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AdWords Quality Score Basics (Part 2)

March 6th, 2009
3 comments

Read previous post first for Part 1: http://www.ppchacking.com/2009/02/adwords-quality-score-basics/

…continued…

Now we need to ensure that the content of our landing page will get a good quality score. This quality score will be determined instantly by the adbot who will visit your site as soon as it knows the destination URL - so be careful your landing page has to be 100% ready before you make your advert.

Basically the adbot has an algorithm to determine what the quality of your site is. This will then later on be blended with other factors like the CTR.

This algorithm is different than the typical SEO algorithm Google uses as here incoming links are completely irrelevant: a brand new site has the same chances to get a good quality score than a very old established site. The judgment is done exclusively about the content of the site itself and not the reputation of that site on other sites (incoming links).

What we suggest is the following:

1) Ensure you have the keyword in the main headers:

  • Title
  • Meta Description
  • Meta Keywords
  • H1,H2,etc…
  • Body

2) Ensure you have a decent amount of pages (Adbot punishes 1 page sites). It’s fine to just put some links to internal pages that are just articles in the footer.

3) Have the following pages:

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms And Conditions
  • Return Policy
  • Contact Us
  • About Us

I know this may seems stupid but I guess somewhat they have determined that quality sites always have those pages (possibily because their legal departement asks them to do so - which means they are big enough to be able to afford a legal departement!)

Doesn’t seems to really matter what you write in those pages, just try to write a decent amount of text so that the bot is happy.

If you follow those rules and you bury those pages in the footer even of a single page sales letter you should get a pretty good quality score. I rarely get less than 8 or 7 depending on the keyword if I do all this properly.

Giotto De Filippi adwords, adwords bot, new sites, quality score, sales letters

AdWords Quality Score Basics

February 24th, 2009
1 comment

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:


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.

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

Don’t be a miser with AdWords, or at least don’t show it

February 7th, 2009
6 comments

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.

Giotto De Filippi adwords, adwords bot, quality score

AdWords Quality Score Issues with Brand New Sites

January 10th, 2009
6 comments

This is an issue that I’m sure is having many people struggling with.

When you add an advert in AdWords, Google will send its AdWords bot to crawl your site and determine it’s quality score according to several factors (Time to load the page, presence of certain elements like privacy policy, terms and conditions, number of pages, presence of certain keywords on the pages, etc…)

On that basis you’ll get a quality score number comprised between 1 and 10. The higher the quality score the lower you’ll have to pay for a click in a given spot. This is just a first quality score assesment based on the crawling of your site and the relevancy of the advert to the keyword.

After that Google will adjust your quality score also based on the CTR you are getting.

However if you get a very poor quality score (like 1) and they put your minimum bid at $5 or $10 it’s basically impossible to improve the CTR since you are not showing up at all so you don’t get any impressions/clicks.

What I found is that the quality score algorithm Google uses is FAR from perfect, actually seems it has very serious flaws, which CAN be exploited by a savvy AdWords player.

So once you write your first advert ever for your brand new site you could just happen to get a very low quality score on the first crawl, and if this happens you may be in serious trouble, keep reading to understand why.

Please note that this is not just typical with sales letter sites, but it can actually happen on larger sites (even if for more developed sites there is another easier solution I’ll describe later in this post).

What Google will tell you is that you should improve your quality score by making changes to the site. (Assuming that when you click on the details of the quality score it tells you that the landing page is not relevant, which is the hardest problem to solve).

In my experience this won’t work at all, no matter what changes you make to your site your quality score won’t improve.

I did a lot of research on this issue, and CONSISTENTLY get the following outcome:

If this is your first advert ever for your brand new site and you get a very poor quality score, basically that domain is trashed.

Means that no matter which changes you make to the landing page, or no matter if you create a new AdWords account, you’ll be given again a very poor quality score. What I then do is I register a new domain (after making changes to the site), I don’t even bother to create a new AdGroup, I just go in the Ad Variations Tab, create an IDENTICAL Ad Variation except for the Destination URL, delete the previous advert with the “punished” domain and wait a few minutes. Your quality score will immediately be reassessed and if the corrections you made to your landing page are right you should get a good quality score. If not you have to keep trying with new domains.

The key thing to remember from this is that there is no point to make changes to the landing page if it got a very poor quality score in first place. No matter what changes you do Google will remember that domain, even if you create a new AdWords account.

So what I do now is I never experiment the landing page with the real domain I want to use, I first experiment with some domains I register just for that purpose, and only when I’m happy with the quality score I get I make a mirror copy of the site on my valuable domain, since I need to be 100% sure that the first AdWords bot crawl ever for a domain must lead to a good quality score.

Now how can those flaws be exploited? Very simple…

While I was struggling with those issues, I decided to call the AdWords customer support and ask them to do a manual review of the site. They are aware that their algorithm has flaws (even if they don’t admit it) so they offer this recourse, of manually reviewing the site.

However they will manually change your quality score only if they determine that your site deserves it, means that if it’s just a sales letter site, or it’s something odd like a miracle cure, a get quick rich site, etc… there is no way they are going to manually improve the quality score. They would probably do it if your site is a good portal, a quality online store with many products, etc… but if you have just a sales letter, or you have no much content you won’t get the quality score changed.

However a well done sales letter can convert very well, so those who are able to master this will find themselves with much less competition, since all the amateurs players will have poor quality score and only the professionals will be in the game.

So basically Google as per their policy says that a sales letter site SHOULD get a poor quality score, and that’s what you get if you ask for manual review. However manual review happens if you ask for it, so it’s better not to ask, register several domains and experiment with your landing page until you get a good quality score, then mirror the site with your final domain,  add it to the Ad Variations and remove the old domain. Remember that once a brand new domain gets a poor quality score it’s for good, so experiment first with worthless domains that you just registered!

In a future post I’ll explain what are the things to try to improve the quality score of your landing page, so you know what to experiment with.

Giotto De Filippi adwords, adwords bot, new sites, quality score, sales letters ,