PPC Hacking: AdWords and Quality Score Secrets Revealed

Some people get banned on AdWords because of some violations of AdWords Terms and Conditions. Most of the time they have absolutely no clue of what exactly they did in order to get banned, they just get an email from Google saying that they have violated terms and conditions, and if they answer that email they hear that they should not contact Google again.

This can happen to both completely legitimate accounts (like classic ecommerce) and to border-line accounts.

We specialize in helping in this case of situations and we are able to have your ads running again in a matter of days.

This is possible no matter what activity you are doing, from completely legitimate to border line.

We successfully opened accounts for the following activities:

• Arbitrage
• Affiliates
• Ecommerce
• Ebooks
• Squeeze Pages
• Sales Letters

If you are interested please contact me on the contact form of this blog.

Twitter This

Username: Password:

Bookmark It

Giotto De Filippi adwords

Most newbie AdWords users focus very strongly on CTR as a way to measure the success of their advert.

In previous posts I already explained why focusing on CTR is wrong and why instead you should focus on conversion:

• http://www.ppchacking.com/2009/01/impact-of-domain-on-ctr-and-conversion/
• http://www.ppchacking.com/2009/01/focusing-on-ctr-for-your-adverts-and-forgetting-conversions/

What CTR indicates is simply how many people out of those that made a search clicked your advert. However it doesn’t indicates who those people are. Are they buyers? Are they people purely looking for information with no intention to spend a single dollar?

People that search on Google have a specific intent in mind, and they summarize it into the search query. However the search query being just a few words it doesn’t tell everything about the intent of the user. Is he looking to buy? Or just searching for information?

The second step in expressing that intent is clicking on an advert. The user will click the advert that he feels is the most relevant to his intent (and not just to his search query).

So if for example you add the word “Buy” in your advert people that have the intent to buy will click more on that advert and people that don’t have the intent to buy will click less. Usually by adding the word “Buy” in your advert you’ll get a lower CTR, but the reason is not because your advert is not good, it’s simply because the amount of people with the intent to buy is less than the amount of people with the intent not to buy.

Let’s look at this example:

In the advert with “Buy” the CTR is lower, however the conversion rate is higher and overall the advert with “Buy” generates more conversions.

Also besides generating more conversions this advert gets half the number of clicks, so the cost is is also less.

Twitter This

Username: Password:

Bookmark It

Giotto De Filippi Uncategorized

Frequent readers of my blog know the value of bidding high on a keyword in order to appear on the left (if not read here: http://www.ppchacking.com/2009/05/appearing-on-the-left-on-adwords/)

Of course you want to bid high, but you also don’t want to have a high CPC, which is usually possible if the person ranking #2 is not bidding high. (Very simplified example: You bid $10 so you appear on the left, and the person below you bids $1 so your CPC will be a little more than $1 but you’ll be on the left and get much more traffic).

When you use this strategy you’ll watch very carefully your Average CPC to ensure that it doesn’t grow.

However there is something very important that you should understand about Average CPC: the fact that it’s just an average.

This means that if you are bidding $10 and your Average CPC is $1 it may very well be that you are paying $0.1 for some clicks and $9 for others (and the ones that cost $9 are not necessarily the ones that convert).

Unfortunately Google doesn’t release cost of individual clicks, all they show is the Average CPC.

I’ve however found a way to get some useful (even if not perfect) results: In the reports section use the “Geographical Performance” function in a way that split the clicks as much as possible (so that you go as close as possible to seeing price of a single click).

So use the following settings:

By doing this every click will be split by: AdGroup/Day/Region (There may be hundreds of regions in a single country) so you’ll often see the price of a sigle click, but even if you don’t they’ll be small group of clicks with similar prices.

There are many ways to analyze the data you’ll get, from very simple like sorting the report ascending and descending by Average CPC to making more complicated pivot tables with excel.

Sorted from Top to Bottom:

Sorted from Bottom to Top:

Keep in mind that the Average CPC of the following example was $1, but as you can see just looking at the number $1 (that AdWords tells you in the interface) doens’t really means much since the range goes from almost $7 to a little more than $0.10

So what is the action to take once you have seen this report? See which countries have a high CPC (that is not worth it in terms of conversion) and group those in different campaigns so that you can have different sets of bids. What you want to do is keep bidding a lot to be on the left in areas where your CPC is low, and use much lower bids in areas where the report shows you that you are actually having a very high CPC.

Twitter This

Username: Password:

Bookmark It

Giotto De Filippi CPC, adwords, conversion rate

There are many possible bidding strategies for AdWords, but at the end of the day what it comes up to is simply where will your Advert shows and and at what price.

Will it shows first? Will it show last? Will the click be expensive?

There are a few correlations that are almost always true:

• Higher positions will cost more per click
• Higher positions will deliver more clicks
• Higher positions will have a lower conversion rate

The logic is pretty straightforward, higher positions get more visibility and so get more clicks. Advertisers compete via the auction system for the first ranks, so this makes those more expensive.

The conversion instead is more about user psychology, the more they dig down in the results the more they are interested. A click on position 1 shows much less commitment than a click in position 10.

So now the important question: Which position should you bid for?

There is no magic answer that always works, since it also may vary from market to market, but in general terms we can say that the more you appeal to the generic audience for that keyword the higher you should bid (if your conversion rate allows it) and the more you are targeting a specific segment of that audience, the lower you should bid.

