This Week in Relevance

A few weeks ago, Microsoft’s AdCenter released their version of Quality Score (QS) into their UI and keyword reports. This is significant, as it will allow advertisers to make more informed decisions on keyword, ad, and landing page selection in AdCenter, which is continuing to gain share of searches and ad budgets.  We’ve had a chance to spend a little time digging into its similarities and differences to Google and would like to share our initial thoughts.

Similarities

At first blush it looks pretty similar to Google’s Quality Score — a single numeric score from 1-10 plus 3 qualifying, non-numeric subscores for keyword relevance, landing page relevance, and landing page user experience.  And while the algorithms to determine these quality scores are likely quite different between the two engines, we are not seeing a significant difference in aggregate click weighted quality scores for similar (if not identical) campaigns that are running on both engines.  Across a number of accounts, the deltas are somewhere in the 5-10% range, Google QS vs. Adcenter QS.

Differences

We see two major differences in how the two engines deal with quality score that should be critical to advertisers as they manage campaigns against these two engines.  First of all, AdCenter QS does not determine ad ranking as it does on Google.  Sure, many of the things that influence QS in AdCenter also influence ad ranking, but there are a number of other factors at work beyond bid and QS — we think that this should free advertisers up a little to not obsess over QS quite as much as they do on Google.  Use it as a diagnostic to determine where your campaign can improve, but don’t feel like you have to throw the baby out with the bath water and start over if you see quality scores below 6.

A second huge difference between the two is that Google assigns the same QS to a bidded keyword regardless of match type, so as long as your ad is relevant to your bidded keyword, you should be fine on broad/phrase match variants of that term.  This is not so in AdCenter. You could have a QS of 10 on your bidded keyword but if the ad or landing page does not line up with the queries you are matched to on broad/phrase, then quality score could suffer on those match types.  So what does that mean for advertisers?  Obviously it is even more important then on AdCenter to 1) exact match as much as possible and 2) leverage separate ad and potentially landing page strategies for the less restrictive match types.  Otherwise, your relevance, QS, and ROI may suffer on braod/phrase match, as we have heard from countless advertisers.

Endgame

So now that AdCenter makes Quality Score available, does it even matter?  Much like on Google it is algorithmically determined, so you just can’t control for a lot of that when managing a paid search campaign, especially a large scale one. The best thing you can do on either engine is to focus on the relevancy factors that you can control which should help you maximize the ‘potential quality score’ of your campaign, and use the numbers you see as one indicator of how successfully you are doing that.  These are things that you have a lot of control over and should drive universally solid QS:

• Relevance of your keywords to the products and services on your site (If you don’t sell it, don’t try to market it in search — this is especially true on AdCenter!)
• Relevance of your ads to the keywords in your account (If you don’t have the patience and tools to create ads that speak to each and every keyword uniquely, create fewer keywords!)
• Relevance of your landing pages (Meet users expectations when they land on your site — if you ad says one thing, make sure your landing page says the same thing)

These simple rules should help you maximize your ‘potential quality score’ for any keyword in your account. At the end of the day, focusing on what you can control and the actual dollar return of the campaigns, as opposed to the absolute 1-10 quality score, will benefit your business greatly and save a ton of frustration trying to ‘game’ AdCenter or Google.

Google stores QS at the keyword-ad pairing level so there will be some sort of reset once breaking apart that pairing and putting those keywords into a new ad group so there may be some near term quality score pain, but the long term benefit of having a well organized campaign with small and focused ad groups cannot be understated.

By leaving that keyword in the broad ad group you are essentially saying that you don't want to understand the true potential of that keyword to your business because you'll likely only be able to place generic creative that uses DKI (dynamic keyword insertion) against it. If you can customize and test ad copy against that keyword, there is the potential of driving a much higher CTR, Conversion Rate, and long term QS. Also, if this is a good QS keyword for you now, it won't take long for Google to recognize that you deserve a good QS on that term in the new structure.

Take the small hit now as it increases your flexibility and performance potential over the long term.

When breaking apart an Ad Group that has a long history, how does one most effectively treat keywords that don't belong, but have high QSs?

This very much depends on the types of keywords you have in your account. It is very to difficult to get 10/10 on a term for which your brand is not uniquely relevant for. I.e. on the term 'cars' there are a large number of potentially relevant marketers so it is rare that one of those marketers will distinguish themselves enough from a user engagement (CTR) standpoint to garner a 10.

The terms for which your brand would be uniquely capable of delivering a relevant experience would be for branded terms as well as for niche offerings, where you are one of maybe a handful of firms who could deliver on the searcher request. If these terms represent the bulk of your portfolio, I think it is realistic to expect that a majority of your keywords would run at a 10/10.

How often will quality scores of 10/10 be found in an Adwords account?

