PPC Hacking: AdWords and Quality Score Secrets Revealed

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/

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

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

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

Negative keywords are one of the most powerful ways to increase the CTR (and so your position) on AdWords for broad and phrase keywords.
Unfortunately there is not much documentation about how to use them in an effective way.

Let’s see the different levels of understanding of negative keywords form beginner to advanced:

1. Don’t understand negatives at all, they just don’t add them
2. Add obvious negatives like “free” to their campaigns
3. Check their webserver logs or analytics software and look at exact search queries, then add irrelevant words to negatives

However even the 3rd level of understanding is really missing the most important thing!

There is an important distinction to make in negatives:

• Negatives that don’t make the sale
• Negatives that don’t get the click

Negatives that don’t make the sale are the ones that you can get from analytics - when you get the clicks but those clicks don’t make sales: by adding those negatives you’ll increase your conversion rate but not necessarily your CTR.

Negatives that don’t make the click are like a hidden disease: some people search but never click, so you have no way to know that these impressions happen and so to put them as negative. Reason being that with an analytics software you can track the search query that generated a click but there is no way to know which search query generated an impression that never got a click.

Note: Even if an impression doesn’t make the click it’s costing you money because it lowers your CTR

One way I found to help in this task is to write an advert that is as generic as possible for your topic: what will happen is that some people will click on it as they find it somewhat relevant no matter what they search.

Example if you write “Buy” in your advert the chances of someone that had the word “Free” in this search query clicking is very low, so you may simply never realize that anyone is searching “Free” and put it as negative - however if the advert is completely generic you have more chances to get a click from both “free” and “buy”.

Of course this generic ad is just a first phase of your campaign to learn negatives, after that you’ll try targeted ad variations to improve your CTR and conversion rate.

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

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

When working on competitive keywords having a good CTR is extremely important. So it would be very useful to be able to tell if your CTR is better than your competitor CTR, and by how much.

Some people may just think that it’s simple and all you have to do is replicate the advert of your competitor (with his display URL of course) for a given keyword to find out the CTR.

In reality it’s not as simple as one may think, most people think that what determines the CTR is the advert they write, however this is very far from the truth. The most important factor that determines the CTR of an advert is the position. So basically a very poor written advert in position #1 is most likely to have a higher CTR compared to a very well written advert in position #10.

So what we really need to measure is the CTR for a given position.

The position depends on many factors, for sure those 3:
- Bid amount
- CTR
- Quality Score

The problem with the way the AdWords interface is done is that what you see as position is actually the average position. This means that if the advert appears once on position #1 and another time on position #10 the average position will be #5.5

The main issue with this is related with the fact that the competitive landscape of AdWords is completely different according to country, language and time of the day. Whereas in some countries there may be 10 competitors, in others there may be zero. Which means that the average position (and so the CTR) will depend more on where the searches that displayed your advert have been performed rather than the quality of the advert itself.

What I’ve found to be an effective way to compare the CTR (note as you probably understood this is NOT about determining the absolute CTR of your competitor, since this is impossible if you don’t manage to show up exactly in the same position and in the same countries but determining if your CTR is higher or lower than your competitor) is to make an AdGroup and put 1 keyword, the one you want to know the CTR of the advert for (for newbies: of course we can speak of CTR only for a given keyword, the keyword will probably be one of the most important factors in determining the CTR of an advert). Then you add 2 adverts, one is yours and the other one is the one of your competitor (with the competitor’s display URL). Now if you search with Google that keyword, in any country you want, and you refresh your search, you’ll see that the 2 adverts are rotating (you may have to refresh a few times). What’s interesting to see is that the position is almost always exactly the same. This may be due to the fact that in order to determine the position to give to an advert Google is not using the CTR of the advert, but rather the CTR of the keyword, which average the CTR of those 2 adverts. So by doing this you guarantee that both adverts will show in the same position, and avoid the problem you would normally have by using 2 AdGroups of having the best beforming advert move up and increase it’s CTR even more and the worse performing advert move down and it’s CTR declining even further.

It you want to do an even more comprehensive CTR analysis I also suggest to try varying the bid amount, so that you can see if the CTR difference is consistent across positions.

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

A lot of AdWords advertisers understand the importance of a quality advert in order to get a good CTR.

CTR of course is very important since it’ll have an impact on how much one will pay per click for a given position.

However as we have seen in a previous post (http://www.ppchacking.com/2009/01/focusing-on-ctr-for-your-adverts-and-forgetting-conversions/) the conversion rate that the advert is getting may be even more important than the CTR.

The right approach to write an effective advert is to understand that that adverts are made of 4 lines, and not just 3. The last line (display URL) is actually as important as the other ones.

This requires registering several domains, that can even be very similar, and have them mirror the same site. Then you just write the same exact advert (the first 3 lines) with the exception of the destination URL.

In the example above, you can see that the advert is exactly the same, except that the second domain contains the word “cure”. This is a website about a cure, and we have 2 versions of the domain, one that just contain the name of the disease, and the other one that starts with cure and then has the same disease name.

