Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

Clients, especially new clients, will ask me how much it might cost to be in position one or in the top three on Google. And while they might not like it or think I’m trying to hide something, I really can’t tell how much it will be to be in a certain position. And one of the main reasons why is because of the Google AdWords Quality Score, a dynamic metric assigned to each of your keywords. Quality Score can affect your CPC, your max bids and your position relavtive to your competitors

With a new account, because there’s no history for Google to look at, it may cost more to have a higher position. Over time, as you accrue data, your CPC may go down, but that will depend on your Quality Score. The lower your Quality Score, the more you may have to pay to maintain a position. Sometimes it’s hard to get clients to understand that landing page quality and load times, as well as advertising on relevant keywords, can have a big impact on their bids and their position.

Google has been making the Quality Score more transparent, which is going to be helpful in talking to clients about these criteria. But first, a definition and a little history on the Google Quality Score. According to Google, “Your Quality Score reflects your keywords CTR and the relevance of your ad text and landing page. Keywords with high quality scores are more relevant for users, more effective for your ad campaigns, and have lower cost-per-clicks (CPCs).”

Google first came out with a grade of Great, OK and Poor. Great was, well, great!; OK was middle of the road but not necessarily a bad place to be, and Poor, which usually meant your keywords would go Inactive (not showing at all) unless you bumped your maximum bid to a higher level, from $.50 upwards to $10.00. The problem with this system is that you had really no idea what was wrong because no additional information was given. Did Google hate the landing page, was the keyword considered irrelevant, was the load time on the page considered horrible, was the Google history on this keyword throughout their system so bad that wouldn’t serve these ads at all? We had no clue and no way to help our clients, other than experience and gut instinct.

Then Google added a little magnifying glass next to the Quality Score which allowed you to see a little more information – Keyword Relevance, Landing Page, and Landing Page Load Time. If Google felt that one of those items was lacking, they might tell you or they might not. It just depended. Plus I always felt there should be a Score of Good, somewhere in between Great and OK.

Last month, Google posted a message about changes coming to the Quality Score information, which would happen slowly through some Google customers. In the the next few days that change will be universal through all Google AdWords accounts. We’re seeing it now in the majority of our clients, and it’s very interesting. There’s three main changes that I see:

1. There are no more “Inactive Bids.” There’s now a message that says “Bid is below first page bid estimate” with a dollar amount that shows what Google recommends the bid be at to show on the first page. I totally loved the bid estimates for some of my clients’ terms. Granted they’re not the most targeted keywords, usually due to the insistance of a client that they need to be advertising on terms that they have no landing page or information on their website about, but $49 to be on the first page seems a bit excessive, in my book, especially when their average position for this term month-to-date is 4.0, but we’ll see what happens.
2. The data in the Quality Score column can change based on the range of time you look at. Google now calculates the Quality Score at the time of each search query. There’s a message in the Keyword Status column that says “Ads rarely show due to low quality score” when I look at the Today date range, but it just says Active when I look at past data. It’ll be interesting to see if that message changes based on the amount of data Google has to look at.
3. The Quality Score grades of Great/OK/Poor actually have a little more meaning. On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the best and 1 being horrendous, Great is from 8 to 10, OK is from 5 to 7 and Poor is 1 to 4. It tends to be more helpful on the Poor and OK grades, in that if you have a 1/10 rating, you know you’re really, really Poor, as opposed to almost OK if you’re at a 4/10.

This information will help us make better decisions on what to do with certain keywords, particularly poorly performing keywords. And I think it will come in most handy because I’ll be able to give my clients more information about a search term and how it’s doing or why a bid is so high. And hopefully they’ll understand how important landing pages that are relevant to the search terms and ads that we create really are. There’s a synergy between the three that sometimes clients have a hard time understanding, and this additional transparency from Google on the Quality Score can help me have hard data numbers that may clarify this for them. It could also cause more “data analysis paralysis” as I blogged about last time, but only time will tell.

We have been working closely with Google’s keyword quality score for quite some time.  The Quality Score that Google assigns to each keyword in an account is an important component in PPC Management.

The way Quality Score worked in the past is that Google would take a combination of the keyword, the Ad Copy and Landing page and other “historical” information from the account and the industry and would assign a quality score to the keyword.   Just recently, they added landing page load time to the quality score calculation as well.

This quality score would impact the CPC (Cost Per Click), the position of the ad and the minimum bid required to show your ad on that keyword.  One of the biggest impacts of the quality score algorithm was that Google could make your keyword “Inactive for Search” by increasing the minimum bid based on this score.  If an advertiser does not look at their account often or does not have a PPC management firm overseeing their account, they could have very important terms inactivated with little notice (Google tells you about the keywords that are inactive only when you display Ad Group in a campaign).

The New Quality Score Changes
As with everything, Google’s goal is to improve the quality and relevance of advertisements displayed to their visitor.

In order to improve relevance, Google is moving to a real-time calculation of quality score.  The new per-query Quality Score will use more accurate performance information and will take into consideration the account location, the language and timing.

No More Inactive Keywords!
Google is getting rid of the minimum bid and the “Inactive for Search” status.  This will definitely have a positive impact on accounts that struggle with improving their quality score and getting their ads to show up for certain keywords.

More Data
They are replacing “minimum bid” with a “first page bid” which will tell us what we need to bid to appear on the first page.  This may help in managing our campaigns and predicting performance. However, there is also a chance it could create artificial bidding wars as inexperienced PPC users bid for position instead of bidding for ROI.  Of course, as with anything, we’ll need to see how accurate this new “tool” is among all of our accounts.

When? Where? Who?
Google’s announcement was vague as to how they plan to implement this change across all accounts.  For now, they are saying that “select” advertisers will have this feature enabled so that they can receive and process feedback.  The Google API and Google AdWords Editor will be updated “in the future”.

With all of our accounts here at JumpFly, we will certainly see this feature very soon and will report on our experience.

More From Google
To find out more on this new feature see their blog post on Quality Score Improvements.

There’s nothing more frustrating as an account manager than spending time researching relevant keywords, creating new PPC advertising campaigns, writing compelling ads and sending lots of quality clicks to a client’s site, only to have the search terms get hit with a poor Quality Index score.

Google grades your landing pages (the pages on your site where the people who click your ad “land”) and gives each keyword in your Google account a Quality Score. The lower your grade, the higher your bids have to be; the higher the grade, the lower your bids, to the point that you can be spending less to be in a higher position than a competitor who has a lower position than you. If your score is bad enough, Google will actually turn those terms Inactive.

Sometimes it’s a few simple things than can help, and part of my job as a JumpFly account manager is to look at my clients’ sites and make suggestions to help improve landing page quality. There are some great articles out there on what makes a good landing page (and I’ll blog about that another day). We’ve seen clients more than double their conversion rate plus reduce their CPC when they improve their landing pages. In today’s economy, that’s smart business.