Ads were already normalized by position - Stop Freaking Out!
November 3, 2008
Google made two changes to AdWords Quality Score Calculations while I was away on vacation. The first one was so minor, I didn’t even look twice at it. Unfortunately, it has caused an unnecessary uproar.
Ad position has been taken into account for the calculation of a more precise Quality Score.
Ads in high positions typically earn better CTR than those in low positions, because ads in high positions are more visible to searchers. To calculate the most accurate Quality Scores, it’s important that the influence of ad position on CTR be taken into account and removed from the Quality Score. We’ll update the portion of the Quality Score algorithm that accounts for ad position.
Please note that this does not change the Quality Score Factors Chart – it’s just an update to the algo. I’ve seen some who have freaked out thinking that the information I’ve been giving (and Google as well) wasn’t quite accurate. That’s not true. Google (and my) info has been accurate. CTR has always been normalized by position. Since they recently moved to a ‘query time update’ of quality score, I think this is just a logical extension to CTR projections.
The takeaway? Don’t fret on this one – CTR is normalized by position. Bid what’s profitable for you and don’t think twice about this update other than Google is trying to make their algos better (a good thing).
Higher quality ads are given the more opportunities to move above the search results.
We’re also improving the way we determine which ads show in the yellow region above the search results. In the past, if the ad with the highest Ad Rank did not meet the quality threshold, we may not have shown any ads above the search results. With this update, we’ll allow an ad that meets the quality threshold to appear above the search results even if it has to jump over other ads to do so.
Thank you! I first talked about this issue in 2004. You could essentially ‘lock-out’ a competitor from being able to get into the top spot if you had just one of the main factors a bit low to be considered appropriate for the top spot and your overall bid times quality score was still higher than the other competitors. While most people really don’t want to get into this level of keyword manipulation as its very rarely worthwhile – it was something that did happen in certain niches.
This is a fantastic update. It might be a bit confusing to explain to others, but I actually a fan of this one.
Remember, to be in the top spot you must meet minimum standards on several of the quality score factors. If you have even one of the major factors below par, you could still have a great quality score but your ad would not appear in the top positions. This makes it so that you can leapfrog someone if all of your factors meet these standards.
I’ll be moderating a session at Pubcon next week on quality score, and then giving a day long AdWords seminar in Vegas two weeks from today. I’m guessing some of these new factors will be discussed in depth during both of those events.
Use Demographic Targeting to Reach Your Customers in New Ways
October 28, 2008
I’m a little late in posting this. My latest Search Engine Land column was published while I was away on vacation in Europe.
It shows how to combine the power of demographic targeting with the targeting of AdWords to create some really targeted campaigns.
Hope you enjoy it.
Use Demographic Targeting to Reach Your Customers in New Ways
From Google – Paid clicks more likely to convert
October 27, 2008
Google and Compete did a joint retail study examining the role of search in retail, and they have a webinar about the findings.
One retail study they were involved with started that in 7 out of 8 categories they tested, paid clicks were 50% more likely to convert than organic clicks.
Personally, I’ve always felt paid should convert higher for two reasons:
- You get to choose your keywords. You can show in natural results for terms unrelated to your products/services. For paid, the relevance should be higher.
- Many consumers know they are ads. Often we click on natural when we’re surfing/researching, and ads when we’re more in the mood for buying or researching a future purchase.
If you are in the retail industry (or a paid search manager), the webinar is definitely worth watching.
The note above about the conversions comes on the ‘Key Findings’ slide if you’d like to jump to that point and listen. Then jump to the slide ‘Paid clicks are more likely to convert’ to view the chart.
Local Info
The other chart that most of us involved in local will be interested in is the ‘In-store purchases’ near the end of the presentation. “Up to 43% of of online shoppers purchase in-store”. That number changes a lot depending on who you are talking to; however, this study does show a chart of in-store purchase percentage by a few verticals, which is useful.
Affiliate & Retail Info
Slide ‘many people click now and buy later’ shows a chart of how much time occurs between initial search and purchase time. It’s common to see one to two weeks pass. If you’re an affiliate with a same day or one week cookie, this is important to understand in your driving traffic to a site where you might not gain the commission.
The Actual Study
It’s an adobe webinar so you will need flash installed to view it:
Google retail industry webinar.
Q&A - Should I use both Google Analytics and AdWords Conversion Tracker?
October 14, 2008
Yes! Please! I often survey attendees of an AdWords Seminar, and a common theme often emerges.
