PPC Hacking: AdWords and Quality Score Secrets Revealed

In my opinion quality score is a real pain, however it’s not necessarily a bad thing once you understand it. The main reason is that it’s not completely obvious to trick - so most people won’t manage to trick it - they’ll lose money and quit. That means that whoever manages to understand it will make much more profit than if it was simple and with a lot of competitors.

The first thing to understand is that there are several quality score phases:

Phase 1: The AdBot visits your site, and assigns you a quality score based on:

• The content of your site (Landing Page)
• Your advert (Keyword Relevance)
• The time to load your page
• How much you bid for that keyword - This one is not declared by Google, but we discuss it in this post: http://www.ppchacking.com/2009/02/dont-be-a-miser-with-adwords-or-at-least-dont-show-it/

Phase 2: Actual performance on your advert (CTR)

Let’s start with Phase 1:

What you need to do is:

• Ensure that you have a decent server and the page doesn’t take forever to load (this could be more of an issue with pages that are generated on the fly rather than a slow server by itself - even if I never had any issues with this and I was never penalized by Google because of this even when my pages were dynamic and took a few seconds to load)
• Use the exact keyword you are bidding for twice in your advert, once on line 1 (The title) and once either on line 2 or 3 (the 2 description lines)
• If you do this and you bid the right amount - read: http://www.ppchacking.com/2009/02/dont-be-a-miser-with-adwords-or-at-least-dont-show-it/ - then the initial quality score you’ll get will be about the content of your site - something we’ll see on the next post

In the next post we’ll see the more advanced things related to site content and also Phase 2.

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Giotto De Filippi adverts writing, adwords, adwords bot, ctr, new sites, quality score

Let’s say that you targeted a specific keyword, but you are not making money on it.

Let’s say it’s “laptop”.

Of course there are MANY things you could do that I’m not going to talk about in this post, like changing advert, position, match type, geolocation, etc…

Let’s talk about finding ALTERNATE keywords.

You probably know that if you bid on [laptop] (exact match) you’ll get searches of people that only search that keyword. So if they search “laptop” they’ll see your ad, if they search “cheap laptop” they won’t.

Let’s assume that you are sure that “laptop” is your niche, but you are losing money.

Maybe you should not target the main keyword, but alternate keywords related to it. What’s the best way to discover those keywords? Simply to let Google do it for you.

You could just bid on the keyword laptop with broad match, however you’ll be still be receiving many clicks for “laptop” that will lose you money.

So what you can do is bid on “laptop” broad match, and then bid on “laptop” exact match as negative.

It’ll look like that in the account:
laptop
-[laptop]

Now you’ll get clicks related to “laptop”, but that are not “laptop”.

Of course you need some web analytics software to track the new keywords you receive.

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Giotto De Filippi adwords

The quality score is a really complex black box algorithm, there are many things that it takes into account.

Here is for example something that is very far from being intuitive or obvious:

If you just added a keyword and you bid a very low amount (seems to be correlated with what the cost of being displayed on first page will be) you may end up getting a poor quality score, and of course it’s not going to improve immediately if you then increase the bid later on.

The logic behind it seems to be the fact that if you add a keyword and you bid a low amount (let’s say $0.05) it means that you believe this keyword not to be higly relevant and your thinking is simply that if it’s cheap enough it may actually be profitable, no matter if it’s relevant.

A good trick is to bid a high amount, like $1 or more when you add the keyword. Then a few seconds later check the quality score it gets, and just lower the bid to whatever amount you want.

So if you want to bid $0.05 on a keyword, don’t add the keyword with that bid amount, add it with $1, let AdWords calculate the quality score (usually takes a few seconds) and then lower the bid to the amount you want. If you were to add the keyword with the low bid right away you would end up getting a lower quality score.

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Giotto De Filippi adwords, adwords bot, quality score

There is an easy way to discover which keywords your competitor is bidding on.

This service called semrush.com allows you to type your competitor’s url and it’ll find the keywords they are purchasing on AdWords.

The way it works is that they have a crawler and a large database of keywords and they just query Google for all those keywords.

So the first difference will be that you’ll not know what your competitors are actually buying, but rather for which search queries they are showing (which actually is more important anyway).

To use it for AdWords you use your competitors URL followed by “(by adwords)”.

So let’s try: google.com (by adwords)

Here we can see all the keywords google.com is showing for:

Click here to try it: www.semrush.com

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Giotto De Filippi adwords, competitive intelligence