The first priority of AdWords is to create the best quality SERP (Search Engine Results Page) to serve the searcher. AdWords controls 50% of the most valuable Internet real estate on the planet and our job is to pursue SERP perfection. We are not fools so we are very aware of the fact that obtaining perfection is impossible, but it is the pursuit that is important.
You might think something like “I am paying for AdWords and I want it to serve my needs first.” This is a nice thought, but a failed concept. The value you get is from the interaction with the searcher. You can only get there if you serve their informational need first. The value of traffic is created by the engagement of the searcher with the value statement of your business. We must serve the searcher before that value can be created.
We get calls from people all the time that are trying to control the market and the reality is that the market is a thousand times more powerful than the business. Control is an unlikely outcome in a mismatch like this. The strategy needs to be in service to the market, not in an attempt to control the market. You cannot win if you try it the other way around.
There are lots of system manipulations, some of them work once in a while, but none of them work long term. You can trick a person into clicking on an ad with deceptive copy, but it is unlikely you will hold the upper hand all the way to the finish line because they hold all the power. I will be the first to admit that there are businesses that work on a one-sale model, but our clients need the recurring business and the long term relationship to build a good business. For that reason they need to get the right traffic to their site and that means serving the searcher first.
To be in service to the searcher we need to make sure that the ads on the SERP are the highest quality match to the searcher’s query. The magic of AdWords is the keyword model of both positive and negative words to connect directly to the searcher’s need. Since 1994, when I started working in web marketing, I have yet to meet a person that did not know their keywords. It is a rare person however that knows their negatives. To serve the searcher the ad needs to appear when it serves their informational need but no other time. You might think that there is no cost to the extra impression of your ad, unfortunately that is not true. That impression goes into the quality score which is multiplied by your bid to calculate your rank so it really does cost you in the long run.
We like to think about the search process as the start of a conversation. The searcher enters a few words as a clue of their interests and we match that to the keywords related to the ad copy which is our response to their query. You say hello and I say Good Morning, it really is that simple. The really tough part here is when they click on your ad you need to continue that conversation on your landing page or the only thing that will happen is a charge to your credit card.
First it was Microsoft and now Google is getting into the Privacy Policy Enforcement business. Microsoft has been rather heavy handed and inconsistent on their policy enforcement shutting down accounts for what it deems to be a problem. It seems if your page takes input from the visitor there is very exact language required in your privacy policy.
Here is Google Blog Posting from Inside AdWords on this:
If your site requests payment, financial, or personal information from visitors, please review the new requirements and make any needed changes to avoid having your ads suspended.
Clear, accessible disclosure before visitors submit personal information
Our existing policy requires you to clearly describe how any personal information you solicit will be used. Soon, we’ll require that your description must also be easily accessible before site visitors submit their details.
Option to discontinue direct communications
In the same description of how personal information will be used, you’ll also berequired to describe how people can opt out of future emails, phone calls, or other direct communications.
SSL when collecting payment and certain financial and personal information
Many websites use what are known as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connections to encrypt sensitive information that travels between the user’s browser and the website’s servers. To help ensure user safety, AdWords policy will require all advertisers to use SSL when collecting payments and certain financial and personal information (like bank account and social security numbers).
Microsoft’s policy appears to be very similar especially on item 2. We had a situation with them where they shut down two accounts over the exact words in the privacy policy. It seems that the magic words are “You may opt out of any future communications including but not limited to emails, phone, or mail. By sending a notice to via email to <email address> or by mail to <business name and address>.
Both Google and Microsoft are requiring that the advertiser states in their privacy policy that they will obey the law. The CAN-SPAM law specifically requires that you honor an opt-out request within 10 days. It seems that Microsoft and Google are now assuming the role of the Government in this area. The timing is such that I wonder if the Government is pulling the strings on this one.
For the SEO only people in our audience you have to wonder. What they will do to your organic score, if you do not have a privacy policy? My gut tells me that it will not be very pretty.
The bottom line here is if you have no privacy policy and have any input on your site you need to fix this before something bad happens to your site. If you have no policy http://www.freeprivacypolicy.com/ can generate a policy for your site and it’s free.
Just for some balance and to show that we do appreciate the good things that programmers bring to us, here are some recent at-a-boys for our developer friends.
