A Look into adCenter’s Quality Score Rankings

May 8, 2007

Quality score remains one of the more ambiguous ideas on the web. Google has become much more transparent with sharing information about AdWords quality score.

Microsoft adCenter has also announced it will use a quality score formula to determine placement. I’ve had some discussions with Microsoft digging into the full algo, however, here are some high level facts that will help you optimize for adCenter’s quality score.

How closely related the keyword is to the ad’s content (single factor)
How closely related the query is to the landing page (single factor)
How closely related the keyword is to both the ad and landing page (combined factor)
The serial chain of query to ad and then ad to landing page
Uniqueness of the ad to other ads on the page. adCenter tries not to show duplicate ads on the page (this is an interesting one).

Overall, it’s fairly similar to Google’s.

The concept is quite simple: If you are enhancing the search process, then ads rank well. If you aren’t, then ads rank lower.

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog, MSN PPC - adCenter | 1 Comment

The Psychology of Search

May 7, 2007

The search process is quite simple and very complex at the same time. I’m not talking about algorithms and results, but how people going to a search engine actually conduct a search process.

Understanding the psychology behind the search process makes us better advertisers and SEOs.

Let’s examine how people search in order to learn how to connect with them.

The first step is why people go to a search engine.

People don’t go to a search engine to browse the web. They go there because they have a question to be answered.

The question could be how to spell a word, where to buy a book, a nearby plumber’s phone number, or how to back up MySQL. The potential questions are limitless.
The basic reasoning is simple. You don’t know a piece of information, and you wish to find it.

What determines the search query?

Most people don’t think in words, most of us think in concepts and pictures. The way those items are translated into words are known as ‘keywords’ or the ’search query’.

While that sounds simple, this is very complex. Consider this scenario:

It’s February in Chicago and the temperature doesn’t break 10 degrees for two weeks. On Saturday evening, the frigid air causes the pipes in your basement to freeze, and then to burst, which floods your basement. You’d like a plumber to come out immediately to pump fix your pipes and get rid of the water in your basement.

This is a scenario which happens almost every year in Chicago. What are the ways someone could interpret those events to type them into a search engine? This is by no means a comprehensive list, it’s just a small sample set of possibilities:

plumber
Chicago plumber
weekend plumbing services
broken pipes
flooded basement
how do I get water out of my basement?
emergency plumbing services
60626 plumber
plumber website
plumber phone number
emergency pipe repair
frozen pipe help

The list can go on and on. Each one of us interprets events differently. We also describe the same scenario differently. However, each query is relevant, and each of the above keywords is how people look for answers.

The SERPs - Expectations

The next step is typing your query into a search engine. SERPs stands for ’search engine results pages’.

It is important to remember, as humans, every time we do an action, we have an expectation of what is to come.

In the current scenario, we would expect to see results about finding a plumber in Chicago who can come to our house on a Saturday evening to fix the basement.

If we see ads and websites that don’t connect with our current interpretation (the keyword query), searchers are less likely to click on them. The closer the ad (or website description) matches our query, the more likely searchers are to visit that website.

The SERPs - Connecting with Answers

The query is typed, the enter key is hit, and within seconds the searcher is presented with many possible answers.

At this point in time, there are five possible scenarios:

The searcher sees a possible answer and clicks on a result (ad or natural result)
The searcher doesn’t see anything that meets their expectations and refines their query
The search clicks on another result type (maps, images, etc) looking for an answer
The searcher decides to try the search on another engine
The searcher abandons the quest for answer

The marketers job is to connect with the searcher. The ad or result should be waving it’s hand and saying ‘I have your answer, come click on me’.

If one of the results on the page connects with the searcher, holds the promise of an answer, and meets the searchers expectation, a click generally occurs.

The Landing Page

You achieved the click, brought a new visitor to your website, now what? The battle for conversions is not over.

You must still meet the searchers expectation. Before the searcher clicked from the SERP to your website, they had an expectation of what information they would see on the landing page.

Does your landing page meet their expectation?
Does it contain the answer?
Does someone know what to do next?
Should the searcher hit the back button?

The page must meet the searchers expectation. It should be a continuation of the ad copy for the landing page to convert. Any forms should be simple. You aren’t trying to surprise the visitor, you are just simply answer their question and telling them the answer (i.e. the plumber’s phone number) , or how to achieve that answer (shopping cart).

