Dating Rules for Your Google Adwords Account

Google Adwords with her seemingly targeted traffic, easygoing daily budgets, and conservative broad matching makes you think you have found the perfect solution to your marketing needs.

Then as you get to know each other and start to build what you think is a trust-based relationship, she slowly goes completely crazy. Like bad movie psycho girlfriend crazy. Make a wrong move and she'll set your wallet on fire with bad content network traffic, ridiculously liberal extended broad matching, and possibly throw all your clothes out the window onto the lawn because she caught you messing around with Yahoo Search Marketing or Bing. If you catch her talking about how she wants to optimize or automate your relationship grab your wallet and run for your life!

Okay so the opening is a bit dramatic, but this is a boring topic and starting with a little humor and wit makes it easier to learn. There is no proof that Google actually has a gender but it certainly has a personality and most of its bad behavior is linked to how you trained it. There is no doubt that Adwords gets more complicated as your relationship with it grows and so today let's talk about how it learns and grows with you.

The normal course of evolution of an Adwords Account starts something like this. Someone throws a bunch of keywords into an ad group, writes a quick generic ad, adds a few dollars to the budget, and pulls the trigger. This is followed quickly by a couple of searches to confirm your genius and mastery of the Adwords System because just like magic your ads appeared as you knew they would. So you walk away thinking to yourself "That was easy" but that was only the first pitch of the game. This is a huge mistake because from the second the account starts Adwords is learning about you and if you disrespect Adwords it will get offended and it can get real rude with your wallet.

If you want to play Adwords professionally you have to understand Google, and Google wants to create the best possible SERP (Search Engine Results Page). This is incredibly important to Google and unlike a regular business the quality of the SERP is more important to Google than your money. Adwords is 50% of the most important web page on the planet so it is no surprise that if you do not help them help you, they will hurt you. Adwords is only slightly less complicated than space travel, programming all the features of your phone, or nuclear cold fusion and there are thousands of rules, guidelines, policies, and advisory comments. Since even partial coverage of this topic would fill a book I just picked a few common ones to make the point.

Rule 1: First Impressions Count

You never get a chance to make a second first impression and Google never forgets its history. If you start your relationship by just throwing keywords around without any thought then you are disrespecting the system and you teach it to treat you that way. The right way is start your relationship with Adwords is slowly and carefully building your traffic one layer at a time. Go after only the best quality words and buy only the ones that really apply to your business. You can get more liberal and go after broader traffic as the relationship develops but initially try being on your best behavior and help Google create a better SERP with an ad group that is absolutely on-target.

Rule #2: Impressions are NOT FREE!

The term PPC (Pay per click) makes some people think that impressions are free and they could not be more wrong. Just because you pay by the click does not mean that impressions are free and this can be hard for some folks to understand. As they say the truth is in the math and here is how the math works. Your CTR (Click through rate) is clicks divided by the impressions so you can change the CTR by changing the clicks or the impressions. Since CTR is a major factor in your quality score extra impressions drive down the CTR and with it your quality score. Seeing as your bid consists of your money times your quality score impressions do cost you real money. The general rule is that you want all the impressions you need but no more than that.

Rule #3: Words are special

One of the most complex issues with Adwords has to do with the multiple definitions of a word and more times than not it is the context of the word. Somehow English readers can tell the difference between how to read a document and how they read the document. Same word but different context and this happens much more than you think.

My all time favorite word for this is pearl because depending on context the word can be so many things. There pearls of wisdom, pearl jam, pearl harbor, pearl jewelry, pearl paint, pearl flip, aunt pearl, and many more. So this word can be a concept, rock band, tropical island harbor, jewelry, color, cell phone, or a person. The use of an apostrophes and plurals makes this even more fun!

A great tool for understanding how this impacts your keywords is Google Insights for Search

http://www.google.com/insights/search/

What I like to do with this tool is look at how the use of the word breaks down for the use I have in mind. I did this recently for a client and we came to realize that while we wanted a specific word only 2% of the traffic actually applied to their business. This helped to explain why we were having such a problem with the CTR and quality score. If you start with 98% of the searches not related to your use of the word, you're going to have a problem!