Negative Word Lists
In the past there were only ad group or campaign level negative keywords but now Google is supporting keyword lists that can be applied across multiple campaigns. The process is simple to implement and it starts by building the negative keyword list in the Control Panel and Library section. Here you create the list and add the keywords, then at the campaign you attach the list in the negative keyword section. Now you can add a keyword to your list and have it applied to all the connected campaigns.
Better Mobile Targeting
Mobile targeting was greatly enhanced by a new campaign level setting that allows for targeting the device type and the carriers. Everyone knows that mobile is rapidly expanding and changing and not everything works for everybody so now you can control this to a much finer level. If your site uses Flash you probably want to turn off iPad and iPhone traffic since we know that Apple does not support this. If your web site isn’t designed for a good mobile experience you may want to turn off Andriod, iPhone, and Palm, but keep the iPad traffic since the screen size is large enough that a desktop design works just fine. Carriers are another item to consider, especially in a very localized campaign.
Display Network Bidding
In one of the great non-events of recent time the split bids between managed and automatic placements has been consolidated. We are not sure why they ever split this up to begin with but it is no longer the headache that is was. Now we have only search and display bids as it should be.
Top Ads
You have probably noticed some changes in the Top position ads with longer than normal headlines. This is controlled by including a period, exclamation point, or question mark on the first line of body text. When this is there and the ad qualifies for a top position above the organic, the line will be appended to the headline with a dash and the punctuation will be removed. This is a big deal to several of our clients and we have begun a full review of all accounts to leverage this change. While we are very excited about the potential of this for many of our clients the early testing shows there are some bugs to be worked out. If you do this yourself make sure you test the outcome of the change!
Ad Copy Conversion Optimization
Google rolled out a new change to the Ad Rotation settings for campaigns extending the optimization based on Conversions rather than Clicks. We have been asking for this for years and the problem is so old that it was a chapter in our first book several years ago. We have some testing underway to see if this operates as you would expect, but the fact that it exists means I can take this off my Christmas Letter to Saint Google.
A system user’s bug is often a programmer’s feature, and this month we thought it would be fun to talk about functions that are just dumb. I was inspired to write this because of a conversation I had with a person at Microsoft AdCenter support regarding budget changes. Here is the situation.
We had an account that was running higher than the client wanted so we think to ourselves no problem just adjust the budget – but life is not that simple. It was late in the month and the account had already spent more in the current month than they wanted to spend next month. This is actually a very common situation but guess what in AdCenter you cannot do that because of a feature/bug. Here is the error screen:
A wise person once said “Half of my marketing dollars are wasted; I just do not know which half.” This is actually an optimistic statement because depending on how you measure success the waste could be much higher. In the direct response business a response rate of 2% is not uncommon and that translates to 98% waste. The challenge with finding the waste is that success and failure are not always clearly visible.
Think about the last time you had a first transaction with a company based on a single impression from that business. Depending on who you listen to each of us is exposed to thousands of advertisements each day so it is incredibly rare that we respond simply on one impression. While a direct response can happen in the vast majority of businesses it takes many impressions before a prospect makes a measureable transaction. Consider the following:
The first time a man looks at an advertisement, he does not see it.
The second time he does not notice it.
The third time he is conscious of its existence.
The fourth time he faintly remembers having seen it before.
The fifth time he reads it.
The sixth time he turns his nose up at it.
The seventh time he reads it through and says “Oh brother”
The eighth time he says “here’s that confounded thing again”
The ninth time he wonders if it will amount to anything.
The tenth time he will ask his neighbor if he has tried it.
The eleventh time he wonders how the advertiser makes it pay.
The twelfth time he thinks it must be a good thing.
The thirteenth time he thinks it might be worth something.
The fourteenth time he remembers that he has wanted such a thing for a long time.
The fifteenth time he is tantalized because he cannot afford to buy it.
The sixteenth time he thinks he will buy it… someday.
The seventeenth time he makes a memorandum of it.
The eighteenth time he swears at his poverty.
The nineteenth time he counts his money carefully.
The twentieth time he sees it, he buys the article or instructs his wife to do so.
