Trouble Shooting Quality Scores- Step 1 Identify the Issue
I recently did consulting for a group and came across the frustrations that many of us in the Paid Search space face, the dreaded Quality Score....
Quality Scores can plague an account by driving up costs and limiting impression share on terms that are vital to the success of your account. Over the next few weeks, our team will focus on Quality Scores and what tactics can help to improve them in your account. Before we can move forward with how to fix Quality Scores, we must first understand what Google's Quality Score is. By understanding how Quality Scores work, you will save a ton of time on developing a plan to improve them in your account.
What Is Google's Quality Score?
Google's Quality Score is their rating system that ensures the most relevant ads show in the Sponsored Results per search query. The Quality Score is calculated based on the following variables:
The variables above all play an important part in your quality score, however the most important judge tends to be your CTR. CTR is what Google relies the most on to give it an idea of how it relates to the user experience, which is the main purpose of the Quality Score. Higher CTRs give you more weight, especially with lower positioning.
How Do I Know Which Variable is Hurting My Quality Score?
The best place to start in understanding why you have poor quality scores is using the Ad Diagnostic tool. This tool will give you an idea of why your ads aren't showing:
You can see in the results above, the Ad Diagnostic tool will give you the reasoning behing your poor quality score. Once you understand which factor is causing the issue, you can start the healing process.
Improving A Huge PPC Account
If you're a PPC manager in an agency environment, you'll definitely end up taking on some pretty big accounts. It can be a daunting task to stare down a huge, ancient account. You hardly know where to start, and your client is eager to see improvement right away. What do you do?
It's easy to be intimidated by the scope of a big account under your management. But, it shouldn't be that way. The good news is that you really don't need to worry about the entire account right away. Once you filter out the noise, the parts of the account that you really need to work on will be smaller than you think.
First, you'll need to determine what your goal is. This is the most important step both in creating new PPC accounts, and improving old ones. What do you want from your efforts? More conversions? A lower cost per acquisition? Greater impressions on display ads? Make a goal and stick to it. Determine the appropriate strategies to accomplish your goal, then get to it.
Second, look for the campaigns and/or ad groups in the account that are performing the worst in your goal metric. Need to get cost per conversion down in the account? This can be a pretty ambitious goal if you have fifty campaigns. But, if you focus your time and energy on the five campaigns with the highest CPA, you'll start seeing improvement in the overall account stats even though you're only working on ten percent of the account. Some of your campaigns are probably already performing within your goal conversions or CPA. Ignore them! Focus your effort on the worst performers first, and treat the adequate elements of your account as distracting noise.
Lastly, you should continue to work on these problem areas until they are no longer problems. Then, re-evaluate your campaigns and pick the few worst campaigns again. Focus on these and repeat the process. Pretty soon you'll be seeing improvements across the board, even though you're only working on small portions of the account at a time.
The important thing is to not intimidated by a giant account. Remember that parts of it are doing just fine, and don't really need much attention besides the usual maintenance steps of bid adjustment and periodic negative keyword additions. Pick a few small battles and hit them hard instead.
Yahoo’s Advanced Bidding Options
With all the hype surrounding Google's latest features, Yahoo has been quietly adding to their targeting options over the past few months. A few months back, Yahoo released their new targeting options that allows you to adjust bids based on the demographics, geography, network (Yahoo.com, Yahoo Search Partners or Yahoo Content) and time of day. How does this stack up to Google's bidding options? It doesn't....
To date Google only allows you to implement bidding strategies based on the time of day. All other bidding options are made manually with no ability to segment your traffic without using multiple campaigns and creating placements. Here are the different options that Google offers in more detail:
Network Targeting
Yahoo's Network targeting now allows for users to adjust bids for their Search Partners Network and get more aggressive if the results are available. If you are only having success on the Search Partner network, you can also focus your advertising to that network only. This is one of the newest, most under utilized features in Yahoo.
Demographic Bidding
Yahoo Demographic targeting is another great report and bidding option has been another great way to improve ROI on your account. To use this tool, you must first select for Yahoo to start collecting the data from your visitors. Once this option is selected, Yahoo pulls the data from the Yahoo profile that the user has signed on with. This data is not 100% accurate, however it can be very useful in lowering your Yahoo CPAs. In most accounts, lowering or blocking the 17 and under crowd is a huge cost reducer without any drop in your overall conversions.
Geography Bidding
The Yahoo Geo Targeting/Bidding option takes things a step further. Now you are able to not only target specific DMAs on Yahoo, but also incorporate bidding strategies based on the ROIs of each DMA. This can prevent the need to create a campaign for every DMA that you would like to target separately and for bidding and budgeting purposes.
Overall, Yahoo is quietly flying under the radar and has added numerous targeting options that surpass anything on Google. The improvements we have seen at ATX PPC from incorporating these strategies is well worth noting. The only concern is that these targeting options go away once MSN takes over.....