You should try your best to ensure that this does not happen, and here's why:

You will not be bidding against yourself so much as you will not have a good sense of which campaign/ad group your ad will serve out of. Those 2 ads may deliver significantly different user experiences with different conversion profiles. Google will select which ad to serve based not on conversion value delivered, but on AdRank (Quality Score*Bid), which would potentially be suboptimal for your business because it does not take your back end metrics into account.  

Also, if those keywords live in different ad groups within the account, you cannot take advantage of Google's ad rotation and optimization capabilities so if you wanted to actively test the performance of different ads against the same keyword you would be much better served running multiple ads against that keyword in the same account.

The more fine grained control of an account you have as a manager tends to drive better and more comprehensible results as you leave less up to Google to make decisions on what ad to serve when.

To the question on keyword elements, you should have no issue when having different keyword elements in different areas within the campaigns unless you have poor coverage and the keywords are on broad match, thus forcing Google to decide which ad to serve in the cases where a query has that element but you don't have an actual keyword that matches it precisely.

In Google AdWords, to what degree should you allow ad groups to share keywords, or keyword elements?

Bidding on competitive terms is definitely an accepted practice and leveraged quite frequently, especially in super competitive keyword marketplaces like automotive and insurance.

In as much as position in Google's marketplace is driven by the relevance of the ads to the queries, as well as additional relevancy factors which tend to include SEO concepts like relationship between url string and query as well as your organic ranking against the query, it is very likely that bidding on a competitor's term will be a fairly expensive prospect due to an invariably low quality score. If looking at this campaign from the standpoint of being able to generate great 'last-click' ROI, this is probably not an attractive strategy.

That said, I do believe that there are scenarios in which this type of advertising would be very useful to run. In the words of David Ogilvy, advertising should not be entertainment but 'a medium of information.' If you feel as if you have something useful to communicate to users about your product's positioning relative to your competitors, by all means, test this strategy. You already know that this user is in the market for your products/services and may not be aware of your brand and its attributes, so why not use the opportunity to educate them. This is likely the only way you would maintain a click through rate high enough to continue to serve in those marketplaces without an astronomical bid. If the ad only seeks to distract, more often than not, consumers will see right through that and so will Google.

Should you bid on keywords that are the names of other companies in your space and/or competitors in Google ads?

I always like to refer to this chart when looking at what Google uses to determine quality score — gives some good broad buckets beyond strictly CTR: http://certifiedknowledge.org/bl…

That said, there are a lot of small and difficult to understand nuances that go into determining the 'absolute quality score' of any given keyword in your account including things like market-wide ad effectiveness on that term, SEO rank of your site against that that term, historical performance of your URL against that term, as well as the general attractiveness of your brand within that category.

At the end of the day, a lot of those things you just can't control for when managing a paid search campaign, especially a large scale one across multiple categories of products and services. The best thing you can do is to focus on the relevancy factors that you can control which should help you maximize the 'potential quality score' of your campaign:

• Relevance of your keywords to the products and services on your site (If you don't sell it, don't try to market it on Google!)
• Relevance of your ads to the keywords in your account (If you don't have the patience and tools to create ads that speak to each and every keyword uniquely, create fewer keywords!)
• Relevance of your landing pages (Meet users expectations when they land on your site — if you ad says one thing, make sure your landing page says the same thing)

The simple rules should help you maximize your 'potential quality score' for any keyword in your account. At the end of the day, focusing on what you can control and the actual dollar return of the campaigns, as opposed to the actual 1-10 quality score, will benefit your business greatly and save a ton of frustration trying to 'game' Google.

How do you improve Quality Score on AdWords?

I have actually never seen those numbers before, but it is very hard to calculate the actual money being spent on SEO and very easy to calculate the amount of dollars being put towards paid search advertising. In my experience, that number seems to be quite a bit low for SEO when you think about the internal resources that go into the design, architecture, content, and meta content for a website, all at least partially designed to drive better positioning in the search engines. Add in all of the tools, consulting, etc that marketers are leveraging, I would imagine that it adds up to a lot more than 12% of spending to drive search results. I think the challenge in comparing those numbers is that paid search is a straight media buy (easily quantifiable) while there's really no media buy in SEO (especially now that Yahoo killed Paid Inclusion).

Now to the next question on the value of paid search relative to the cost. It is well known that only 15-20% of all search clicks go to the paid search results, but there is definitely some nuance in those numbers as well. Over 50% of the queries on the major search engines have no paid results associated because the queries do not have a relevant ad associated. Therefore, on the queries for which advertisers' offers are relevant to a user that number is a lot higher — i.e. paid search ads are a lot more useful to the consumer than that number quoted would indicate.  Consumers have been trained to ignore what is not useful to them and most online advertisers have been trained to place media dollars where they see real return (paid search has historically been one of those places).  

This is why Google has continued to be attractive to both users and advertisers and is still growing in both core search revenues and core search users. If that balance is ever upset, one or both of those parties will start to defect, but that doesn't seem to be the case yet.

Why is 88% of online search dollars spent on paid search when 85% of online audience ignores it?