Rule #4: Adwords is simple, except for the details

Adwords lives where people, language, and technology collide and it is not always pretty. Conceptually Adwords is easy but when you get down to the details there are thousands of tradeoffs that you have to make. Fundamentally they boil down to a balance between quality and quantity. Generally speaking as quality goes up quantity goes down and the trick is to find the right balance because there is no right or wrong answer. I frequently have this discussion with clients about the balance between the multiple choices they have in keyword selection, ad copy, and landing pages.

What happened to Quality Scores?

The one constant with Google is change, and recently it seems that it was Quality Score's turn. We actively manage over 60 accounts; each month we analyze each account and report our observations to our clients. This allows us to see patterns that are not visible to the vast majority of people and this month what is very apparent is that quality scores are on the move. Quality scores are always on the move but not like this. Across dozens of accounts we saw point shifts of 2-3 and all in one direction.

In the bidding process Google treats quality score just like money and it is a good indicator of SEO problems with the site so it is high on our list of things to watch. Because of the way the math works a dip in quality score is the same as reducing your bids, which can put your ad in weaker positions. What we observed is that almost across the board there were 2-3 point reductions in quality score. In the past a 7 was an average keyword quality score, but it appears that 5 is the new 7. From what we can tell this does not seem to have impacted ad delivery because everyone took a similar hit to their scores.

While change can be upsetting, I have to admit that the Quality Score is getting better with this change. Although there are exceptions, generally speaking the relevancy fit of the new quality scores is better than it was before this change. This was not a simple change where they removed x number of points to readjust the center point of the bell curve. Words that were a 7 before ended up from 4-6 and the ones that got the 4's generally were weaker than the ones that earned 6's. Quality score in a very broad sense is reasonably accurate and fair and while you might want a higher score the real question is do you deserve it? We get calls every day from people wanting us to improve their quality scores but they almost never want to the hard work required to impact this number.

Our guess of what is happening is that they are moving the center of the curve toward 5 to give more room in the process. With the average sitting at 7 and reporting only whole numbers it gave very little room to show the finer details. In the long run this is better for the system for the center point to be at, well, the center point. Theoretically there may be a risk of losing positions if the change rolls into your account before your competitor. So far we have not seen any indication of that happening, but we are watching very carefully.

Adwords Quality Score and Organic Page Scores share lots of attributes so it is important for both sides of your web strategy team to watch these numbers and to learn from them.

The Adwords Bid Simulator - What's Really Going on Here?

Google likes to come up with new and helpful tools to make it easier to manage an Adwords account to reach their goals. Wait what? Yup, most of the suave little tools they come up with are tilted in their favor not yours! Like I've said before Google is just like Vegas, the house always wins. The more information they give you, the more paranoid you feel about how much you are bidding. The First Page Bid info that was launched a while back basically gives you what they want you to bid to get on the first page of search results. Can you get on the first page for less? Oftentimes yes. Will most people just blindly believe the First Page Bid and apply it directly to their account without testing it? Oftentimes yes. Apparently this was such a hit with the accounting department they decided to up the ante and introduce the Bid Simulator. Now they're leveraging impressions against your bid in an effort to extract more money from your wallet. Tread lightly with this one kids!

So here's an example of the Bid Simulator for you to check out. This is out of a fairly competitive national campaign. The estimator is not bad when you compare it to real life, we did get 87 clicks at the current bid with a solid position 1.1 and a 4.52% CTR. However the tool is recommending increasing the bid to $7.97 from $3.01 which is a whopping 165% increase. For the extra money we get an additional 450 impressions and 17 clicks with a 3.7% CTR (notice they don't do that math for you) which is much lower than the current performance. Since CTR is a large part of quality score, the likely effect of this will be to drive your quality score down resulting in a need for a higher bid to hold your current position. By the way, look at how easy it is to just pick a button to make the change... compare that with the click maze required to turn off the Content Network. < sarcasm >Weird that one would be so much easier than the other. < /sarcasm >



So here's my big question: where are all these extra impressions coming from? I mean I'm not losing them to position, improving on position 1 is somewhat problematic, so what's up? Break out your tinfoil helmets; I have 2 (conspiracy) theories about it.

1. Google is holding impressions hostage

So my first theory is that even though your current bid is totally adequate, Google thinks it's not enough. They let you rank highly when you serve, but they hold back on how many impressions you get. If you're going to get the rest of the impressions you're going to have to bid what they want you to bid. The price of the impression ransom is right there in the Bid Simulator waiting for you to save the day.