Of course the factors of conversion will enter into play too, meaning that if your site is poorly designed and your prices are expensive you’ll have a lower conversion rate that won’t necessarily let you bid for #1.

Generic audience simply means what people that search that keyword are searching for “in general”. It may requires some research and experimentation in order to find it out.

For example let’s think about jewelry related keywords. What are people that search that specific keyword looking for in terms of price? Are most people looking to spend $100 or $10,000? The point here is that for a keyword like that the price range is so huge that you may completely fail if you don’t know the statistics. Maybe 95% of the people are looking to spend between $100 and $500 and if you don’t give good visibility to that price range on your site you won’t convert.

Now for example let’s say you sell very expensive rings that interests only 1% of the traffic, then it makes sense to buy a very low position and clearly state in your advert the segment you are targeting, as you already know that people searching that keyword that are looking for what you sell will very likely:

• Have a hard time finding what they are looking for on the generalists #1 sites
• Already know they’ll have a hard time so already be prepared to go through many sites in order to find it

As a general conclusion, if you are a generalist you should really aim for #1, if you can’t get #1 profitably then you should work on your conversion. If you are a specialist you should instead work very hard on clearly stating your specialty in your Advert.

A related post to this article can be found here: http://www.ppchacking.com/2009/01/focusing-on-ctr-for-your-adverts-and-forgetting-conversions/

Twitter This

Username: Password:

Bookmark It

Giotto De Filippi adverts writing, adwords, conversion rate, ctr

There is a new tool that allows to discover negatives that never get a click but generate many impressions.

Those keywords impact negatively your AdWords account by lowering your CTR as you get some useless impressions that never get a click.

Since they never get a click it’s very hard to discover those negatives as you won’t see them while looking at your logfiles.

This new tool uses some predictive algorithm to discover words that you should put as negatives that never get a click but generate many impressions.

You can try it free here: http://www.ghostnegatives.com

Twitter This

Username: Password:

Bookmark It

Giotto De Filippi adwords, ctr, quality score

Sometimes it happens that your advert is showing on #1 on the right like in this example and there are just organic results on the left.

It’s actually possible in this situation to force Google to display your advert on the left like this:

(Note: Sometimes your advert will appear naturally on the left, what I’m talking about is how to ensure that when you are the #1 ranking advertiser on AdWords you always appear on the left and not on the right. The benefit of doing that is that by being on the left you’ll get more clicks and so a higher CTR)

The way to do this is to bid a large amount on the keyword. This doesn’t means you are going to pay more than when you appearead on the right (if your advert is already showing #1), you may actually end up paying less if your CTR increases.

So let’s say you are currently bidding $0.5 for the top slot, but you appear on the right. And let’s say your average CPC is $0.3 (this is determined by what the other advertisers did bid).

If you now bid $10 instead of $0.5 you’ll still be paying $0.3 as AdWords uses a proxy auction model, and your CPC is determined by what the other advertisers are bidding. So the rule is that if you are already #1 and you increase your bid your CPC will stay the same but your’ll now get promoted to appearing on the left simply because you have a large bid amount.

There is however a danger in doing that, if one of the other advertisers that are currently below you were to increase their bid let’s say to $9 you would have to pay $9 for that click. So you have to closely monitor your AdWords spend and immediately reduce your bid if you see your CPC increasing too much.

Twitter This

Username: Password:

Bookmark It

Giotto De Filippi Uncategorized

I want to review and compare different bid management tools that our readers are using to write a post with the findings.

If you are using a bid management system, what is it? Are you happy with the results? What are the functions of this tool and how do you use it?

Please post a comment on this post.

Twitter This

Username: Password:

Bookmark It

Giotto De Filippi Uncategorized

I get many comments from people suggesting that instead of using the advanced technique for finding negatives I suggest in this post it’s better to just stick to the search query report.

Here is my answer:

First it’s a myth that the search query report gives you search queries that don’t get clicks. It’s true that it shows the impressions but if a search query get impressions but no clicks you won’t see it.

To prove my point I took the following screenshot:

As you can see out of almost half a million impressions if I sort by clicks the report I get only 3 search queries that have zero clicks.

So if you really want to learn (and put as negatives) what are the irrelevant terms that you are getting impressions for but no clicks the recommendation of starting with a very generic ad is very effective.

Now when it comes to clicks I’m certainly not against using that report, but very often you’ll just see:  “XX other unique queries” - something that would not happen if you analyze your server logs or use an analytics software.

Here are a myth I would like to debunk:

High CTR is not necessarily a good thing, by adding the right negatives you may actually be reducing your CTR when you add keywords that get many clicks but don’t convert, so don’t use CTR as a measure of success of adding negatives.

Summary of steps to EFFECTIVELY add negatives (and I’m saying adding negatives, not increasing CTR!)

• Use a very generic advert so that you get as many clicks as possible
• Discover negatives (words which are creating impressions but not converting)
• You can use your server logs, an analytics program or the search query report to see those search queries (ideally use all)
  
• Always add the negative, even if that word appeared just once, it may be the tip of the iceberg of plenty of impressions with very low CTR

Twitter This

Username: Password:

Bookmark It

Giotto De Filippi adwords

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!

Twitter This

Username: Password:

Bookmark It

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.

Twitter This

Username: Password:

Bookmark It

Giotto De Filippi adwords, ctr