Google announced:

“Since 2005, we’ve improved Quality Score in many ways, such as the inclusion of landing page quality and landing page load time as factors. Along the way, we’ve also received much helpful feedback from both users and advertisers.
Today, we’d like to let you know of further improvements we’ll introduce in the coming weeks — based, in part, on this feedback. First we’ll outline the key points, and then dive into the details:

Quality Score will now be more accurate because it will be calculated at the time of each search query

Keywords will no longer be marked ‘inactive for search’

‘First page bid’ will replace ‘minimum bid’ in your account”

The idea behind having the quality score calculated for every single search is that it will make Google’s PPC results more relevant and time sensitive. For example, if you competitor writes a compelling ad which most of the traffic for a given keyword, your CTR will reduce, and Google will see you as less relevant in the next keyword auction.

I wanted to check that my long tail keywords were still being displayed, and this is what I discovered:

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For this keyword, I am in position 1.4 but my bid is not enough to display on the first page… I have to double it!

Furthermore, when I check the SERP for this keyword, there are no PPC ads out there. Not one. I would have thought Google wanted at least one PPC ads on every page to monetize their SERPs, but no, it prefers no ads at all… Could it be that the bid increase I need to get my keyword active again outweighs any other monetizing factor? I doubt it, I regard Google very highly.

OK, fair enough, I have had no click out of 28 impressions, I am not relevant enough to appear on the first page… I thought you’d give me at least 100 impressions before casting a judgement on me, but let’s move on.

Let’s have a look at this one:

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For this keyword displaying on average in position 3.6, I am getting a great CTR (7.27%) so I should be deemed relevant! But no, I am asked to “optimise my keywords and ads”. Or double my bid. (I think they mean the second option…). It’s only then that I remember what the Google Bible Blog said:

“First page bids are an estimate of the bid it would take for your ad to reach the first page of search results on Google web search. They’re based on the exact match version of the keyword, the ad’s Quality Score, and current advertiser competition on that keyword.”

Tagging keywords with first page bid estimates instead of marking them inactive is a way for Google to keep all your keywords in play – especially the broad matches as they trigger for more Search Queries. Who knows, maybe your ads will start displaying again if your competitors stops using one of their high performing ad, and you might start receiving traffic and spending without knowing it.

So I went to have a look at my Keyword Diagnostic tool (which I have to say have been improved greatly by the new functionalities, but that’s another post) and here is what I found:

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Even though my bid is high enough to get position 3.6, and even though I am getting over 7% CTR, I am being told that I need a higher bid (optimisation guidelines have been followed as explained on the pic). So why base this Quality Score attribution on the exact match only?

Instead of giving you an indication of how low you can pay, Google will give you an indication of how high you have to pay. It’s like O2 saying “iPhone on contracts around £50″ instead of saying “iPhone with contracts starting at £35″.

In theory, first page bid estimates are a sweet metric – whether you are on page two and want an indication of how much you are willing to bid, or whether you are in position one and want to go down without loosing first page visibility. But the execution is poor, and the combination of the first page estimate with the dynamic Quality Score calculation can really caused your account harm if you are not careful.

On these topics, there will always be two school of thoughts:

The sceptics will say: “Google doesn’t give us enough impressions to deem us relevant or not” and “Google says my ad is not on page 1 but it’s in position 2.6 – this is an outrage!”

The purists will say: “It’s great to have Google inform you that your position 4 is not deemed relevant… I need to create more ad groups!” and “My keywords aren’t inactive, they’re just irrelevant at this point in time”.

But, both parties will probably end up doing the same thing… (and so should you):

Go in and have a look at your [Exact Match Keywords]. If they don’t have a good CTR, check the other matches of the same keyword and examine whether you are going to have to increase your bids. Based on this, you will have to make a commercial decision

If most of your keywords have been marked as not reaching the first page, you need to create more ad groups and make your ads more relevant. However, you might also have to pay more as the rest of the advertisers around you are likely to increase their bids, thus artificially increasing CPCs.

