Introducing The All-Important Quality Score

Throughout this column, the phrase “Quality Score” has popped up on different occasions. Understanding Quality Score is fundamental for successful paid search campaigns, but can be a difficult concept for beginners to understand. So the time has come to cover this topic so you can use Quality Score to your advantage and not fall into its traps.

The early days before Quality Score

In the beginning of paid search, auctions existed in a purely capitalistic marketplace where the advertiser who was willing to pay the most for a keyword was awarded first place, the second highest-paying advertiser’s ads were second, and so forth.

It was an easy system to understand and it made sense. However, the ad space became a bit muddled. Advertisers with deep pockets literally took over the search engine results pages on keywords that weren’t necessarily related to their business. For example, a global soft drink company could start to take over terms such as rock and roll, skateboards, or even Britney Spears. These advertisers mostly weren’t trying to cause chaos—they were just trying to reach their target demographic. But in doing so, the sponsored search results for some keywords could potentially contain no results directly related to what a searcher was looking for.

The engines realized that this could be a problem. Google has long maintained that the best thing for its business is to keep results as relevant as possible—including paid listings. To improve the relevance of paid search ads, Google created the Quality Score. Microsoft and Yahoo soon followed with their own systems to improve relevance of ads.

So what is Quality Score?

Simply put, Quality Score is a numeric grade from one to ten (ten being best) assigned to each of your keyword/ad/landing page combinations. The score is updated frequently, calculated at each time your keyword is searched on to account for changes to your terms and creatives. So what’s the value of a high Quality Score? If your keyword is deemed highly relevant, Google will lower your cost-per-click and rank your ad higher than other competitors even if they’re bidding more for those terms. On the flip side, a keyword with a low Quality Score may mean you have to bid a premium price to even appear on a search result page.

How is Quality Score calculated?

We don’t know exactly what goes into the Quality Score black box but we do know that high click-thru-rates (CTRs) are a big piece of the pie. The engines probably correlate high number of clicks as “virtual votes” by past users for the advertiser and figure a good CTR means a relevant keyword.

Google does offer some insight into how Quality Score is calculated in the AdWords help area:

While we continue to refine our Quality Score formulas for Google and the Search Network, the core components remain more or less the same:

• The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on Google; note that CTR on the Google Network only ever impacts Quality Score on the Google Network — not on Google
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
• The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• The quality of your landing page
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
• Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
• Other relevance factors

Note that there are slight variations to the Quality Score formula when it affects ad position and first page bid:

• For calculating a keyword-targeted ad’s position, landing page quality is not a factor. Also, when calculating ad position on a Search Network placement, Quality Score considers the CTR on that particular placement in addition to CTR on Google.
• For calculating first page bid, Quality Score doesn’t consider the matched ad or search query, since this estimate appears as a metric in your account and doesn’t vary per search query.

What do you really need to know about Quality Score?

You’ll have plenty of time to test various tactics to improve Quality Score once the campaign starts, so don’t waste too much time worrying about it right now. The one thing you do need to take into account though is to make sure you keep your ad groups tightly focused. Because click-thru-rate is the biggest weighting factor to Quality Score, you’ll want to make sure that your ads are highly relevant to the keywords in each group so that you get the best CTR as possible. In my experience, as long as you’re getting a good percentage of clicks to impressions, the engines will consider your terms relevant enough to gain fairly high scores. After that, there are just a few things to keep in mind such as ensuring that your landing pages are loading at a good speed and you have some of your ad group’s keywords in your ad text. You do those things right and your Quality Score should be just fine.

Overall, my best advice is to not obsess over Quality Score. There are a couple hundred other factors to PPC success that are just as important. The important thing now is to just make sure you understand the concept fully and do some extra research if you feel you still need some clarification.

The premise that ad popularity and a high quality score leads to improved search advertising results may or may not be true….especially for B2B advertisers. I urge business marketers to challenge this assumption and understand the relationship between PPC quality score and ROI-based results.

Quality Score algorithms

In simple terms, ad position is primarily determined by how much an advertiser is willing to pay for each click (i.e. your bid) and the popularity, orclick-through-rate (CTR), associated with your ad. Relevancy also plays a role… and very poor landing pages can lead to penalties.

