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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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