The over use of the word he and the last item are probably good clues that this list has been around for a very long time. According to the best information I have this was published in– Hints to Intending Advertisers; By Tomas Smith, London – 1885. While this list is 125 years old you can see that people really have not changed much. When you ask the question where did you hear about us the answer will always be the 19th or 20th step but in reality many areas are never credited with the transaction. Since we are AdWords Experts we would like to point out that the keywords associated with each of these steps are probably different. So if you never advertise for the early stage keywords how are you going to get the majority of the audience to this final step?
I propose that this list is not far off in many situations and it explains why we get the results we get. Were any of these 20 contacts wasted? My position would be that each step was part of the process and it simply took 20 actions to complete a visible reaction. At any point in the purchase process you could have hundreds or even thousands of prospects at the various points and this process is not purely linear. An individual prospect could skip or repeat steps because these are people not machines. I would propose that you can reduce this list by doing a better job of communicating your value and telling your story clearly and with emotion, but your prospect is still going to evolve over time not just instantly transform.
Think of your personal experience today. Studies vary but most indicate that you will be exposed to thousands of advertisements before you close your eyes tonight. Out of those thousands you might respond to one or two. If you are like most people 90%+ of your purchases today will not be based on advertising but on some prior experience or relationship. You will buy your coffee at the same place, get gas for your car at the same station, and buy a sandwich at a place you have been before. We are creatures of habit so the fact that advertising fails at a very high percentage should not surprise us. The challenge is that as a business you must reach out to new people consistently because if you fail to develop new business you will ultimately fail.
At my core I am a systems person that loves impossible challenges and that is why I work in marketing and my goal is to fail less often.
Believe it or not this is one of the most common questions we get. People hear about AdWords, but they are not really sure of what they are or why they should care. This is Google’s fault because they really are not great communicators. Their mission is to organize the world’s information but like the cobbler’s shoes they either struggle with or simply do not care to communicate the value of AdWords. You would think that Google would try harder since AdWords is their golden goose and Microsoft is now in the second position nipping at their heels in the search market. Here is my attempt at a simple description of AdWords:
Adwords is an auction priced self-service advertising system that delivers ad content relevant to the other page content.
Google’s primary goal is to provide advertising that enhances the search experience and, in Google’s eyes, this mission is much more important than your money.
Let’s take this statement apart piece by piece.
Auction Priced: One item that throws people new to the system is that unlike other advertising where the cost is set by the publisher, in AdWords the cost is set by the competitors seeking the same ad space. Because keywords often cross over different industries you will often be competing for ad space with businesses that are not your normal business competitors. Your bid is not what you pay. What you pay is one penny more than the competitor behind you. This is how changes by competitors drive your costs up.
Self-Service Advertising: Adwords is a computer system that requires on-going maintenance and there is no auto-pilot button. Your campaigns use a keyword and bidding model built and maintained by the advertiser. How well it works depends on how well engineered the models are.
Relevant Ad Content means that Google is looking to deliver the best ads associated with the actions of the searcher. They view the ads as an extension of the natural listings and they rank them in a very similar fashion. They want to deliver ads that are likely to be of interest to the searcher based on the keyword match or the content or actions of the searcher. They take this extremely seriously and will not display ads that are a severe mismatch no matter how much you are willing to spend on that position.
Advertising that enhances the search Experience: New advertisers often fail to believe how serious Google is about this. Other Publishers will sell their soul to close the deal and collect your money; Google is not like these other publishers. Google places the priority of producing the best quality SERP (Search Engine Results Page) well above your money. Given the option between improving the SERP or increasing immediate revenue they will pick the SERP quality every time. This surprises Advertisers. It really shouldn’t though because the secret to Google’s success is the quality of their SERP. This is a core corporate value and not a marketing slogan.
The heart and soul of AdWords is the keyword matching and its simple appearance is misleading at best. The process includes phases of eligibility and ranking. For eligibility there are four positive and three negative forms of keywords used to match to the searchers search query and multiple statuses that create a test for display eligibility. After eligibility is established quality score and bid are used to determine the ad rank. Assuming the keyword met eligibility and ranked high enough to make it to the page the ad is displayed. This is, of course, a very high level view of this process and the devil is in the details. In the matching process it is important that you fail the eligibility for searches that do not apply to you. In a pay per click world impressions might seem to be free but if you follow the system you will find that you pay for those excess impressions later. They drive down your click through rate lowering the quality score and increasing your cost on future clicks.
Why should we pay you to run AdWords?