2. The extra impressions are born of extended broad match mixed with irresponsible bidding

My other theory is that there will always be more impressions if more money is involved. The keyword matching will get looser and looser to accommodate your obvious disregard for money. I would venture to say that a big percentage of those "missed" impressions are garbage that you didn't want in the first place.

Although the Bid Simulator is interesting, I think it's more of an attempt to make you bid higher than it is to help your account. Think about it, Google offers you new impressions of questionable value from a mystery source. You feel compelled to get in on the action and pick one of the pretty radio buttoned options presented to you. 2 or 3 of your competitors do the same thing and now the competition for your niche ad space has just jumped up by multiple dollars. Who wins in this transaction? Not you, Google. I highly recommend that you do your own testing to find real impression levels and watch your search query reports closely to ensure you're not getting loads of off topic clicks. An attentive mind will beat fancy tools and automation every time.

The Silent Web Site Killer

There is an insidious web site killer just waiting to ensnarl your visitors and turn them against your business. Not only is this traffic killer silent but it is also invisible thanks to the technology that speeds up your browser. This dastardly villain is the slow loading landing page! Hard to believe but this is absolutely true! Let's explore how you can deal with this dangerous foe.

To understand the damage a slow page load can have, consider the impact on the web experience. When a page load time exceeds the patience of the visitor, they terminate the visit and your business loses the value of that traffic and maybe more. As people get better and better at navigating the web, this patience period gets shorter. Ask yourself what you do when a page does not load within the time period that you expect it to serve. I bet the answer is you hit the stop button or just click on the next available link. In the Adwords World this is a disaster because the click got charged to account when the person clicked but the value to your business happens when they read the page, which is AFTER the page loads.

Is this happening to you? How do you know? When we install an AdWords Account one item that we always recommend is that they implement Google Analytics at the same time. One side benefit of this is that you can detect lost traffic, most of which can be traced back to a slow page load problem. Adwords and Analytics operate separately and it is this difference that can help you detect this problem. In Adwords the click is counted when the user clicks on the ad, but Analytics counts the click when the java script at the bottom of the page executes. This is why you should install Analytics at the bottom of the page because you want the entire page to load before you count the visitor. There is actually a special type of implementation of Analytics that will allow you to even more accurately measure this process. You can execute the analytic tracking code once at the start of the page and again at the end. I would love to take credit for discovering this ability in Analytics but I actually learned it from a book written by Brian Clifton titled Advanced Web Metrics. If you need to do this it is one page 135-136. For the scope of this article we are just interested in the fact that it happened, but Brian's method will actually record the actual load time.

At any rate with Analytics implemented and your URL tagging turned on, set your date to last month and look at how much paid traffic you have from Google. You can get to this data by clicking on the "Traffic Source" then "Search Engines" then click on "Paid." Next you need to run a "Campaign Report" to get your invalid clicks. Invalid clicks are clicks that Google removed from your Adwords count because of suspect patterns in the traffic. To set up the report select the Campaign Report and then click on the "Add or Remove Columns" link in the Advanced Setting section and check the box for "Invalid Clicks". Add this to the Adwords traffic and subtract the total from the Analytics count. If Adwords is higher you might have a page load problem. If the difference is small you should not be overly concerned, but if your traffic is expensive and the difference in these numbers is large you need to really start digging.

If you have a problem, the next step is to figure out what to do about it. Well my friend Mr. Obvious says how about making the page faster. That is a really good idea but first you have to decide how you want to do this. The general rule of thumb in web design is that the fancier and prettier the page the bigger it is, and hence the slower it loads. What is the patience threshold of your audience? Well that varies from site to site and there is no actual answer to this question. I start becoming concerned when it exceed 3 seconds because studies seem to indicate that the average page load is in the range of 2-3 seconds and the patience threshold of your audience is probably conditioned by their other web experiences. Not a perfect estimate but it gives us a starting point.