More information can be found here on Google Quality Score, and Yahoo Quality Index. Details aside, Quality Score causes most advertisers to try and maximize response, or click-through-rate.

Note: Not surprisingly, this methodology also increases the click charges that go into the pockets of search networks!

Tips on PPC targeting

All advertisers should be deploying these PPC best practices to accurately target your audience:

• Select very specific keywords and long tail keyword phrases
• Utilize keyword match-types
• Deploy negative keywords
• Test geo-targeted ads (even for national brands)
• Implement day-parting

This week’s question: ”What have you heard about Quality Score?”

10 Easy Ways to Optimize Your PPC Landing Pages & Increase Conversions

It’s common knowledge that a professional website design can increase conversion rates and sales. A professional website design ensures trust and credibility with your users. But website design and landing pages can play a part not just in SEO, but in PPC too.

Actually, there is an entire procedure to optimize PPC campaigns including writing successful PPC Ad Copy, Optimizing Your AdWords Campaigns Now, back to PPC landing page optimization. The tactics I describe in this post will not only improve your Quality Score which can increase your ad position for a lower cost, but can also help convert more people that come to your website.

Now, I will admit that most of these tips are for lead generation, not all of these tips would apply to an ecommerce website.

1. Call to Action/Buttons – It’s no secret that adding a call –to- action or a button that is large and very noticeable on your PPC landing pages will help increase conversions. Anything that draws attention to a user is more likely to get clicked on. Tell people what you want them to do on your landing page, don’t just assume they’ll know automatically.
   
   
2. Minimal Navigation – The key to successful PPC landing pages is keep the user to from getting too distracted. Remove the top, left or right hand navigation from your main site on your PPC landing pages. Simply have your company logo at the top left of the page with a link to your homepage. That will be enough for people to click on if they need more information before converting.
   
   
3. Important information above the fold – Some people who are searching for a service like yours are sometimes in a hurry. If they enter your landing page and don’t see what they need to do within the first 5 seconds, they’re likely to bail. Be sure that your call to action, button, or form is above the fold. Be sure to check Google analytics to see what resolution size the majority of your users are currently using. This will help your designers make the important information above the fold for most of your users.
   
   
4. Easy-to-scan copy – I’ve worked on clients before that use way too much industry language in their PPC landing pages. You have to think that if an executive is looking for a service they’re likely to ask their assistant, intern or even a receptionist to do research before they engage in anything. While the executive may know all the industry jargon the assistant or intern may not. Also, these people who are searching for many companies are in a hurry, and simply just scan the copy on your landing page and don’t necessarily read through it all the way. So break up your copy into several paragraphs instead of one large paragraph. And I like to use the rule of thumb to put your benefits or advantages of choosing your company in a bullet list or numbered list so it stands out more prominently.
   
   
5. Few images to convey professionalism – Some PPC landing pages I have seen have a lot of well, dorky images that don’t convey any professionalism whatsoever. This can really turn off a potential client and make you look untrustworthy. Have one to 2 images on your PPC landing pages that show professional looking people, smiling as if they have just engaged in yoru services and are incredibly happy. Also having too many images on your PPC landing page will make your load times longer.
   
   
6. Fast loading times – One factor of the Google Adwords Quality Score is the load times of your pages. If it takes more than 10 seconds to fully load your pages that’s way too long. It should take less than 5 seconds. Large flash files, too many images, or animated graphics could hinder your fast load times. Also, if I have to wait for a flash animation to load before I can get information about your services, I’m more than likely not going to stick around or come back.
   
   
7. Dynamic headlines – Using dynamic headlines on your PPC landing pages is a great way to better target what the user is actually typing in the search box. Dynamic headlines are generated by tracking URLs that will insert the specific keyword into the headline. This is like using dynamic keyword insertion in your PPC ads, only it’s for your landing pages. If the page headline is more targeted to what the user typed in the search, they’re much more likely to continue reading and complete an action.
   
   
8. PPC keywords in your landing page copy – Many people think this is only true for SEO, but you still need to include your PPC keywords in the copy of your PPC Landing page. This will not only help improve your Quality Scores, but will also help your users connect better to your copy.
   