- Most of the audience uses Google Analytics.
- Most of the audience does not use the AdWords conversion tracker.
They are different tools that should be used differently.
AdWords Conversion Tracking
The AdWords conversion tracker just tracks conversions. You can define a conversion in many different ways (sale, lead form, page view) etc. You can define different conversions within the same account. Once you’ve enabled conversion tracking, you can run reports to see performance statistics by keyword, ad group, campaign, ad copy, landing page, content sites, etc by different conversion types (what keywords lead to contacts vs. shopping cart checkouts).
AdWords conversion tracking passes that stats back to your AdWords account so you can easily access all you conversion information cross referenced with your AdWords data within the single AdWords reporting interface. This is a huge timesaver.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an analytics system. It will give you more information than you need to know about your site and visitors. You can easily define goals (conversions) within your analytics account. Google Analytics will tell you about visitors to your site that came from other sources than AdWords. You can view browser, screen resolution, referring site info, and your AdWords account within Analytics (as well as hundreds of other data points).
Like AdWords conversion tracking, analytics should be used to make decisions. Whenever you decide to implement analytics, the first question you should ask is ‘What information do I need to know to get my job done well?’. You can ask that of the design, marketing, and other departments within your organization. Then look for an analytics solution that fits your needs.
For most small businesses, Google Analytics will fit that need. If you need to make real time decisions, then it will not meet your needs.
However, it is much more difficult to extract data such as what content sites are sending you converting traffic from your Analytics account. From within the AdWords conversion tracker – it’s easy. From Analytics – incredibly difficult.
Use Both Google Analytics and the AdWords Conversion Tracker
Assuming you’re willing to use Google Analytics, and it gives you the data you need to perform your job – then you should use them both. Since these two tools perform different functions, you need a tool for each function. Neither are difficult to install, and the data can be invaluable for increase your website’s effectiveness.
AdWords Conversion Tracking Resources:
- Video: Setting up conversion tracking (watch this first)
- Setting up AdWords conversion tracker FAQs
- PDF guide to setting up AdWords conversion tracking
- Troubleshooting conversion tracking
Q&A - Why should I only use one country per campaign?
October 7, 2008
This is a very common question, and one that’s often addressed in the AdWords Seminar. The answer to the question resolves around how you use your reporting statistics for further optimization.
If you run a campaign targeted to the UK, Canada, US, and Australia (a very common thing to see), and after a month you have these stats:
- CTR: 5%
- Conversion rate: 5%
- CPC: $2
What do you do next? Where are your ads doing well?
If you had this data:
| Australia | Canada | US | UK | |
| CTR | 10% | 3% | 5% | 1% |
| Conversion Rate | 6% | 1.5% | 1% | 12% |
| Cost Per Click | $5 | $2 | $10 | $0.25 |
Suddenly, you can make much better decisions.
- The UK converts well, and is the cheapest click, but has a much lower CTR – work on raising that CTR.
- The US CPC is way too high compared to the others and the conversion rate, lower the CPC.
- Do the math on Australia, with a high CPC, but a nice conversion rate, it might be an OK campaign.
The more granular you can view the data, the better decisions you can make.
And I didn’t even mention the most obvious question, how do you spell ‘color’ or ‘colour’ in your ad copy? Every area has a different belief system and different ways they react to words. You can’t test well for different geographies if you don’t have the data to work with.
There are some reasons to start bundling countries; however, a good general rule of thumb: target just one country per campaign.
AdWords Quality Score now uses Geographic Signals
October 2, 2008
Google has updated their information on Quality Score to now include geographic information. This has long been a part of the ‘other relevancy factors’; so it shouldn’t be that big of a surprise.
At present, it’s only used in calculating the quality score for search.
Essentially, Google is looking to see how your account performs in different geographies. At present, this factor is listed to be used at the account level. Hopefully, it will eventually be moved to the campaign level, which is where you can actually specify different geographies.
This should help small businesses who are targeting very locally.
It should also help those who are tightly focusing their keywords and ad copy around specific geographies. You should use one campaign per country at a minimum (another post coming on that soon).
I’ve updated the Quality Score Factors Chart to also include the new geographic information.
Q&A: My site is all flash, can Google spider my site?
September 22, 2008
The short answer is yes! However, be careful - Google’s indexing of site’s is still new and if they make a mistake on your site it can seriously affect your quality score.
