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.
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”:
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.
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:
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 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.
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:
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:
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.
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:
Phase 2: Actual performance on your advert (CTR)
Let’s start with Phase 1:
What you need to do is:
In the next post we’ll see the more advanced things related to site content and also Phase 2.
adverts writing, adwords, adwords bot, ctr, new sites, quality score
Let’s say that you targeted a specific keyword, but you are not making money on it.
Let’s say it’s “laptop”.
Of course there are MANY things you could do that I’m not going to talk about in this post, like changing advert, position, match type, geolocation, etc…
Let’s talk about finding ALTERNATE keywords.
You probably know that if you bid on [laptop] (exact match) you’ll get searches of people that only search that keyword. So if they search “laptop” they’ll see your ad, if they search “cheap laptop” they won’t.
Let’s assume that you are sure that “laptop” is your niche, but you are losing money.
Maybe you should not target the main keyword, but alternate keywords related to it. What’s the best way to discover those keywords? Simply to let Google do it for you.
You could just bid on the keyword laptop with broad match, however you’ll be still be receiving many clicks for “laptop” that will lose you money.
So what you can do is bid on “laptop” broad match, and then bid on “laptop” exact match as negative.
It’ll look like that in the account:
laptop
-[laptop]
Now you’ll get clicks related to “laptop”, but that are not “laptop”.
Of course you need some web analytics software to track the new keywords you receive.
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.
There is an easy way to discover which keywords your competitor is bidding on.
This service called semrush.com allows you to type your competitor’s url and it’ll find the keywords they are purchasing on AdWords.
The way it works is that they have a crawler and a large database of keywords and they just query Google for all those keywords.
So the first difference will be that you’ll not know what your competitors are actually buying, but rather for which search queries they are showing (which actually is more important anyway).
To use it for AdWords you use your competitors URL followed by “(by adwords)”.
So let’s try: google.com (by adwords)
Here we can see all the keywords google.com is showing for:
Click here to try it: www.semrush.com
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.
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.