The other form of this questions “Why can’t I just run AdWords myself?” and the answer is you can just like you can prepare you own taxes. Businesses that are large enough to have a full time accounting staff still engage CPA firms that specializes in taxes because they know it a full time job just to keep up with the changes and the latest strategies. When it comes to rapid changes in policy and practice the IRS has absolutely nothing on Google. Changes at Google are non-stop and according to spokesman Matt Cutts they average more than one change per day and that is just what they admit to. At least the IRS has Congress to slow them down! After working with Google AdWords since 2003 I can tell you that you are always one click away from discovering some new function or feature that was not there yesterday. It is a rare day in our office when there is not a new discovery for the entire day. While I do not propose that AdWords is as complex as the US tax code, it is certainly not simple. At a basic level almost any business person can set up an AdWords account, put in some keywords, write a few ads, and get results from the system. The problem with this is that the campaign is not going to run at maximum effectiveness and it can leak money and opportunity at light-speed.
AdWords is where marketing, systems, language, and people collide in cyberspace and when played at a serious level it is complex and competitive. It is complex enough that Google has not one but four certification tests for its certified partners. There are three major networks including Google Search, Search Partners, and Display and each of these networks is complex enough to write a book on. Its competitive enough that businesses spent $22.8 billion in 2009 and its on track to increase 22% for 2010 based on results through Q3 (reference: http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html). Add to this the analysis of how the traffic acts after it gets to your web site and it’s time to engage serious people for your team.
Nobody walking among the mere mortals on Earth, including your humble narrator, knows exactly how the page ranking at Google works in complete detail. We do however know many of the attributes that count and the basic structure of the formula. The process starts with hundreds of attributes that are scored and then the real magic happens when they blend these scores.
Attributes come in several different flavors and two common ones we call “the-more-the-merrier”, “the sweet-spot”, and “Value over time”. These are far from the only type of measurement but it helps us here with an example of how competing with one type using a strategy of another is a major mistake.
Let’s start by defining how a sweet spot attribute works. For discussion purposes only, let’s say that the sweet spot in keyword density is 2% so at 2% you get the maximum points then as you move away from that point the points decline. The farther from the sweet spot, the lower the points and this goes for over or under the sweet spot. So this is a case where more is not always better.
Another type of attribute is the more-the-merrier and an example of this is the back link. In this case, the more you can get the better. Not all back links are created equal in this world. Some back links are worthless or might even be cause for penalty if they are purchased or grossly off topic. The value of the back link is based on the trust and authority of the source of the link. A front page link from cnn.com is very different than a link on an obscure sub page in some unknown web site. The authority juice from the source flows to the target. It is possible that links from sources that Google does not like such as known link farms could actually be negative but as everyone knows, proving a negative is exceptionally difficult. My guess is that links from bad places have no authority or trust level at Google so they transfer zero to the points.
The process is more complex than just these simple statements and you have to consider the type of site that is being processed. In a simple world we have editorial, reference, commercial, and many others and content is treated differently depending on its type. For example in an editorial site like cnn.com, the older the article the lower its value. After all, who wants to read yesterday’s news. In a reference site like Wikipedia.com, older is often better since it is a well established highly referenced page. The example of this is Einstein’s theory of Relativity, very old but also well respected. So older is better in one case but worse in the other.
One thing about SEO that makes web site owners crazy is that most of it is outside of their control. This does not mean that you cannot influence it, but you cannot directly control it. Back links are one of many examples of this in that you probably do not have control over the other site pointing to you but you can influence the link by proactively seeking them.
Themes NOT Keywords are the core of the logic and Google has been working on this challenge for a long time. A theme is a broad collection of related keywords and they cross support each other. If your site theme is Adwords then terms like PPC, SEO, Adsense, Display Network, and many others are going to support your theme. The more your site is about your theme, the higher you will rank for your keywords.
Nobody knows the exact percentage, but our guess is that 80% or more of the organic score comes from off-site items. This is just like the real world in that your reputation is more about what people say about you than what you say about yourself.
There are a thousand ways to earn the top position in Google, all of them hard. When people get into a discussion of SEO, they desperately look for one thing to grab onto and to run with it. But SEO is about a collection of attributes and in some cases you have to rank low in one to rank high in the other. Keyword density in your page title is a great example of this. For discussion purposes, let’s say that your page title is worth 10 points and you have 5 words in the title then each word is carrying a weight of 2 points. If you reduce the total number of words to 3 then each word is worth 3.33 points resulting in an increase of more than 50% on fewer words.