The Search Process is Linear

We search because we’re seeking information.
We all interpret events differently, how an event is interpreted determines the search query.
When one does a search, we have an expectation of the search results possibilities.
An offer on the SERP page should connect with the searcher and hold the promise of an answer.
When one clicks on SERP result, they have an expectation of the website.
The website should direct the visitor to find the answer.

When all of the above are done in a fluid process - conversions happen. Searchers find information. Businesses make money. The process continues.

The concept of search is simple, I have a question and I’m looking for an answer.

The process of meeting people’s expectations is complex.

Understanding the Psychology of Search should put you on the road from simply ensuring your website is on a search result to driving conversions for your business.

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog, PPC Info | 5 Comments

Google mobile ads now support conversion tracking

May 5, 2007

Google recently changed their conversion tracking script so that it is now compatible with mobile ads.

Can I track mobile ad conversions?

Conversion tracking is available for both the PC- or mobile-version of your website.

Learn more about setting up conversion tracking for your mobile website.

Source: AdWords help files

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog, Google AdWords, Mobile | Leave a Comment

Everything You Need to Know about AdWords Preferred Cost Bidding

May 4, 2007

Preferred Cost Bidding allows you to set your bid prices to your average CPC and not your max CPC

You can enable this for both CPC and CPM (site-targeted) campaigns.

This is very useful in three different scenarios:

1. You know your value per keyword. If you have the data that says keyword 1 is worth $4.23, and keyword 2 is worth $3.56, then instead of ‘guessing’ what the max CPC should be, you can set your preferred cost at those actual prices.

2. You want more control over expenditures. When setting max CPC, your click cost can vary widely from day-to-day. With preferred bidding, you have much more control over how much you actually pay for keyword. This makes it so your average spend per keyword should be much more consistent.

3. You don’t want to spend all day reconfiguring bids. Since preferred bidding changes your max CPC behind the scenes to reach your actual bid price, there’s a lot less work in adjusting bids with preferred cost bidding.

How does it actually work?

With preferred cost bidding, you can set your preferred click cost at the keyword or ad group level. Behind the scenes, Google then adjusts what your max CPC should be so that your actual click cost comes out to be in your preferred cost bidding range. (More on quality score and ad rank)

So, the same ad rank formula (ad rank = quality score X max CPC) still applies, just Google is doing an addition algo behind the scenes to determine your max CPC.

Incompatibilities

Since Google needs control over your max CPC in preferred cost bidding, it’s not compatible with a couple of AdWords features:

Ad Scheduling advanced features. Preferred cost bidding works with the normal ad scheduling (which is essentially day parting or showing your ads at specific times of the day and days of the week). However, the advanced version of ad scheduling allows you to automatically change your max CPC at various times by a percentage. This advanced feature is not compatible with preferred cost bidding.

Position Preference. This feature allows you to control which range of positions you wish your ad to show. Since Google is changing the max CPC behind the scenes in position preference to determine your ad rank, this is incompatible with preferred cost bidding which is also trying to change your max CPC.

Will you overpay?

The first negative reactions I heard about this feature is that since you are setting a preferred cost, in times when you could pay less for the top positions, you could easily end up overpaying for ads (i.e. if your bid was $3, and it required you to pay $1 to be in the number one spot, the rumor was Google would charge you $3).

This isn’t true.

Google is still running the ad rank formula for all companies involved in the auction for a single keyword, and the ad discounter still applies as well. Essentially, the ad discounter calculates the values for all companies in the auction process and reduces your actual CPC to the lowest possible CPC you could pay to be in that ad position.

Enabling Preferred Cost Bidding

Preferred cost bidding is another bidding option. In the campaign settings, you’ll first want to ‘view and edit options’ under bidding.

Next, choose from one of the three bidding options:

Set max limits - default bidding
Set preferred bids - preferred cost bidding
Budget optimizer - maximize traffic

Finally, choose how to change your current max CPCs to your preferred cost bids.

Preferred Cost Bidding can be very useful for controlling your ad spend, or for those who really understand the best bid by keyword or ad group.

I’ve been playing with it in a few accounts (it’s still in beta), and have been quite happy with the results so far.

It won’t be for everyone (the advanced ad scheduling being the one incompatibility I hope they fix), however, if you want more control over what you pay per click instead of what you bid per click, then it’s worth taking preferred cost bidding for a spin.