To make an example it could be like: www.CureFlu.com vs. www.Flu.com. (I cannot reveal the website of the customer)

Intuitively it would be pretty hard to guess that this can make a difference (except the fact that usually shorter domains are seen as more “authoritative”) but the difference is actually measurable. The short domain has a slightly better CTR (around 10% better) and a better conversion too (30% more).

So the moral of the story is that it may actually be a very good investment to register 10 or more domains that show the same site, and test the CTR and the conversion. In a very competitive area with low margins the domain itself may make the difference between making a profit and making a loss.

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

Most people pay a lot of attention to the CTR of their adverts, but not that much to the conversion rate of the advert itself (In my experience people seem to measure performance of adverts by CTR and performance of keywords by conversion rate).

In this post I will show an example to illustrate why this practice is wrong and will lead to wasting lots of money.

As you can see from the image above, I tried 3 differents adverts in this AdGroup, trying to improve my CTR and conversion. Since I cannot disclose the advert without risking to disclose the name of the customer I had to hide the advert, just note that just one word was changed in those adverts, and every time I chose a word that was more appealing to a certain segment of the audience for that keyword.

What is interesting to see is that the advert that achieved the highest CTR also achieved the lowest conversion rate. The CTR are all very similar, all almost at 5%, however the worst converting advert has a conversion rate that is less than half the one of the best converting advert.

Now the most important thing to understand is WHY it happens that the conversion rate of an advert is not necessarily proportional with its CTR.

Many people simply assume that you should have the highest possible CTR so as to bring as many people as possible to your landing page. Then from there they believe that every keyword has a certain conversion rate for a given landing page.

However the advert plays a much more important role in my opinion than just bringing as many visitors as possible to the landing page, it’s actually an opportunity to target the right segment for your landing page.

Let’s make an example (since I cannot reveal the real keyword used in the example): assume your are selling laptops, you are bidding on the keyword “laptop” and your landing page is very generic.

You could for example try different segments in your advert:
- latest laptops
- cheapest laptops
- discounted laptops
- light laptops

The important point to understand is that those adjectives are not actual differentiators of the product, like for example saying Sony vs. Acer but they are actually things everyone want in a laptop (everyone want a new, light and cheap laptop, and everyone will be interested in having a discount if possible).

This means that of course if your landing page is about a Vaio laptop and you are buying the keyword “vaio laptop” then the best way to describe it for highest CTR and conversion rate is to include the word “vaio” in your advert, however here I’m talking about a generic keyword like “laptop” or “buy laptop” with a generic landing page.

What happens by segmenting - by the example adjectives I provided - is that you target specific segments that might react differently to your landing page, without you being aware of it until you try.

Imagine for example that the prices on your landing page are very good, then probably “cheapest laptop” will have a higher conversion. It won’t necessarily have a higher CTR (since the most price-sensitive people are not necessarily the largest segment of the people that search the keyword “laptop”) however it’ll convert that segment better.

So the success of this stategy will depend both of the size of that segment and its conversion rate. There is also another element based on the advert position that I’ll discuss in another post.

Just to make the whole post very clear, let’s use a simple metaphor. If you are looking for employees to hire thru an ad in the newspaper, if you want to receive as many calls as possible (CTR) you’ll just mention that you are hiring, but most of the callers will not be suitable for the job, so you won’t hire many people (low conversion rate). The more you make your offer specific, the less calls you’ll receive (CTR) but the more those calls will be qualified and the more chances you have of hiring the caller (conversion rate). You may get less calls in the second scenario, but very qualified people that you might want to hire would never call for a generic ad, so if you want to hire qualified people (segment) you should specify it in the ad and you’ll be able to hire more overall (more conversions).

So the best thing to do is to try all these possible segments to see which one work better for a given keyword/landing page combination.

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

I recently found a very interesting trick for making it easy to quickly write well performing adverts.

The trick is very simple but also very effective, all you have to do is go on Google and search for a keyword. I also recommend to search in the location where the competition is going to be the highest, which is usually USA. In order to do that you just have to add “&gl=us” to the URL of your search. I’ll explain more about that in a future post on this blog.

Keep clicking the search button, you will see that the results change over time, and you actually get less results. Keep clicking, it may take up to 50-100 clicks before the ads starts changing, and you’ll see that you get less and less results.

Those few results that remain seems to be the ones Google likes the most. Of course you cannot know if it’s all because of the advert (and certainly it’s not) since the bid amount and the landing page will also have a strong impact, however you can assume that people that did bid high and made the effort to make a good landing page probably also took the effort to write a good advert.

This trick will work better if the keyword is competitive, if you just get a few results when you search for the first time it’s not going to be that effective, however if you have several pages of results, it’s going to be very effective in helping you to write a good advert, since you can just get good adverts ideas from those few sites that Google likes.

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Giotto De Filippi adverts writing, adwords, quality score adwords, quality score