In the last 16 years, I have seen the calculations evolve from very simple to today’s nuanced logic and over that time I have noticed that most successes have been accidents but with a common theme. The people that rank well for their keywords are largely good communicators that are passionate about their topic. So write and publish what you love and do it consistently over a long period of time and you will eventually win the game.
Can I prove what is written here? Absolutely positively no. Anyone who tells you that they can tell you exactly how the Google Search Algorithm works is lying to you. I do believe that there is a preponderance of evidence supporting the statements in this article and that it this is generally correct but certainly not absolutely accurate.
The virtual stockings are hung by the SERP with care, in hopes that Saint Google soon will be there. The AdWords Experts are nestled all snug in their beds while visions of new features danced in their head and I am sure you know all the rest.
Every year in the fine tradition of the Christmas letter, I write an open letter for the things I want to see in Adwords. Before I get started with the details I would like to note that many of the things I asked for in prior years I actually got, so maybe this letter isn’t as silly as it seems.
Group the Changes
This year St. Google gave us lots of new features. Working with Google is a lot like having Christmas every day because you are often only one click away from finding the newest and latest changes. Google rolls out hundreds of updates each year and it makes managing Adwords a difficult task. We would like to see them slow the process down and batch the changes together with reasonable documentation. We could have a few major releases each year rather than 300 small ones. It is actually a rare day when we do not find some unknown change that sneaked in under the radar.
User Defined Data (UDD)
This has been at the top of my list for a long time and it’s so simple that it amazes me that it was not done a long time ago. Almost every system provides for UDD to cover things they simply did not think of, or that vary from customer to customer. In fairness to my friends at Google, they did roll out labels which addresses this a little bit but those are like putting band-aids on a shark bite. We need actual numbers and codes with simple validation ability. We need this at all levels in the database including the campaigns, adgroups, keywords, and ads.
Advanced Keyword Matching
Google Adwords has only the most basic of keyword matching controls and this really needs to get better. We need the ability to express more powerful rules for the matching and I am not really talking about anything innovative here. Things like wildcards, phrase and broad combinations, capitalization and punctuation expressions and so on. All I am asking for is the same level of ability that we find commonly in Microsoft Excel, Access, or even Word. Surely, Google can beat Microsoft in this area. Maybe the problem with this is it just is not complicated enough to get an engineer’s attention. The rules already exclude symbols and special charters so all the normal ones are available for this use. I would be glad to spec this all out if anyone at Google is interested.
Negative Search Query Report
The search query report that is near and dear to any professional needs to have a negative counterpart. This report would show us search queries that were qualified by the keywords but then were lost to either rank or because they were excluded by a negative keyword. What surprises me about this one is that it would be good for Google’s revenue yet they seem to resist disclosing this. In the logical flow of a search query, there must be a point where this data is simple to grab.
Move, Copy, and Paste
Last year, I asked for this and we got some of it but it still needs help. The ability to download into csv files and then push it back into the system made this area much better but it still is missing some very basic functions such as copying a campaign online. The Desktop Editor does this with no problem but for some reason this functionality never seems to make it to the online editor.
Centralize the Ads
This one kills me because it would save both advertisers and Google a ton of time and fixing it is just a simple relational database concept. Sometimes, especially with image ads, I just want to create an ad once and use it many times so there is a many to one relationship between the ad and the adgroup. I do not want a separate ad for each ad group and I certainly do not want to have to upload the same image ad for every ad group. On Google’s side, this would reduce the number of ads that have to be reviewed saving time and money. This is especially important for image ads, which can take a week to get approved depending on the backlog.
Interactive Change Log & Alerts
Let’s call this one Twitter for Adwords. I manage well over 60 accounts and all my clients have full access to their accounts, as they should. I would like an alert when someone changes something or a campaign runs out of money without having to sign into an account and run a report. Google already logs the changes and all they would have to do is feed it to a secure application modeled after something like Twitter. Sometimes clients accidentally change things and did not even realize it. Some clients run out of money every day so the alerts have to be at least reasonably controllable with an on-off option by account. The alerts and change log need to be across the entire client center and subordinate client centers not per account.
