How to get higher Quality score in Google adwords Pay per click

Before proceeding to know how to get higher Quality Scores, l, we need to understand how a quality score is calculated. Simply stated, a Quality Score is calculated every time your keyword matches a search query – or in other words, every time your keyword has the potential to trigger an ad.

Then, it is necessary to know why Quality Score is important. The Ad Rank or the position an ad shows on a search result or across the content network – is determined by maximum cost per click and quality score. There is a widely accepted formula to arrive at the ad rank and the formula may be stated thus:

Though somewhat confusing, one needs to understand that for search purposes, the keyword quality score is used and for content the ad group quality score is used. For keywords, every keyword has a quality score fixed to it. So, it is important to keep in mind when talking about ad copy as it will be associated with multiple keywords.

Here’s the step by step instructions on adding your quality score column to your keyword view.

First, navigate to the keywords in your AdGroup. Next, click on the ‘customize columns’ option seen below.

This will let you see the drop down menu:

Click on ‘Show Quality Score’. Your AdGroups will now look like this

A keyword’s Quality Score influences its cost-per-click (CPC) that is, how much the advertiser is charged for a click on the ad when it is triggered by a keyword. The higher a keyword’s Quality Score, the lower is its Cost per Click (CPC), and vice versa.

Quality Score also determines, in a way, if a keyword is eligible to enter the ad auction that occurs when a user enters a search query. Usually, the higher the Quality Score, the lower will be the applicable costs and the better your ad position. Every time one of your keywords matches a search query, the combined Quality Score and cost-per-click (CPC) bid is evaluated to see if it’s eligible to enter the ad auction. Keywords with a higher Quality Score will be eligible to enter the auction more easily and at a lower cost.

On the keyword analysis page, there will be a metric called ‘first page bid estimate,’ that means the CPC bid required for your ad to appear on the first page of Google search results assuming the search query exactly matches your keyword. The estimate is obviously based on the Quality Score as well as the advertiser’s competitors for that keyword. However, it is to be noted that succeeding in your first page bid is no guarantee of your ad placement which will depend on Quality Score, your CPC bid, your budget and user and advertiser behavior.

It is to be understood that ads are positioned on search pages and content pages depending on their Ad Rank. The ad with the highest Ad Rank obviously appears in the first position, and the other ads appear in the order of their rankings. For Google, to put it simply, the Ad Rank is determined by your keyword’s Quality Score and (CPC) bid.

In sponsored results even if you didn’t advertise?

Yes it’s possible but very rare. Sometimes this might be good or sometimes bad. I have heard cases in forums and blog posts where people notice their website popping up in search sponsored results without them advertising. There are few possible reasons for it.
1. If you have affiliates they might be advertising your name without notifying you. It can help or hurt you, you need to decide whether you allow them or not.
2. Some competitor is so keen about competing with your keywords and rankings that they might end up entering your URL instead of their own URL for destination URLs. Yes its possible and has happened in our experience one of our PPC trainee did this mistake, she was supposed to research competitor sites and have them as reference she ended up adding the competitor URL in destination URL and the campaign ran almost a day without noticing.
3. Potential black side is some competitor trying to be unethical to you by advertising for some crap keywords that are not relevant to your Business and redirecting those keywords traffic to your site to spoil your reputation. Yes its possible though I haven’t heard something like this happening.
4. Also sometimes it might be someone in your own company advertising without your knowledge. Did you check your company and with everyone including the marketing department whether they are running any small test campaigns. It has happened before for our own clients.
5. Also I read once Adwords advisor in webmaster world said it could also be fan interest on your website. There are some fans who for good will want to direct traffic to your website. You need to check this highly potential possibility.

Is PPC in Bing any better?

It’s too early and too unfair to give any judgment for Bing search engine. Bing is only establishing itself now as a genuine search engine. In just 15 days already Bing has produced some quality relevant results and has already captured some decent market share in search engines. I am sure Bing is a search engine of future they have good quality results almost as good as Google in some areas. I see a lot of geo-targeting going on and they don’t have easy access to areas where I can set my geo-location. But even if I set a geo location I still cannot see only US results I see a lot of results from my country and countries popping up due to geo targeting happening through IP location.
I feel as a PPC manager I need to start focusing seriously on Bing. This is what Microsoft has to say about Bing and its search advertising program.
“Microsoft is committed to Search and Search advertising, and is dedicated to providing you the best value for your online advertising dollar. The innovative Bing search experience is designed to maximize opportunity to capture and retain new users, grow query share, and most importantly, help you make the most of your online advertising investment.