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog, Creating PPC Accounts, Google AdWords | 7 Comments

IP Blocking Coming to AdWords

April 30, 2007

Blocking specific IP addresses has been a common request for advertisers. It’s mostly requested by companies who know their competitors IP addresses and wish to block those competitors from ever seeing those ads.

For more sophisticated advertisers, it can be used to block IP addresses that send a lot of traffic but don’t convert.

This isn’t as useful as Yahoo’s continent blocking option, where one can decide not to show ads on particular continents, however, it’s a step in the right direction.

We are also going to be releasing the ability to prevent ads from showing to specified IP addresses (see #4) in the next month.

Source: Shumans.com. It’s also a good read on where Google stands on the Click Quality Council requests.

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog, Google AdWords | 3 Comments

adCenter announces Upgrade

April 25, 2007

Weâ€™re now taking the next step forward. On Thursday, April 26, 2007, the current adCenter site will be upgraded with these new features, including:

Improved navigation. Easily go to any campaign or ad group in your account via our navigation enhancements.

Bulk edit keyword settings. Quickly make updates to negative keywords, dynamic text and destination URLs for all of your keywords.

Enhanced campaign imports. Import new campaigns or make updates to existing campaigns with our new, robust, import feature.

Microsoft Excel download option. You can now download all of the adCenter data sets in an Excel format.

Full text search. From any page, find campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and ads that contain all or part of a search query string by using our new full text search feature.

And more! Watch our webinar to learn more about how to make the most of these new features.

Source: adCenter blog

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog, MSN PPC - adCenter | Leave a Comment

If you’re showing contextual ads on your site - Do Not Block these Bots

April 23, 2007

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have bots that belong to their contextual ad programs.

These bots spider web pages to understand what the page is about so they can match appropriate advertising.

If any publishers are blocking these bots they will keep themselves from having the proper (or in some cases, any) ads show on their website.

Block these bots (if you’re showing contextual ads on your site) and you will lose money.

The useragents not to block:

Mediapartners-Google
MSNPTC
YahooYSMcm

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Contextual Advertising | Leave a Comment

Ad Copy that Increases Conversion or Click Through Rate

April 17, 2007

Words that increase CTR:

Action words

Find
Search

Solving words

Cure
Help

Words that increase conversion rate:

Call to action

Learn more
Subscribe today

Words that do both:

Credibility words:

Guaranteed
Authorized reseller

What do you want from your 95 character ads?

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog, Creating PPC Accounts | 3 Comments

How to Lower Your AdWords Minimum Bid

April 16, 2007

Minimum bids are tricky. Understanding what you should focus on, and the odds of it actually helping is a matter of debate.

I have a chart that lists the odds of being able to increase your minimum bid, and the most likely candidate to use as a benchmark for improving minimum bids.

First it should be said, this is my opinion. This is not approved, reviewed, or official advice from Google.

Before we dive into any numbers, it’s important to remember what determines the minimum bid for AdWords.

Factors that affect minimum bids are:

Click through rate on Google.com
- Overall history
- Most recent history
Ad copy
Landing page
Account quality score
Other relevancy factors (very low weight)

Let’s examine each factor not as it applies to setting the minimum bid, but more how it applies to an action plan for lowering your minimum bid.

Click through rate on Google.com

First, this is normalized by position. Therefore, its expected that position 5 will have a lower CTR than position 1. (article and link about predicted CTRs coming soon)

Secondly, this is only Google.com CTR. Ignore search partners and the content network.

If you are in the ‘premium area (which was blue, and is now yellow)’ - your CTR is good, and this is not an area to focus on.

If you think your CTR is low, then you’re going to want to raise it. This starts with Ad Group organization, which is discussed next.

Ad Copy Relevancy

Your ad copy should describe every keyword in your ad group. Every keyword in your ad group should be closely related.

Therefore, if your keywords are closely related, and the ad copy describes each keyword, these two items have an effect on each other.

This means that ad group organization is a very key factor in determining relevancy.

How closely does your ad copy reflect your keywords? Ad Group organization is key to starting this process. Your ad copy should describe each keyword in the ad group. Each search has a different user intent, therefore, your ad copy needs to take a userâ€™s intent for that keyword as it relates to your website in mind.

Does your ad contain the keyword? Of course, each ad can not contain every single keyword. Google understands themes, stemming, and latent semantic indexing. If your ad does not contain the keyword (the closest match), does the ad copy contain the overall theme of the keyword? (Again, please read the ad group organization article as themes can be quite granular).