One way to test what AdWords things your site is about is to use the Google Keyword Tool. When you navigate to the keyword tool, use the ‘website content’ option and paste your URL into into the box and hit submit.
If you’d like to see a few examples of all-flash sites keywords’ copy and paste these URLs into the AdWords Keyword tool:
Google is still not viewing images, nor seeing all the contents within flash - they are mostly looking at the text. Please read the Webmaster Central post closely. An alternate method is to use sIFR.
There is additional information at Google Webmaster help on Flash, images, and other non-text files.
Q&A: How can I tell if Google’s Ads Bot can spider my landing page?
September 18, 2008
Google’s adsbot will spider your landing page to determine your landing page’s impact on your quality score. If Google’s ads bot cannot properly spider your page, you may see very high minimum bids and low exposure.
Google webmaster tools has a tool where you can see if Google’s adsbot spider will index specific pages on your site. Here’s a step-by-step guide to checking if specific pages can be spidered.
- Create a Google webmaster tools account.
- Verify your domain.
- Once your domain is verified, login to your account and navigate to: Google webmaster Tools > Tools > Analyze robots.txt
- Either view your robots.txt or enter a new robots.txt into the first text box
- Please note, if you use meta tags or nofollow tags to control what pages Google can spider, this tool will not show what pages are being disallowed by methods other than the robots.txt file.
- At the bottom of the page is a section labeled ‘Choose user-agents’. Select Adsbot-Google
- Hit the ‘check’ button and view the results.
Click picture to see full view.
Here you can see where to navigate to view the robots.txt tool. Next, the first box is your robots.txt file (and you can change what is being tested here), the URLs you wish to check, and finally the results. In the graphic below I entered Google.com to show why you need to verify your site. You cannot see information outside of your domain.
Additional note: If you have a global disallow, adsbot-Google will ignore your entire robots.txt file (but Google’s other bots will follow your robots.txt instructions).
Article resource links:
- Quality Score Factors Chart
- Quality Score Demystified
- Robots.txt information
- Google help file on adsbot-Google
Q&A: I use location targeting but I don’t live in the areas where I advertise. How can I see my ads?
September 17, 2008
If you are looking to see ads at a metro level, this is a very straightforward process.
Use the Ad Preview Tool to choose your location (country, metro, etc), keyword, language, and domain (Google.co.uk, Google.com, etc).
If you wish to see mobile ads, you can use the mobile ad preview tool located at the same page - just click the ‘trying to preview mobile ads’ link.
It does get more complex if you wish to see ads at specific coordinates. It can be easier to use Google Earth to first find coordinates before previewing the ads.
What does the AdWords Change to the ‘Top Position’ Formula mean to you?
September 11, 2008
<new>This is an older draft that’s well past the date when people were freaking out about this change to the top position. However, I think it does give some insight into Google being able to both maximize profits and maximize the consumer experience</new>
I’ve been examining the changes to the AdWords Formula for top position ranking (From Inside AdWords) to discern it’s impact on advertisers, and while the change is subtle, there are a few items worth nothing.
Quote from the blog post:
The key change to the formula will be how we consider price. Today’s formula considers an ad’s Quality Score and actual cost-per-click (CPC). The improved formula will still heavily weight Quality Score, but instead of actual CPC, it will consider an ad’s maximum CPC.
When I originally saw this, it seem subtle. AdWords blog post states that there’s a larger pool of advertisers eligible for this spot - which I believe to be true. Advertisers are becoming more sophisticated, learning more about AdWords, and slowly becoming more sophisticated in general.
Therefore, it makes sense to give advertisers more control of showing for that top spot. By changing the formula to use the max CPC instead of actual, an advertiser can opt to ‘force’ their way to the top spot.
It must be noted, before one can force their way to the top, the ad must already meet higher quality score metrics than a typical ad. You will rarely see a poorly written ad, or irrelevant keyword ad, show in the top spot.
Then I read an independent research report from Merrill Lynch that stated Google might see a 2% increase in revenue due to this change. Interesting. The change does give advertisers more control, however, its also good for the bottom line. A win-win overall (and some will see this as Google trying to pull more dollars from advertisers).
However, what wasn’t mentioned in the blog post was how it will affect preferred cost bidding.
<added>Turns out not much. For preferred cost bidding, Google is determining much of the max CPC on the backend, and they are doing the same for this change</added>
As advertisers should be bidding to an ROI basis - does the formula change matter to those sophisticated bidders?
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