Page optimization is outside the scope of this article and could fill a very large book. My advice is that if you have an overly large page then call your web designer and have a heart to heart chat because they need to put their design on a bandwidth diet. They should be an expert in trimming the size of the page without impacting the web experience and if they cannot do that you probably want to go looking for one that can. We recently worked with a site that exhibited this problem and the estimated page load time for a standard broadband connection was 17 seconds, way beyond the pain level of all but the most determined visitors. The page was beautiful and had all sorts of function but it lost one third of its total traffic not exactly the result you want when you are paying good money to create that traffic. In this case we estimated the cost of this slow page load at $2,600 a month and that will pay for lots of page optimization.

At the beginning of this article I stated that this killer was a silent one and I want to explain that because this is something even the most basic user can track. All browsers are designed to be as fast as possible and download a page and especially its graphics are an area that all browsers are optimized for. They do this by not downloading everything they need on every page. They use a cache on your local drive to store the things they have already downloaded. This way, they can increase the speed of a page load because the slowest part of the page load is the download. By saving items on the local drive the second load of the page is lightening fast. Since you probably have looked at your web site before, what you see most of the time is the page reloading not from the site but from your local drive. This is why the load seems fast to you and it is also how the real performance is hidden from you. Use the refresh function within your browser to see what the first page load looks like to the outside world, it might scare you.

Another area where a slow page can hurt you is in your quality score within AdWords. While Google is somewhat mysterious about the details of what goes into Quality Score the page load time is specifically called out on this. If you hover over the icon next to the keywords quality score the pop up will show page load as a specific part of the quality score. The problem with this is that so far we have not found a way to get to this data other than to hover over each icon. The data elements of the quality score are not in the report options. We have also noticed that this feature appears to be marginal in its accuracy.

A page load should take no longer than is absolutely necessary and the trade-off between functionality and speed should be a deliberate decision not an accident.

Life was simpler in the olden days

Google Adwords continues to grow in complexity and it is unlikely that will ever change. In the olden days you could write an ad, pick a few keywords, and your campaign was up and running. Well, the world has changed. It is not that you cannot still do this, you can, but Google has continued to release information and smart advertisers are using this to get better performance from their marketing investment. The problem is that your competitors are really smart people and they are not going to let you get away with being sloppy or cheap. Competitors are going to push the system for maximum performance and you have to do the same thing.

We can start by talking about the broad areas that have changed and what this means to your business. In the early days we had clicks, impressions, and CTR and not much else. Today we have a whole array of information and understanding what it means is not simple. Within Adwords we have quality score, impression shares, exact match, filtering, expanded search query reports, and many other newer items. Then you have Analytics and that gets into a whole new level of complexity.

Of the newer items quality score is probably the most important since it contributes to your knowledge of both paid and organic traffic. Quality Score is simple to understand but very difficult to manage. It is in fact what Google thinks of the relationship between that keyword, your ad, and your web site. It is the first quantified feedback in this area that Google has ever given us. Quality Score is what Google thinks. Google filed a patent on the Quality Score and we read it from start to finish. Our count of the attributes in this filing is about 140 so there are 140 items they are telling us about that affect the quality score. What they have not given us is the weight of each item. Given Google’s love of partial information my guess is this is about half of what is really going on inside the quality score. What is very clear is that organic score and quality score are cousins and very close cousins at that. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that an improvement in quality score will also improve your organic score. Every professionally run web site needs to be tracking and managing this number for both paid and organic purposes.

Impression share is another area that deserves some attention. This data includes the total impression share and a break down by budget and rank. The budget side of this is fairly straight forward in that if you want to improve these numbers simply give it more money. The Rank side however is about as clear as the components of the quality score. When an auction takes place Google ranks each of the ads with what they say is the sum of quality score and bid, however this is not entirely true. There is a touch of magic involved here and magic is another word for something they are not telling us. If the calculation were as simple as quality score and bid the positions would not move very much and they move all the time. We accounts that do not run out of money yet they loses large volumes of traffic to Rank. Our belief is that Google is moving ads in and out of the list that is being ranked based on factors they are not ever going to tell us. What we have learned about Rank is that it seems to improve based on the overall reputation of the account. Those accounts that have been around for a long time with a good CTR and run a clean account have the highest impression shares based on Rank. The problem with Rank is that Google does not report this information to a level where you can develop a specific strategy for improving this. The data stops at the campaign level and the problem has to be fixed at the keyword level. So you look at the warning signs at the campaign level and you try to guess what keywords are losing based on rank. Maybe Google will fix this, but for right now there is a huge leap between the level of the data and where the change has to be made at.