More generally, PPC marketers now need on their tiptoes, and monitor performance very regularly as the market can now affect your performance more than ever!

]]> http://www.webdatasource.com/2008/09/googles-new-quality-score-improvements-analysed/feed/ 0 http://www.webdatasource.com/2008/08/how-to-do-negative-keyword-research-part-2/ http://www.webdatasource.com/2008/08/how-to-do-negative-keyword-research-part-2/#comments Tue, 05 Aug 2008 11:09:50 +0000 Eloi http://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/blog/?p=160 After having explained why negative keywords are so important to a campaign, and how to do negative keyword research, this post will review how to add and optimize your negative keywords to be as precise as possible with your targeting. There are more advanced things you can do with negatives, and some ways you can research them not only based on the keyword tools’ estimations (ie average search volumes) but through the clicks you actually get on your ads:

Researching negatives through reports

The search query report was recently voted the favorite report on the PPC blog PPC Hero. The main reason for this, is that it shows you exactly what was typed into Google to trigger your broad and phrase matched keywords, but this works both ways: If you see a keyword that isn’t relevant to your campaign in this search query report, then add it to your negatives. This is a great way to cut costs as well as filter out irrelevant traffic.

Now combine this with:

Using different match types for your negatives.

This is only currently available on Google, but watch out for MSN. It is unlikely Yahoo will roll out this feature due to their archaic keyword matching system.

Say you want your ad to appear when someone searches for anything related to cars. You add “car” to your campaign as a broad match keyword, and bid accordingly. But being a car manufacturer, you don’t want your ad to appear when someone types “car theft” – for branding reasons (although in my opinion, you should have an ad saying “the most secure car 4 years in a row” for adverse branding). Simply add “car theft” as an exact-match negative keyword to your campaign, and you will appear for “safe cars” but not for “car theft”.

]]> http://www.webdatasource.com/2008/08/how-to-do-negative-keyword-research-part-2/feed/ 0 http://www.webdatasource.com/2008/08/how-to-do-negative-keyword-research-part-1/ http://www.webdatasource.com/2008/08/how-to-do-negative-keyword-research-part-1/#comments Mon, 04 Aug 2008 13:49:18 +0000 Eloi http://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/blog/?p=159 Negative keywords can often be overlooked by search marketing managers eager to expand their keyword list and get as many searchers as possible to click their ads and follow through to their site. However, negative keywords can play one of the most important parts of your paid search marketing campaign by eliminating the traffic you deem not relevant, thus raising Click Through Rates (and therefore quality score), conversions and conversion rates.

For those unaware of negative keywords, these are elements in your PPC campaign that will ensure your ads are not triggered and displayed when this keyword is included in the searcher’s query: if I have the negative keyword “boat” in my “rentals” campaign, then my ads will not show when someone types “rent a boat” into a search engine.

The absence of negatives in your campaign may lead to a complete waste of your budget if you are not careful. It is also very important to include these keywords from day one to your campaign, and then add new negatives as and when you find them. The other thing to note here, is that the simpler your keywords are, the more you will need to use negatives: if you are bidding on “rental” for your car service, then you will need to exclude anything else in the world you think people might rent. (boats, planes, flat, power tools…)

So how do you research for negative keywords that should apply to your campaign?

When you use your favorite keyword tools to build up a keyword list of terms relevant to your campaign, there are usually more suggestions you reject than ones you accept. Well instead of simply dismissing these terms, put them aside, and factor them into a negative keyword list.

Once this is done, type in the most generic keywords of your campaign into the keyword tool (the shortest ones: usually one word, possibly two words). This will churn a long list of keywords in which you can select irrelevant keywords, put them aside in your master negative keyword list. You then need to go through your negative keyword list, and make sure you DON’T want to appear for any of these terms.

Now you have a decent list (10-20 terms can sometimes be all you need, but it can be anything really) you want to add these to your campaign. In AdWords, it’s never been easier: go into your campaign page, and there should be a link there to the campaign negative keywords. Copy + Paste your negative list into the box, hit enter, and your negatives are now active and refining your campaign objectives.