Budget Controls
We would like to have full budget controls that do exactly what they are told. Controls that allow us to set an Account, Campaign, and Ad Group budget distributions that do exactly what they are told to do. To reduce a budget for the month takes two changes and is subject to lots of error. You first have to reduce it to a pace that will come in where you need it and then you have to remember to change it on the first of the month to the new full month budget.
Clean up the Filters
The new interface has been in production for a few years now, yet the filters still have problems. There are very common combinations that are simply not available. The classic of these is that you cannot filter your active ads from the paused ones because the only options are Approved, Pending, and Disapproved. Here is a newsflash; there is a Review and Paused status. Consistency would also be nice to have. All numbers should have the basic value test plus a range of values. Some fields like Avg. Position have better than or worse than, while Avg CPC has ><, while clicks have <= and >=. We also need to have filters work for all the data, not just the level we are at. For example, I should be able to filter ad groups with words in their name and positions for the keyword. The rules should be if I can see the data on the screen, I should be able to filter by it.
Dataset Filters
We often find datasets we want to work with but there is no way to keep the dataset intact. For example, it is very common to filter high position keywords for this month and look at how they look year to date. The problem is as soon as you reset the date range, it changes everything. We need a function that says keep this dataset but show me a different time period.
We know this list is long but Saint Google gets to pick the ones we get. We will just wait with baited breath for the opportunity to shake the boxes under the tree next to the fireplace with cookies and milk.
Smart Phones are changing how marketing will be done in the future and in case you’re curious the future is today. If you have not been paying attention to trends in marketing for the last decade the process has shifted from product presentation to a strategy of engage and educate. This change in basic strategy results in a shift in where your marketing dollars are invested in engaging content rather than slick ads. Mobile marketing takes this evolution to the next level.
Everyone I know is trying to figure out how mobile marketing will impact their business and I believe that it will force a higher percentage of your marketing investment to be put into the material creation rather than the delivery vehicle. We will pay less for the ad delivery but much more for the creation of the content we deliver. In mobile marketing all of the old world product pitches are simply considered spam and mobile marketing will be driven by the opt-in list and very few will subscribe to your list if all you do is pitch your product. You have to give them meaningful value that is of interest to them or you will find that they have a very short attention span and a low tolerance for your message.
It’s the list stupid!
Mobile marketing is all about the list. How you gain new subscribers and how you develop your relationships with them are the critical success factors. For most small businesses the infrastructure of mobile marketing will be an SMS service provider. These businesses make it possible for small businesses to use this marketing channel without the huge overhead involved in short codes. Short codes and keywords are the gateway to the SMS process and setting this up is not cheap or easy. Just to get started a short code costs $1,500 per quarter and if you want a special vanity code the cost increases to $3,000 per quarter and this is a long way from delivering your first message. The SMS service providers leverage this by providing a shared short code from which they sell specific keywords. This is how texting a specific word to a short code gets you on the SMS list you want. The big advantage here is that without getting into all the technical challenges and costs a low cost relationship with a SMS service provider you can get your mobile marketing up and running in just hours.
The challenge to all of this is to get people on your list and then treat them so they value the relationship enough that you keep the permission to communicate that they granted you. You do this by clearly articulating the value they will receive and then deliver that value to them. Beyond this you have to get that message out into the market. And of course you have to perform this magic with 140 charters or less.
Talk to those who care about your message
Opt-in marketing has at its core the concept of talking to people that care about your message and quit trying to interrupt people who frankly do not care. People are understandably concerned with the messages that they receive because text messages are an interruption so what you say has to have value or your list will shrink and quickly die. Value is not just a routine discount for the day or a rehash of your print coupon. It needs to be something special that the person is likely to be interested in. Different audiences are going to value messages in different ways but the bottom line is they, not you, need to value the message.
Use QR Codes to Make Subscriptions Easier
The typical subscription process is a small word sent to a short code but even that can be a barrier for people and to the rescue in this is the QR Code. These are the square codes that you are starting to see in the market that look like this. The person simply uses their phone to scan this code and it sends the word and short code. When done like this the length of the keyword and the short code are no longer an important part of the process because it is all contained within the code and the person never has to interact with it.
There are several competing technologies to provide this functionality to the user but so far the QR Code appears to be the leader. Within these codes there are all sorts of interesting things you can do such as embed the identification of the source of the subscription by using different keywords. QR Codes can be used to connect to a web site, send a text message, dial a phone number, or just enter text.