Filtering is new to the beta interface being rolled out in 2009. In the olden days you would run your reports into Excel and then use that to filter your data to find what is important to you. That has changed in a big way since you can now create the filter and not only see your data but change it as well. This is a massive improvement and we think this is probably the most important improvement in the Beta Interface. We have not been a huge fan of the beta interface but it is continuing to improve and data filters are one of the really bright spots in this change. Developing filters that isolate, view, and edit the data in a way that supports your overall strategy is now possible.

Search queries are one of the basic building blocks of any account and yet it is common to run into an account that has never run one of these reports. The newer reports have gotten rid of the Other Unique query problem. This is where Google would hide much of the detail that you needed to really understand what people were actually searching for. That is no long the case and we think this is a wonderful change. Beyond that they have expanded out the search queries letting us know about session matches, which we always suspected were going on but could never document before. A session match is where Google uses parts of queries within the same session to figure out what the person is really searching for. For example if you search for Grover Beach, which is the city we are located in, then followed that with a search for Real Estate. Google gives you results for Grover Beach Real Estate. This is a simple example of putting location with topic but they get much more creative than that.

Google Analytics is another component of this conversion because it brings all the other traffic to the conversion. It is now possible to see how the multiple types of traffic interact with each other and the mixing of Adwords data with this makes some incredible things possible. In many cases you can now calculate your organic click through rate which is really exciting since organic traffic is a mystery wrapped in an enigma with little or no real information available for it. Yet as an advertiser you suddenly have information to help you tune your organic optimization. You can use Analytics to measure your branding strength based on real reactions from real people. All you have to do is accept the assumption that an increase in searches on your brand is reflective of the strength of that brand. The number of things you can learn from Analytics could fill a dozen books and I am not going to do justice to it here in a couple of paragraphs so let’s just say that it makes many things much clearer than they were in the past.

These are just a few of the really big changes so you have to add to this all the little things and you can see that the system is evolving and the pace of change is just getting faster and faster each cycle. Added to all the above the changes in the interface that include extensive graphing ability and now you have a real powerful system for advertisers to focus their investments with. The question is what are you going to do with this better information interface, and will you do it before your competitors or in reaction to them?

Loki - The Real Adwords Monster

In honor of Take Your Dog to Work Day I present you Loki the Adwords Dog. Here in the office pretty much everyday is take your dog to work day. Despite his lack of opposable thumbs, Loki is an Adwords keyword generation expert with a focus on the Roofing industry :)

If it Works and it Shouldn't...

Sometimes the best course of action in Search Marketing is to just let it ride. It sounds lazy, but sometimes it's the smartest thing you could do. I realize this might not always be a popular option, but there are cases in which doing nothing is the best thing you can do for your site.

We manage Adwords for a client that had an incredibly successful organic position for their number one keyword while at the same time doing everything wrong from an SEO perspective. This is a very old site that earned its authority and trust ranking a long time ago. We do not work on the SEO, but we do manage the analytics and report on overall traffic so it was hard to miss this one. In spite of big mistakes like the home page being titled "Home," it ranked first for the business's major keywords. The site has tons of links and authority that helped push it into this position despite it lacking the basics of SEO. Google thought so much of this site that it actually changed the title of the page to be more relevant and even re-titled the site links on the expanded listing.

When we first started working with this client our guidance was to leave these core pages alone! When you already rank 1st for a major keyword with an expanded listing, there's nowhere else to go so just let it ride... especially if you really shouldn't be ranking as high as you are. If it ever breaks that's when you'll need to go in and fix it, but in the meantime it works beautifully even though it shouldn't.

Recently someone decided to ignore this advice and re-titled the pages, and... well you can see the aftermath...


This site's strongest keyword dropped from ranking 1st to ranking between 3rd and 6th, and it switched from the Google generated headline to the newly written title. This new title didn't even have the main keyword in it! Not good! This caused a roughly 66% drop in visits. Chances are if they would have left it alone we'd still be seeing that same stream of visitors that have been coming in via that word for years.

Is there a chance the site will fight its way to the top? Yes. But will it have been worth it to lose thousands of visitors just in order to get back to the same spot it already had? Probably not. Remember whenever you're assessing a situation "do nothing" can be a valid answer in certain circumstances!