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.
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.
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.
Fantastic Google AdWords Ad Auction Video
Google produced a nice video laying the auction process and how raising quality score can decrease price.
It’s almost 10 minutes long, but if you want to see how actual CPCs are calculated, and receive a little bit of insight into quality score, it’s worth the few minutes of time.
enjoy.
New Google YouTube Videos
I’ve recently created a YouTube Channel which is just a subscription to all Google created videos.
You can find the channel at YouTube.com/eWhisper.
Below are the new videos that pertain to Google Analytics and Google AdWords.
New Videos from Google analytics
New Videos from Google Business
- Follow consumers online to get more bang for your marketing buck
- The slowdown will fuel online growth
- Digital consumers are full speed ahead
Google adPlanner Makes it Easier to do Demographic & Behavioral Research
Google Ad Planner has recently made some updates that make it even easier to define audiences.
The biggest change is more insight into how profile demographics are calculated:
- Added Unique Visitors (cookies), a new cookie-based metric, to help you cross-check and compare metrics, similar to Google Analytics unique visitor metrics.
- Changed Unique Visitors to Unique Visitors (users) so it’s clearer that you’re reviewing estimated numbers of real world users.
- Placed the Unique Visitors (cookies) and Unique Visitors (users) metrics on a site’s profile page so you’ll have a more comprehensive view of how a specific site can support your media planning. Learn how to make the most of these two metrics.
Image and quote source from Inside AdWords.
Easier to Choose Your Target Audience
My favorite change is that there are now pre-defined audiences that you can choose from. This is a brand new feature that you can see in the left image
When you load a new audience, adPlanner will automatically select your typical demographics:
- Gender
- Age
- Education
- Household Income
- Children in Household
However, what’s really nice about this feature is that adPlanner will also pre-select certain behavioral characteristics such as:
- Sites also visited
- Keywords searched
In combining both user demographics and behavioral characteristics; it’s very fast to build an initial profile of sites that match your audience.
Of course, you should know your audience better than adPlanner, so while this is a nice starting place; it probably won’t be your final list.
I’m a big fan of using adPlanner to do placement targeting research.
Once you’re up and running, don’t forget to:
- Run placement performance reports to see how sites are converting
- Block underperforming domains
- Filter your information in Google Analytics for better insight
If you’re still learning adPlanner, here are some videos that will help you get started.
Ad Planner Overview
Defining an Audience:
Reviewing & Profiling Sites
AdWords Updates Advanced Conversion Implementation Help Files
For several years, the only place to get information on how to pass shopping cart data (or variable sales numbers) from your AdWords conversion tracking to AdWords was in a PDF file.
AdWords just updated their help files to show how to include code these code bases:
- ASP
- JSP
- PHP
Updated Google Conversion Help Files (Click on ‘Different scenarios for how to implement in the above page types)
Google AdWords now Allows Only one Display URL per Ad Group
Just received an email from Google, and here’s one excerpt:
Policy Change: Only one display URL per ad group permitted
Starting February 24, each ad group in an AdWords account will only be allowed to contain ads that have the same display URL. It won’t be possible to create ads that have two or more different display URLs within a single ad group.
We’ll be also applying this policy to existing ad groups that contain multiple display URLs starting around April, so we encourage you to update any accounts you may have that contain such ad groups and separate the ads into their own ad groups as soon as possible.
You can still have multiple display URLs within ad AdGroup, such as:
- Example.com
- Example.com/electronics
- www.Example.com/TV
- TV.Example.com
You just can not have Display URLs in the same Ad Group such as:
- Example.com
- Sample.com
- Testing.com
How to Use Google Analytics Filters to Increase Your AdWords ROI
It’s one thing to have access to data.
It’s another one to know how to make the data usable.
You can use Google Analytics custom reports to segment data in many ways. But how to do you take that segmentation and actually improve your AdWords account?
Here’s one example.
- Create a custom filter by city (watch the video below for instructions)
- In the metrics, instead of using bounce rates, use ‘Total goal completions’,‘Goal conversion rate’, and ‘New visitors’.
- Save the custom report.
- When you’re viewing the report, under ‘Segments at the top of the screen’ (see picture below) choose ‘Paid Traffic’
- You will now be viewing conversion rate and visitor information from paid traffic in each city.
- Look for cities with low conversion rates and high traffic.
- For those cities, you should consider creating a geo-targeted campaign to help reach that audience.
- If you can’t make those geographies convert, you can also block those regions in your campaign’s location settings.
You can do a lot of analytics of the data in Google Analytics and Google AdWords. However, analysis paralysis is common. Before you start the analysis, think about the actions you can take from what you learn. If you can’t take any action – should you even bother to do the analysis?
Google Analytics Advanced Segments:
How to create Custom Reports in Google Analytics
Google AdWords Q1 Webinar Schedule
Google recently updated their new webinar schedule. There’s a lot on tap for Q1 of 09.
The biggest issue with webinars is it’s easy to register, and since it’s free, you never attend. Google does have some on-demand webinars as well. Just scroll to the bottom of the webinar page and you can see the on-demand information.
Here’s the new webinar schedule (click the image to visit Google’s page and register):
Google AdWords
Seminars for Success
Learn about Google AdWords from experts hand selected by Google.
These seminars will educate advertisers on the creation and management of successful AdWords campaigns.
Upcoming Seminars:
Boston AdWords Seminars June 24th & June 25th
Minneapolis AdWords Seminars July 16th & July 17th
Denver AdWords Seminars August 4th & 5th
Learn More about the Seminars:
Seminar Information
Official Google Seminar Page
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