How Important is the Landing Page to AdWords Quality Score?
Recently, I posted about a video from Google Chief Economist, Hal Varian which explained the ad auction process.
Many were surprised to see the sizes of the pies he used for the quality score factors.
Since the screenshot is pulled from the YouTube video, and difficult to read; here’s a breakdown of the three pieces from largest to smallest:
- CTR
- Relevance
- Landing Page
In general, those factors are also rolled up to three main Google points; there are actually sub points under those items. For example, CTR also uses display URL CTR in determining the entire CTR pie piece.
Landing page looks like a small piece; however, this is what I find about landing pages:
A bad landing page will hurt you more than a good landing page will help.
For instance, in the old days of minimum bids, the higher your minimum bid the more likely it was to be the landing page at fault, and at a $10 minimum bid – it was almost always the landing page.
This is still true. A non-relevant landing page will hurt your account more than just about any other factor. It’s easier to work with a bad CTR than a bad landing page. While the total percentage allocated to landing page may look small, there is a much more severe penalty for a bad landing page than a lower than average CTR.
Going from a good to a great landing page helps very little.
I spoke with the Munich agency team a few weeks ago in Germany at an AdWords seminar and one statement they were willing to make was: If the system says your page is relevant, you can’t do any better. I have found this to be a fairly true statement. If you click on the magnifying glass icon next to your keyword and AdWords says your page is relevant – don’t worry about the small changes. Worry about the page as it relates to conversions.
On a side note, if you’re in Germany you have a fantastic team to work with. Take advantage of the support and resources that they offer. I was thoroughly impressed with that AdWords team.
Conclusion
Don’t spend hours of time tweaking your page for a quality score boost – it’s not worth your time. If you want to increase quality score, and your page is already relevant, then first start with testing ad copies. The changes you make to the landing page should be to increase conversion rate.
If you’d like to read more, here’s a piece at Search Engine Land on the 9 myths of landing page quality score.
links for 2009-03-31
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Good read if you're uncertain about log files, what to do with them, or how to use them.
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Excellent recap of a SES NYC session about paid search and politics.
A New Way of Organizing the Content Network
My latest Search Engine Land article was published yesterday. It’s about taking the normal content network structure (one content campaign and one search campaign) and using a different organization scheme to take advantages of sites that are doing well on the content network.
Essentially, you would have three campaigns:
- Search campaign
- Content campaign (to find new sites)
- Placement campaign (for sites performing well)
Today, you could have ad groups within your content campaign that are targeted to just sites doing well; however, those sites might lose some of their impressions due to other ad groups that are shown on random content sites.
If you have found sites that are performing well for you – don’t you always want your ad to show there? (Same logic as making sure your best keywords are active on Google.com).
Instead, put these performing sites into their own campaign with their own budget. That way you are using the ambiguous content campaign to find sites doing well (and block those that aren’t doing well) that has its own budget. Then, a second campaign for sites that have performed in their own campaign with their own budget so that you ad will always be displayed on those converting websites.
It’s a long article, but well worth the few minutes it’ll take to read and comprehend.
New ways of organizing content campaigns for AdWords.
links for 2009-03-30
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NEW YORK, NY – March 26, 2009 – A pioneering study conducted on behalf of the Nielsen-funded Council for Research Excellence (CRE) by Ball State University's Center for Media Design (CMD) and Sequent Partners dispels several popular notions about video media use, finding that younger baby boomers (age 45-54) consume the most video media while confirming that traditional "live" television remains the proverbial "800-pound gorilla" in the video media arena. (See appendix for more detail.)
links for 2009-03-27
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As many of you know, I'm a closet legal analysis junkie. As I work with many types of companies, I like to stay abreast of the breaking and decided legal issues just to stay clear of any problems and make sure those I work with understand the legal implications as well. Here's a fascinating article about the courts using search engines.
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Google has recently expanded their beta program for the new AdWords interface. It's very different, so if you feel a little lost, there are several videos (the one the preloads is just promotional, the right hand side ones are educational) to help you understand some of the new changes and where data now lives.
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Nice quick read on selling. There are 5 main sections with links to more specific articles. Will take 10 minutes to read main article plus all the sub articles; for most of us who aren't natural sales people - it's a good 10 minutes just to ponder the information for a few days.
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Interesting take on various business models for websites.
There is Not a Magic Number for How Many Keywords Should be in an Ad Group
I often hear that you should not have more than 5-10 keywords in an ad group; then I’ll hear you should only have 1 keyword in an ad group; and Microsoft just said 20 max keywords in an ad group to keep the ad relevant.
Please note: this only goes for search campaigns. For content campaigns, Google only looks at a maximum of 50 keywords in an ad group. The info in this post only concerns ad group organization for adCenter, AdWords, or YSM as it relates to search.