In the coming months, a broad reaching awareness campaign spanning television, web, radio, and print will inform and entice consumers to try Bing. Now is a great time to take a look at your current search strategy and take advantage of the momentum that this campaign will drive.”
We all know how aggressive Microsoft is. I am sure they will promote Bing aggressively and seeing the quality of results and the ever increasing user base I am sure we might need to do a lot of PPC for Bing in future.

1. Can a new ecommerce website get away without PPC

Pay Per Click search engines have come a long way from just being one way of targeted traffic to being one of the most important and primary source of targeted traffic. Google Adwords, Yahoo search marketing, MSN AdCenter, Adbrite and we can name a lot. Online Businesses had become so much addictive its virtually impossible to see one good online Business that doesn’t use PPC campaign as their source of Business. In this so much dependency on PPC world, can a ecommerce website survive without running a PPC campaign?

Well it’s a question that makes itself difficult to answer. There are ways to get away from PPC and still prosper. But PPC cannot be avoided altogether. Pay per Click should always be the starting stage for all ecommerce websites. It gives you a clear insight that your targeted users are, where those visitors come from, what keyword they search for, which keyword converts better etc. This type of quick start and detailed analysis is not available in organic traffic or any other traffic source. If you want to be great by yourself you need to be already established or come out to internet with a bang. If you are Amazon or EBay you don’t need to depend on any sort of search engine traffic. Amazon, eBay and other top sites get traffic from countless sources. But they get this because they are already well established its not that easy for new sites. I have heard of some rare instances where a website comes with a bang and becomes instant popular. This happens especially in word of mouth referrals.

Apart from these you cannot avoid PPC. Pay per click should always be the starting point for traffic for ecommerce sites. You don’t have to use it ever but to learn the way online Business works you need to get started with PPC. Long term results should be organic so SEO is the best for long term solution but the starting point is PPC. Till now I haven’t heard of one ecommerce Business who come to us for SEO that never used PPC. So PPC is here to stay and can never be avoided especially for ecommerce startups.

Advertising trademark keywords in URL:

There are reports that Google is slapping bad quality score for domains that contains trademark names. One of my friend tried to advertise with a keyword Google in its domain name. For a week the campaign was fine but everything changed 2nd week all the ads stopped showing up because of bad quality score. It looks Google is catching on advertisers who might be advertising with trademark names in their domain name. I feel this is a bit harsh it is fair enough to stop sites for advertising trademark keywords but not the best to stop them from using domain names with keywords that are trademarked.

Say for example you might be selling Nike shoes. And your domain might be nikeshoesforsale.com. I don’t see anything wrong with a domain like that going in for advertising. Users like to buy from domains like that since its very much relevant to the query performed by the users. So I request Google to remove any restrictions on advertising with domain names that might contain names that are trademarked.

Is it possible to block individual domains in search network?

That has been the question of the ages. I’d love to know if there is a way that I may have missed.
Many search referrals that I see look good, ISP home pages, legit search portals, but I’ve also seen ‘search partners’ that are — well, no content except a Google search box! I can’t accept that humans visit these pages for any legit reason.
Now, some time back I put Google search boxes at the bottom of some of my sites. I thought it might please the Google G-ds and give my sites extra credibility. However, they’ve never generated enough revenue to make them worthwhile. In fact, they come off as I have reason to update the pages.
I am assuming that I only earn from a search through them if the searcher clicks an Adwords ad, If that is accurate, that may explain why the box gets a reasonable amount of use, but scant $$$ on my legitimate sites.
If the above assumption is true, that should tell you that some former MFA types are abusing that box.
Surely it is not a technical impossibility to implement a feature that would allow me to ‘pick my partners’ or similar.
I’m sure many would love to hear an answer on this. It’s a tough choice to sacrifice the AOL’s and cable/DSL home pages that many of my customers see when they launch their browsers just to avoid these gamers.
I already had to dump Search for my higher dollar campaigns and I saw income shoot up. Similar to the way I dumped Content completely early on after seeing my logs.