   
9. Short contact form – You could potentially be driving away qualified leads by having a contact form that is too long. If your contact form is running below the fold, it’s too long. You should be able to see the ‘submit’ button above the fold. Look at your current forms and only require the information you truly need. If someone sees a very long form, they may think, ‘This is going to take too long to fill out’ and could possibly skip that process altogether.
   
   
10. No Clutter – This is really a no-brainer, but unfortunately too many people make the mistake of dumping too much content on their PPC landing pages. You should have one main goal of your PPC landing page, not 3, 4 or 5. Remove any extra copy that isn’t necessarily useful to the user. Remove any unnecessary images or icons.

If you need any persuasion to make changes to your existing landing pages, just take this for an example: if you were to make changes on your landing pages, and increase your conversion rates by .5%, add that to your current sales and see how much of an increase that is. You would be surprised how much additional revenue .5% would drive.

If you have any additional PPC landing page tips that will help increase conversions that I have not mentioned feel free to add them in the comments section!

Optimizing Your AdWords Campaigns

Pay per click advertising is a form of marketing with major benefits. It differs from other methods of marketing in its ability to allow advertisers and marketers to measure and analyze the results of their techniques, to refine and optimize them to increase ROI beyond almost anything possible in the offline marketing world. Google AdWords is currently the prominent pay per click resource available today. Learning some of the ways to optimize your AdWords campaigns can cut costs while keeping conversions up in several ways.

Here are four ways to refine your AdWords campaign to see where money spent is producing the best return and to adjust settings to maximize return on investment.

1. The Segment option. This is one of the newest additions to AdWords. The Segment option is available within your Campaigns, Ad Groups and Keywords tabs. Within each, the options are different, but allow for viewing of your results in specific ways of measurement. This can include breaking into specific units of time, such as weeks or days of the week.

By viewing your data this way you can discover what weeks are most active for a seasonal market, as well as information such as which days of the week are most prone to getting better conversion rates. By knowing this data, you can reduce costs where your conversions are more expensive, increase bids where you are seeing better conversion rates, and in all these ways increase ROI.

2. A-B Split Testing for ads. This can be one of the most effective means of increasing CTR for your ad groups. Have two or three ads active for each ad group. After a number of clicks (ideally at least 20 clicks on each ad), choose the better performing ad. Replace the more poorly performing ad with a different ad copy. Repeat the whole operation to find which advertisement will produce the best CTR or the best conversion rate.

Doing this can often improve your CTR by a factor of 2 or more, and a higher CTR improves Quality Score as well as increasing lead generation. To get an accurate reading for proper A-B split testing, make sure your campaign setting for Ad Delivery->Rotation is set to “Rotate: Show ads more evenly”.

3. Remarketing with the Audiences tab. This is an element of AdWords that works only for the Content Network. When the Audiences tab is enabled, you can create remarketing lists to target specific visitors to your site. By placing code on specific pages within your site, a cookie is put on all users who visit these pages.

Then when they visit other sites with similar targeted themes, a very relevant ad is shown to these users to give them motivation to return to your site to make a purchase or opt-in. This works by reaching out to visitors who had visited your site previously and displayed some kind of interest in that market. Often this remarketing approach can increase conversions by contacting people who have an established interest in your products and reconnecting with them.

4. Changing advertising frequency/rate settings. Advertising can be adjusted in AdWords to not just advertise for certain days and hours of each day, but the amount for CPC can be adjusted to raise or lower bidding rates for certain days and hours. The setting is within each Campaign settings area, under Advanced settings->Schedule and choosing Ad Scheduling, the selecting “Bid Adjustment” inside the scheduling option.

After doing research for performance for specific days within your campaign you can make changes to cut costs and increase ROI nicely. For example, after viewing that you are getting little or no conversions on certain days of the week, you can pause these days with this setting. In the same way, any days that have better conversion rates can have an increased bid amount to maximize CTR for those days. This can all help improve business results for your AdWords campaign.

By knowing about and using these different options within AdWords you can greatly improve your pay per click results. AdWords optimization is a definite way to increase ROI and open additional opportunities to expand your marketing methods. Properly using these techniques can cut costs, increase profits, and help you make the most out of this powerful tool.