The number of keywords that belong in an ad group is based upon how many keywords your ad copy describes. It is better to have more specific ad copy than more general ad copy. There is no magic number.
A great exercise is to write a very specific ad; one that is so specific that if someone reads your ad they can only assume you do this one service (or sell this one product). Then look at the keywords in the ad group. Does the ad copy accurately describe the keywords? If yes, the keyword is in the correct place. If no, then put the keyword in another ad group.
What I often see is someone writing an ad like such as:
John’s Plumbing Service
Servicing the Chicago area
Call for an appointment today!
And then a list of these keywords in the ad group (and someone claiming that the ad does describe all of these keywords):
- Chicago plumbing
- plumbing services
- broken pipes
- emergency plumbing
- 24 hour plumbing service
- fix shower
- overflowing toilet
- Saturday plumbing
- weekend plumbing
- flooded basement
- kitchen remodeling
Technically, the above should be several different ad groups. Emergency plumbing means you have a problem right now and you need someone at your house ASAP. Kitchen remodeling is a longer buying cycle, someone will want to get a quote, pick out counters, cabinets, etc - there is time before the final conversion. These two items are very different user intents.
Now consider the below list. Each highlighted color represents an ad group (ignoring how good/bad the ad copy is – it’s specific):
In this organization, the ad copy is more specific to the user’s search intent. Therefore, the ad copy is much more likely to receive a click.
If you consider the consumer, weekend plumbers is someone who doesn’t chart $500 an hour to come to your house on a Saturday. Emergency plumbing is someone who needs something done right now regardless of day or time. Fixing a shower can usually be done by appointment by most plumbers.
Consider your audience and what scenario is happening in their life that would cause them to do that particular keyword search.
You may have a few general ad copies at the end of your organization. However, you should end with these ad groups (sort of your left over keywords) and not start there.
Start with the most specific keywords, write targeted ads for them, and then go more general with words that do not fit into the most specific ad groups.
If you write a very specific ad and it does describe a thousand keywords; then that’s OK. It’s not that uncommon to see well organized ad groups with a thousand keywords. It’s much more common to see an ad group with a thousand keywords be disorganized; hence where some of the max keywords per ad group advice comes into play.
If you do the hard part of organizing your ad groups correctly, then there is no magic rule of thumb for how many keywords should be in an ad group. The number is what makes logical sense. You may have ad groups with only one keyword. You may have some with two thousand keywords. Don’t worry about the number if the account if organized correctly.
This is the most time consuming part of PPC; however, it will give you the best chance of long term success.
links for 2009-03-25
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Google adds more functionality to controlling your credit card billing.
How to benchmark your keyword’s quality scores against the competition
When you first add a new keyword to your account, your keyword is given a quality score. This isn’t actually your keyword’s (or landing pages) quality score.
The initial quality score is a default quality score for everyone who has used this word before you. That’s an important benchmark as you can compare your quality score to your overall competition.
After you add several keywords, run a keyword report and save the quality score info for those new keywords.
After those new keywords have accrued enough data for Google to make a statically significant decision about what your actual quality score is (which could be a day to a few weeks depending on how many impressions, clicks, and when Google crawls your landing page) then your keywords are updated with your actual quality score.
Run another keyword report on your actual quality score.
Compare this data to the original quality score.
If yours is higher, fantastic, you’re above average. That doesn’t mean you should be satisfied – but you should note you’re in a good starting place.
If yours is lower, then you will end up paying more than average for the same ad position. If this keyword has a lot of traffic; stop raising bids and work on improving your quality score.
If your quality score drops at a later date, then use this checklist to investigate the reasons why it dropped.
Your ad rank is Max CPC times Quality Score. It’s just as important to optimize your quality score as it is to raise your bids. However, what’s very useful is to know your quality score compared to your competition - which is data that’s not too difficult to obtain.
links for 2009-03-19
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I've been talking a lot about this recently in the AdWords seminars - how to track email campaigns. Google gives some insight in this blog post.
However, they don't go to the extreme of setting up a new profile. I'd recommend a new profile for your email campaigns so you can see the funnel visualization. You can't view the funnel in a segmented view. (i.e. if you just tagged your links, and then made a filter showing just email traffic, that custom view will be disabled when you view the funnel).
By creating a new profile that only counts email traffic, and tagging email links, you can get a better picture of your email engagement metrics.
links for 2009-03-17
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Yahoo has a handful of verticals where they have listed out both keywords (in excel, pdf files) and case studies or additional help files for those industries.
If your industry is covered (apparel, auto, education, finance, health care, home improvement, legal services, travel, wireless) then there's some good info to review.
Google AdWords
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