Category: Google AdWords

Quality Score in AdWords determines how much you will pay for each click as well as where Google AdWords will show your ads on the page. It behooves every account manager and website owner to strive for the best Quality Score possible to control costs and improve exposure.

So what can you do to improve your own Quality Score?

1. First you need to find it and know what the number is. You can mouse over each keyword to bring up a speech bubble to see your quality score or you can add the Quality Score to your columns when on the keyword tab. You’ll find the Quality Score in the Attributes Section 3 choices down.

2. If your quality score is below 4, typically your cost per click will be impacted as well as your first page bid. Lower than that and Google may start to minimally serve your program. Get to 2 and 3 or lower and your keyword may get the “shown rarely due to Quality Score” notice – which means you may want to pause or delete that keyword.

3. I’ve seen situations where a on-target keyword gets a bad quality score and Google stops serving ads on that keyword. The steps to remediating this type of problem I’ll cover on Thursday so please check back. There are things you can do to try to get Google to show ads again, but it takes more time to solve those types of issues.

4. Here are a few of the relatively unknown facts about Quality Score.

• Keyword stuffing on your landing page will not help you improve your quality score. Google determines Quality Score based on scoring of your entire website at one domain, not just based on one site page. So transparency and a privacy policy help your landing page/domain Quality Score.
• Only the exact match variation of your keyword impacts the actual Quality Score. Broad Match and Phrase Match performance do not factor in to the ranking.
• Keywords with zero impressions will not affect your quality score. Now, keywords with impressions and no clicks and therefore a low CTR will definitely impact your Quality Score.
• Quality Score is not updated every day. Although your ability to participate in the AdWords auction is calculated with every search that matches phrases and words in your keyword list, be aware that landing page Quality Score and the first page bid are not recalculated. In fact landing page may only be update every month or so.

In conclusion, AdWords Quality Score is a very important factor of success on AdWords. I recommend keeping your keyword list small, don’t include any single words, and select the very best landing page for each keyword in your ad group.

Check back Thursday to find out how to fix a thorny Quality Score problem on a keyword you really like!

Google has been adding new automation tools into AdWords with the supposition of making the program easier to use, but is it really? Although you can now automate many routine actions such as pausing keywords, enabling keywords, bidding up or bidding down by set criteria automation will never replace the efforts of a seasoned AdWords account manager who makes budget and strategy decisions.

Although automation tools can help to manage large accounts by its very nature there is no reality review done by automation tools that can respond to market changes, auction changes, and a varied marketplace. Although my firm does routinely use automation tools for AdWords account management, we routinely also check the results these tools provide to make sure that the settings are still working for an account. In fact, we will even sort data back 60 to 90 days to make sure that the automation has not run crazy damaging account performance.

Interestingly enough, we are doing a review right now using the Search Funnel reports for clients and are finding out that some keywords paused by automation actually were conversion assist or conversion impression assist keywords and should be re-enabled.

I have found automation is only as good as the account manager you have that sets the automation in place and then verifies and checks that the automation is working for your account.

I’d be glad to chat with you next week about your own AdWords account management needs if you feel that our services would be a match for you.

This article called “What One Million Dollars in Spend Has Taught Us About Enhanced Campaigns” has been getting some wide discussion in my sphere of business. Many are concerned with the inability in AdWords to separately target mobile and for some advertisers, mobile clicks that are not converting are eating up their ad spend.

“A quick note about this data is that while CPA is up across the board this is partly due to seasonality for a few major accounts. It’s obvious though, that CPA is up on computers for Search and Display but that mobile and tablet CPA is up at a much, much larger percentages and has started to make up larger percentages of budget allocation. This is also macro data so one account with high CPA goals that has increased budget over the past few months could drastically skew these numbers.” Make sure to read the rest of this interesting article.

Interestingly the data seems to provide that ad spend is up on mobile but eating into the total ad spend budget significantly enough that conversions are down according to this oneaccount manager that wrote the article. When this manager moved out of mobile using the -100% bid adjustment, tablet traffic moved in to fill this space. Due to the change in ad serving strategy, this account manager saw an increase in the cost per conversion.

For our clients, we are watching the mobile ad spend very carefully. For some we are pushing down the bid adjustment, a few we have moved out of the mobile ad space, but for many mobile just has not been a big cash drain. For many of our accounts in the month of May we did see a big drop in conversions, and increase in the cost per conversion, but for nearly all it was not tied to mobile traffic, rather appeared to be increased market competition possibly as a result from Penguin 2.0 and new advertisers moving in to AdWords.

It will be interesting to see what happens with Enhanced Campaigns in the very near future. I would expect that AdWords will eventually give advertisers the ability to bid adjust mobile, tablet, and desktops as this would keep advertisers happy and allow for greater control over ad spend. For now, advertisers and account managers can only bid adjust mobile activity.

Although we are not seeing the types of results for our clients that the author of this interesting article shared, watching carefully the percentage of your budget being eaten up by mobile in AdWords right now if a very good idea.