Caution: Not everything works in all combinations
Mobile is rapidly evolving and like any newer technology there are consistency problems. Not everything works in all the combinations of apps, phones, and services. In our testing the code above worked on some combinations but not others. The iPhone failed to handle this properly with 3 of 4 apps we tested, but it finally did work with one. The DroidX worked the first time and we have no clue if we just got lucky picking the right reader or if the phone is just more open. What we are sure of is that the URL coding seems to be 100% supported but when you get into the other processes your success rate is at risk. Failing to set up the SMS message is either a program bug or a security feature depending on your perspective. The technology has the ability, but delivery may be inconsistent.
Opt-In or Spam – There is No Middle of the Road
“Consumers must ‘Opt-in’ to a short code program from their mobile device before they can be sent anything. Even an initial message that asks for permission is considered SPAM.” Unlike email the carriers have no problem identifying the senders of spam and taking immediate and decisive action for a rule violation.
In mobile marketing you either get them to opt-in or you are a spammer. There are lots of services that will rent out lists that were built in many different ways including contests and other offers. The key is they did not opt-in to hear from you so you better make sure that the value promised matches your message value or you will get a very negative response. If the list was built by offering discount meal coupons and you are going to offer a discount meal coupon then the list is golden. If however the list was built by a win a free trip offer and your offer is a discount for an oil change you need to run not walk away from that list. People do not just dislike being off message, they HATE it, and they can transfer that hate to the business that interrupted them with a message they did not want. Getting people to opt-in to your list is hard work and keeping them is even harder but it is the only way you can play this game.
Deliver Value or Die
I have already said this several times but it is worth repeating. If you want a relationship that allows you to communicate with your market you need to treat them with respect and talk about what they are interested in.
How this relates to Adwords
Building subscriptions is a common goal for Adwords and a subscription offer is a great way to get the relationship started with a low impact transaction. Lowering the commitment level of your conversions almost always increases the percentage of response and is an excellent way to find people interested in what you have to say.
Quality Score is real money to an Adwords Advertiser. So it is no surprise that improving this is a common topic of conversation with our clients. We have studied this extensively over the years and we have watched it evolve. In this article, we are going to look at the history and where we think the future of Quality Score is going.
If you are new to quality score and have not seen the Quality Score Video by Hal Varian Google’s Chief Economist watch it before reading this article. Hal does a great job of explaining the conceptual basics of quality score.
Quality score actually started life as a keyword status of “Inactive for Search” where Google would simply stop the word if the CTR (Click Through Rate) got too low. The exact percentage was never disclosed but it was somewhere around .5% in the Google search network. The partner and content network were never part of this process. In those days you either gave up on the word, or you moved the keyword to another adgroup and tried to improve the CTR.
The next stage in Quality Score evolution was the static score where the system would periodically pass through your account and update your quality score. In those days, your account would have a default value that it gave to new words and then the routine maintenance would update it for changes. During this time, the Quality Score was fixed and you could see the almost direct impact on your ad positions. In the static version the system looked at the keyword CTR, ad copy, and landing page but no session values. We estimated that in the early stages before historical CTR was available to the system that ad copy relevancy was 80% of the score and the landing page was 20%. As CTR history came available, the score would become more and more based on CTR and by the time the keyword had a couple of months of history it was all about the CTR.
The current Quality Score is calculated on the fly allowing lots of new attributes to come into the formula and this is where it really gets to be fun. Unlike the static version, this one posts back to Adwords the resulting quality score. When Google says that your bid is money times quality score discounted to .01 greater than the bid behind you this is NOT the quality score you see in Adwords. When this change was made the relationship between quality score and organic score got a lot closer because they shared many of the same attributes. If you think like a programmer for a minute this makes perfect sense because Google simply repurposed the organic ranking objects and used them on the keyword, ad copy, and landing page. There are still differences between quality and organic score but your quality score is what Google thinks of the relationship between the search and your keyword.
“How do you improve your Quality Score?”