Click forensics reports significant drop in clicks:

Click forensics a company that monitors invalid clicks in pay per click search engines has reported significant drop in click fraud. We monitor number of PPC campaigns and yes we do notice significant drop in fraud clicks. It’s a very good sign especially for advertisers who spend their hard earned money to make business.

According to click forensics

“- The overall industry average click fraud rate was 13.8% for Q1 2009. Thats down from 17.1% reported for Q4 2008 and from the 16.3% rate reported for Q1 2008.
– Click fraud traffic from malicious scripted programs increased in Q1 2009. Unlike botnets or malware, these new threats exist as simple Javascript programs that execute upon a page view or site visit. Ad networks were found to be especially vulnerable to these attacks during the quarter.
– In Q1 2009, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside the U.S. came from Canada, United Kingdom and Germany. “

What I think we’re really going to see, is Google and the other click advertising distributors take a long hard look at technological ways of detecting/defeating the fraud.
And just like with Spam, the hard core fraudsters are gonna stay up late at night trying to figure out new ways of beating the system. Eventually, it will become prohibitively costly to try and beat the system, for the vast majority.

Until then, any script kiddie with a bit of patience can come up with ways of beating the click advertisers for quick cash.

Keyword suggestion tool goes regional:

Google search based keyword suggestion tool is the top tool in search engine industry. Since the data comes directly from Google’s results its very much reliable. Google keyword suggestion tool searches both by user input as well as analyzing the content of a website. Now Google adwords team made solid improvement by adding new attractive features.

Before you cannot select your country or language, now you can do it just by a single click.

If you haven’t tried the tool yet, getting started is easy:

Go to http://www.google.com/sktool.

Sign in to your AdWords account.

Enter the URL of your website.

Use the Language or Country/territory settings to get results specific to your selection, or keep the default settings to show global data.

Click Find keywords.

Google also added new features to enable greater customization and help you get even more targeted results:

Language/Country-specific results: Narrow your results by adjusting your country/territory and language settings. For example, you can use this if you only want to have the tool match your website against searches from Canada or Australia.

Ad/Search Share filters: Filter by Ad Share and Search Share, in addition to the other advanced filtering options. These filters help you customize your results to focus on queries where you’re not showing up in the natural search-results.

Bidding against you :

Is it possible? May be I am a bit crazy today thinking all weird stuff. Well what happens if I setup multiple sites with same or similar content. Then I setup different adwords accounts for different sites bid for same keywords on different adwords accounts. What will happen if I do that? I will virtually be competing with my own sites. Though this might not have any impact on keywords it could have some impact on quality score. Today quality score plays an important role and when I am my own competition I can see the movement of quality score right?

One other way is to have the same set of keywords for different landing pages in different ad groups under same campaign it’s possible. The only disadvantage with this is your Quality score might get split when Google triggers your ads for same keywords searched. I want to test out the different site theory to see how it works. It just came out of my mind.

Performance trends on CPA on content network:

Google has published an interesting article on improving your CPA on content network. Most of us don’t have luck with content networks. In most of our PPC campaigns we just turn off content network because it rarely converts. I am happy to see Google has brought something effective to tackle this problem.

How do Content Network ads perform for advertisers? We recently analyzed conversions, cost, and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) on the Content Network, and compared them to performance metrics on the search network across thousands of campaigns and many geographic regions.
This white paper presents the findings from this analysis. It shows that advertisers who advertise on the content network see good results on a number of levels:

1. Ads on the Google Content Network are likely to be as cost-effective – or even more cost-effective – than ads on the search network.

The median advertiser has a content CPA that’s about 2% lower than their search CPA.

2. The Content Network drives a significant share of total conversions.

The Content Network drives nearly 20% of total conversions for the median advertiser.

3. Conversion rates are higher for advertisers who used either of two AdWords campaign management controls: the Conversion Optimizer and site exclusion.