PPC Hacking: AdWords and Quality Score Secrets Revealed

Here is the video everyone is talking about:

While it’s certainly interesting to hear something from Google about Quality Score I have a several concerns about the information this video provides.

In the above image they show us the 3 elements that make Quality Score:

• CTR (60%)
• Landing Page (10%)
• Advert (30%)

By seeing this it seems that the only thing that is really important is CTR.

While I completely agree that for a mature campaign it’s certainly the case that CTR is the key factor what about a brand new campaign?

Since there is no CTR for a brand new campaign the relevant factors end up being only:

• Landing Page
• Advert

In my experience if you get a very poor Quality Score for a brand new site you’ll have such an hard time in getting any impressions at all that you’ll never be able to get any CTR at all.

Which means that actually both Landing Page and Advert are very important when it comes to Quality Score, certainly more than this Google Video would lead someone to believe.

I never had any issues with the Advert as basically all you have to do to make Google happy about the Advert is to ensure you have your keyword in the first line and possibly a second time in line 2 or 3 (or both). Since this also plays a major role in CTR it’s something I always do anyway.

Landing page can be more tricky, as sometimes even with a good advert and for a brand new campaign you still get a very low Quality Score that don’t let you get impressions.

I’ve heard some opinions saying that landing page cannot increse quality score, it can just ban your site in case it’s very poor. I don’t completely agree as I’ve seen different quality scores on brand new keywords+adverts+landing pages that can go as high as 10 (usually it’s 7). However I certainly agree that if your page is very bad you basically get banned, and I personally believe that if it’s not banned CTR will play the most important part in determining your Quality Score over the long run.

CTR on the long term can really make the difference in one Quality Score, for some keywords with very high CTR it’s not uncommon to have a Quality Score of 10.

To sum up here are my recommendations for getting good Quality Score:

CTR:

• Always bid on the 3 matches so if a match has a good CTR it doesn’t get diluted by the CTR of another match: read post
• Add as many negatives as you can, that’s the easiest way to increase CTR and so Quality Score: read how to effectively add negatives
• Ensure you use geo-targeted campaigns so the CTR don’t get diluted from high CTR locations to low CTR locations
• Remember that CTR depends more on your average position than your advert, so be careful how much you bid
• More in future posts

Advert (For initial Quality Score):

• Use the keywords you are bidding on in the 1st line of the advert

Advert (Because of the impact it has on CTR):

• Ensure you use exact match only when trying to optimize adverts: read post - read important comment
• Remember an advert is made of 4 lines: title, 2 line and Display URL - display URL will affect CTR just like every other line
• Use generic adverts first to learn negatives: read post

Landing page (This is the trickiest and most important one in my opinion, read the following previous posts):

• http://www.ppchacking.com/2009/03/adwords-quality-score-basics-part-2/
• http://www.ppchacking.com/2009/02/adwords-quality-score-basics/
• http://www.ppchacking.com/2009/01/adwords-quality-score-issues-with-brand-new-sites/

High initial bid trick:

• http://www.ppchacking.com/2009/02/dont-be-a-miser-with-adwords-or-at-least-dont-show-it/

Seems there is a lot much to worry about than what Google is telling us!

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

This is a very simple trick that I’m sure most people already experienced with AdWords know well, but sometimes I’m surprised to discover that even people doing AdWords for a few years don’t know about this trick.

The trick is the following: every time you add a keyword you should not choose if to add it as broad match, exact match or phrase match but you should simply add every keyword in all the forms:

• keyword
• “keyword”
• [keyword]

The reason for that is simply for tracking purposes.

Most newbie people just add all their keywords as broad and then if the keyword doesn’t perform well they remove it completely: WRONG

Why? It might very well be that with a certain match type the keyword is profitable and with another it loses money. So you don’t remove the keyword but just a certain combination of keyword/match.

Usually the exact match has a higher ROI, then the phrase match and then the broad match. However there are exceptions to this rule.

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Giotto De Filippi adwords, ctr

I usually only post useful and actionable information on this blog. I’ll make an exception this time with this post as I think it’s very funny.

I finally decided to take the AdWords professional test, and I was surprised to find out about this question:

Seems that someone at Google confused Page Rank with Quality Score. Funny as those 2 things are completely different.

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Giotto De Filippi adwords

AdWords being such a complex platform, it’s very hard to determine what’s important for starting.

Should you focus on the advert, on the keywords, on the negatives research, on the right bid amount, etc… ?

But then since all those things are interconnected, it could very well be that when you change the negatives everything else changes.

Negatives is something that might take a lot of time to discover, so what do you do in the meantime?

My suggestion is very simple: start with exact match

Exact match delivers no surprises, you know exactly what search queries you are receiving.

Very likely you cannot do just exact match, as to get big volumes you’ll have to do phrase and broad match too.

So basically what we do is as usual for a given keyword we bid with the 3 matches, exact, broad and phrase at the same time.

In the following example we bid on “cheap laptop”:

• cheap laptop
• “cheap laptop”
• [cheap laptop]

Now for example in order to determine the CTR of our advert for a new keyword we should look only at how it performs under exact match, as we know we’ll have no surprises here.

Over time we’ll discover negatives for phrase and broad and we’ll add them, but since this is a long process in the meantime we can already optimize our advert by looking at the CTR of the exact match.

The reason for this is that if we use broad and we get clicks for words we don’t want (and that later on will become negatives) we may distort the CTR of the advert. For example broad may contain the word “free” and appear to have a bigger CTR than exact, but this only until we put free as a negative. If we start by looking only at the CTR of exact in the beginning we won’t fall in those traps.

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Giotto De Filippi adverts writing, adwords, ctr, new sites