’s secret sauce. Perhaps it will simply fall into our laps. Who knows? It may turn out to be as simple as discovering the secret sauce for a Krusty Burger:



Let mayonnaise sit out in the sun. (Okay, okay…the Krusty-AdWords connection is highly unlikely.)

I suppose that it’s best for the AdWords Quality Score to remain a secret. It keeps the playing field level and encourages good sportsmanship and all that.

*Sigh*

The post Google Leaks AdWords Quality Score appeared first on Portent.