Glad you asked and actually there is a lot you can do. Quality Score is driven first and foremost by the CTR and best estimates puts this factor at about 65%. Your CTR is driven by the keywords you select and the relationship between them and the ad copy. There is no hard and fast rule but if your CTR is under .75% then you have some work to do. First decide if you care about the word and if you do not then get rid of it. Otherwise look for ways to improve the relevancy between the intent of the keyword and the headline of the ad. You can play with the body all you want but the headline is what drives this world. If people read the body at all they do so only if the headline got their attention so spend lots of time thinking about your headlines. In most cases we find that repeating the keyword concept is critical and connecting a benefit is the second big thing. With only 25 spaces this is not an easy task! I will tell you that we have seen hundreds of tests where a single word in a headline can more than double the CTR.
CTR is not the higher the better so you have to be careful with this. Like many things in Google the calculation appears to be weighted towards a sweet spot. We cannot prove this is exactly what’s going on, but what we see time after time is that a 3-4% CTR is the optimal CTR. Going above this range is probably caused by some trick on the user and Google knows that. If you have an exceptionally high CTR, you should not be surprised if your quality score dips. We are certain that this sweet spot varies by keyword and that it is relative to the CTR of the others in these searches, but in most cases 3-4% is where you want to be. There is one effect that we see commonly and that is a low CTR with a good quality score or a good CTR with a bad quality score. This happens because quality score is relative to the competition not an absolute measurement so you just have to be better than the other guy.
After CTR the next big thing is relevancy and this is estimated at 30% of the quality score. This factor is closely related to the organic score and it has at least 147 attributes that we know of and probably another 300 that we will never figure out. We know most of these attributes because they are on patent filings from Google. The interesting thing about this list of attributes is that over two thirds of them are not directly controlled by the page source. Just like in real life, your relevancy is more about what others say about you than what you say about yourself.
The last major part of quality score is landing page quality and the rule here is “Do no harm.” Landing page quality is about what Google does NOT like. You do not earn points in this area but you can sure lose them. You can have a 10 score coming into this section and violate one of the prime directives and end with a 1. Things like pop-ups, hidden text, and other tricks are a quick way to destroy all your hard work.
Quality scores can tell you certain things:
Score 1: You have done something very wrong. You must confess your sins and request forgiveness.
Score 2-5: Below average look to your CTR and Relevancy.
Score 6-7: Good Solid Scores you are doing most things right.
Score 8-10: Incredible score but probably a very short list of words. Most of the time these are things like your name or major brands that you own. For some reason the 8 score is very rare except in international campaigns.
The key to managing your quality score is to look for patterns in your score ranges. You will often find that 2-5 scores just need to be split out to a new adgroup with ad copy more connected to the search. Consider getting rid of keywords in the 2-5 range that are not really that important to your business. This will improve your adgroup, campaign, and account average quality score and will improve your overall reputation within the system.
We get calls all the time from people looking to get all their keywords to a 10 score and it is simply impossible. A 10 score is the top 0.5% of keywords and Google is not going to give that score out to several words in any one account and it certainly is not going to give that without other words at the lower levels. Simply put the bottom 99% is what makes the top 1% possible!
The other frequent question is how to trick the system to improve their scores beyond what they deserve. Tricks do exist from time to time but taking advantage of these has some very real risks. Google has a department headed up by Matt Cutts that is dedicated to finding and closing holes in the algorithm. When they find these they correct the logic and you can suddenly find yourself going from 10 to 1 instantly.
Quality Score Rule Number 1: Never try to trick Google unless your Engineering Staff is smarter than theirs!
The Future
Google is not done with quality score and just like the search results page it is constantly being tweaked. We think that ad placement will continue to become more and more like SEO and that the major factors are going to be off-page items. More and more it will be what people say about you not what you say about yourself that will drive your quality score. Money is not a factor in SEO and never will be but it will always be the ante to the table in Adwords. Google will continue to value the quality of the search engine results page above your money and they want every link paid or organic to be a meaningful contribution to the search experience. Quality content is King, and it’s going to stay that way if Google has anything to say about it.
In summary:
• It’s about CTR – target 3-4%
• Using a baseball metaphor: .75% is the warning track and .50% is the wall.
• Look for patterns in your scores – deal with keywords in groups
• Get most keywords to 6-7 before worrying about 10 scores. Hit consistent singles before swinging for the fence.
If you really want to get into the painful details of this send me your email address and I will send you a list of 147+ things that go into the Quality Score calculation. bob@smsrd.com
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