Note: the use of dynamic insertion does not mean your ad copy contains the keyword.

Quick Tip: If you split test ads, you can run an ad copy report that lists the CPC by individual ad. This may give you insight into how the ads are affecting your quality score.

Source: AdWords Quality Score Factors

If you go through the exercise of reorganizing your Ad Groups (I’d recommend using the AdWords Editor), and then examining your ad copy, the issues should start to become obvious.

Remember, the searcher inputted a keyword to find information about that keyword. Triggering mortgage ads from real estate keywords is NOT going to be considered relevant.

Landing Page Relevancy

In the majority of cases where the minimum bid is over $1, it is landing page related. If you’re gone through the ad group organization exercise and have a well organized account with good ads, then the odds that the landing page is the culprit in high minimum bids comes close to approaching 100%.

It’s easiest to think about landing page relevancy in regards to the search process. A user has a question to be answered, that’s why a search was done in the first place. A relevant ad shows on the search result page that attracts the users attention and holds the promise of an answer. So, the user clicks on the ad and sees your landing page.

Does your landing page take these factors into consideration?

Does your page collect personal information?
- If so, does it have an SSL certificate and a privacy policy?
Do you have an â€˜about usâ€™ page?
Do you have a â€˜contact usâ€™ page?
Do you have relevant information to the search query?
Do you have unique information?
Do you have related content to the search query?
Is the page flash?
Can the page be spidered?

Related: Landing page case study.

Once the user has a seamless experience from keyword to ad copy to landing page, then you should start to see much lower minimum bids.

But what about brand new keywords?

Account Quality Score

Account quality score is used for very little. One of it’s main purposes is to suggest a minimum bid when Google has very little history for that keyword. This is very important if you deal with new products, medical terms, and jargon for which there is little past search history.

Google can’t predict CTR if it doesn’t have enough data. Therefore, Google relies on your account quality score as a ‘forgiveness or trust’ factor in how much they let you play with keywords that they might not understand are keywords or how they will behave.

If you have high minimum bids on new keywords, and those keywords don’t have a lot of search volume, then your account quality score is where you should focus your energy.

Other Relevancy Factors

This is a very ambiguous part of the quality score formula. When a search is done, there are many factors such as ip vs national targeting, local vs national query, commercial vs non-commercial intent, past search CTR for that keyword, past search CTR for a logged in user, and the list goes on and on.

Since minimum bid is calculated as a standard, and isn’t adjusted per keyword search, the other relevancy factors are incredibly low, and aren’t worth your time examining in regards to minimum bids.

Where is this chart?

Now that the chart has been somewhat qualified, it’s almost time to reveal it.

The odds able to lower should help you manage your time more appropriately.

The ‘most likely major problem’ is classified as major because it could be that you have both ad group organization and landing page issues.

Minimum Bid	Odds able to lower	Most Likely Major Problem
		AdGroup Organization	Landing Page
$0.01 - $0.05	Approaching 0%
$0.05 - $0.10	If perfectionist, less than 25%. If not perfectionist, less than 10%.	90%	10%
$0.10 - $0.25	25-50%	75%	25%
$0.25 - $0.50	50% - 75%	50%	50%
$0.50 - $1.00	75% - 100%	25%	75%
$1.00 +	100%	1%	99%

I’m also a little lazy. It’s much easier to play with ad group organization and re-writing ads than it is to redesign landing pages. Hence, I always suggest with at least an audit or your themes and how they are broken down into ad group keywords and ad copy before touching the landing page.

Hope this helps direct your energy in the proper places for lowering your minimum bid.

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog, Google AdWords, PPC Info | 13 Comments

Google AdSense Ads now Compatible with Radio Station Systems

April 16, 2007

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., April 16, 2007 - Google Inc. today announced that Google AdSenseâ„¢ for Audio is now supported by the leading radio station systems. Providers announced separately today include Broadcast Electronics (BE), ENCO Systems and LAN International’s VIERO.”

With AdSense for Audio, we’re committed to bringing new advertisers and new dollars to radio,” said Jim Woods, Director of Product Management, Google. “Support from premier partners like BE, ENCO and VIERO is a major step towards allowing all radio stations to gain access to this new and complementary revenue channel.”

From Google Press Release.

Google is still offering $400 discounts on audio ads as well.

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog, Google AdWords | 1 Comment

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