Google’s on a Roll- New Retargeting Available
It has been a very productive month for Google with the latest release of its Search Funnel Report, Mobile Features and now retargeting options in the Google Content Network. It seems that Google is focused on expanding its efforts in Display Advertising with this addition and I have been very impressed with the results. Retargeting is arguably one of the most effective online marketing strategies because you are targeting site visitors who have already shown interest to your service or product. Previously, this type of advertising was very costly however with Google's CPC model, this powerful strategy is available to everyone.
Here is how retargeting works:
- Google will create a pixel to place on specific pages on your site
- Visitors that hit these pages are cookied
- Image Ads will then follow these visitors as they travel through the Google Content Network
This simple strategy can open up a world of testing that can drastically improve your overall conversion rates. The Adwords Help page covering these strategies has a ton of possibilities available, among them are:
- All Site Visitors- cast a wide net to keep your brand in front of your audience
- Category/Product Targeting- run ads for users that highlight the category/product pages that they visited and shown interest in
- Non-converting users- target all visitors who haven't converted
- Abandoned Carts- Target visitors who abandon your shopping cart
- Upselling/Renew Order- Target users 30-60 days after making a purchase
While these are just some of the endless possibilities that retargeting opens up, we here at ATX PPC are very excited. We have already seen great results in our initial testing. Don't forget to tie in the Search Funnel report to create your re-targeting strategies, now that's funky!!!
AdWords On Mobile Phones? Sweet!
Here at ATX PPC, we love two things: pay per click marketing and our smartphones. What could be better than combining the two? Fortunately, Google got the same idea. This week, Google rolled out a mobile site for their AdWords program to a select few advertisers.
With this new interface, you can keep tab on your AdWords accounts on your iPhone, Palm Pre, or Android device. You'll need to set up your mobile preferences in your AdWords account first, but once you get that set up you should be able to get live data on your Google PPC account on the go.
I can't wait to try this out on my iPhone. Google has been giving a lot of love lately to mobile phone advertising - it's good to see that they're making mobile innovations on the advertiser side as well.
Search Funnels Reporting Coming To AdWords
This week, Google announced search funnel functionality in their AdWords platform. This is great news for PPC advertisers. Now, instead of setting up complicated conversion funnels through Google Analytics or other web analytics programs, you should be able to get full clickstream data directly through the AdWords interface.
So why is this useful? Well, most PPC marketers are satisfied with getting their data merely from the end of the PPC transaction, attributing a conversion to a single keyword or ad. But in the real world, searchers often go through multiple queries and ad clicks before they finally convert on a website. You may have a keyword or ad that drives a lot of valuable traffic, but never converts - pausing this seemingly ineffective factor may harm your account performance.
For example, let's say I'm looking for a new laptop. I'd probably start my search with something general, like "buy laptop." Then, if you were a computer vendor, I might see your ad and click on it to research a potential purchase. After doing some browsing, I might write down the name of the laptop I liked to buy later. Fast forward a few days down the line, and I get back on my computer and search for "lenovo thinkpad t400." I might see one of your ads again, click on it, and complete a purchase.
In this scenario, the keyword "lenovo thinkpad t400" would get the conversion. But, you can see that the keyword "buy laptop" was crucial in the search process as well. These new search funnel reports will help you see the value in keywords like "buy laptop," and ensure that you don't make the mistake of removing keywords like these when they're making your account perform better.
PPC Tool Menu
In effort to make this site a resource to all PPC enthusiasts out there, we are working to consolidate useful information for all of our followers. A great starting point is reviewing the top free PPC tools available to all. Here is a list of some of the top tools:
Keyword Tools
- Google Keyword Tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
- Google Insights for Search: http://www.google.com/insights/search/#
- Word Stream: http://www.wordstream.com/products
Competitive Insight Tools
- Spyfu: http://spyfu.com/
- Compete.com: http://compete.com/
Other Important Tools
- Google Ad Preview Tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool
- Google URL Builder: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578
ATX PPC At SXSW Interactive
As true Austinites, we're all very excited about SXSW week. The music and film festivals are great, but as PPC geeks, the best part for us is the Interactive portion kicking off the week. Starting this Friday, I'll be out and about the Interactive conference taking in some panels, doing a little networking, and getting some cool swag from the trade show. That, and checking out the awesome after-hours parties all around downtown.
If you're at SXSW Interactive and you want to talk PPC, I'd love to hear from you. You can reach out to me via direct message on Twitter at @atxppc or @slivengood. Or, just leave a comment on this blog post. We're almost ready to schedule our first official meeting, and I'd like to meet up with any of you local PPC people to let you know why you should get involved in our little group.
See you at the conference!
Welcome To ATX PPC!
Welcome to the ATX PPC blog! We are a group of pay per click marketing professionals in Austin, Texas, who are interested in learning more about our trade and helping others to achieve online marketing success. Stay tuned for monthly meetup dates and informative blog postings related to news and views in the pay per click marketing space.
If you're interested in joining our group, or would like to contribute blog posts, please contact us via direct message on our Twitter page: http://twitter.com/atxppc.
Our first meetup is tentatively planned for April 2010. We'll have updates on this blog regarding our meetup schedule soon.