Quality Score Putting the “M†Back in Search Engine Marketing.
Written by Pablo Palatnik on April 23, 2007
Since the implement of the quality score, almost every search engine marketer has changed their strategy to comply and optimize their campaign to beat the quality score. QSO (Quality Score Optimization) has become just as important as SEO and funny enough, you have to be just as relevant as the organic search but now it really is paying for position, wasn’t really the case before.
There is really two ways to play this game. Either pay more for your click than your competitors (even not being the most relevant but bidding the highest will get you up there) or optimize your campaign and strategize to have your keywords quality score “friendlyâ€.
One major factor to understand: It’s not how relevant YOU think your page is to your keywords, it’s how relevant GOOGLE (or other engines you are marketing) think your landing page is to your selected keywords.
To make this simple to understand, the engines (specially Google) are concerned with one thing (always have), relevancy to the user. ITS ALL ABOUT RELEVANCY. Of course, there are a lot more factors than one thinks to comply with the quality score rules Google has implemented. It’s more than just a good CTR and Bid, but those two together can boost your rankings as good links can boost organic rankings. Although those two are KEY to a successful PPC campaign, other factors do apply.
SES New York had a session called, “Ads In A Quality Score Worldâ€. No matter how much you read, you’ll never understand until you launch your campaign and results always vary.
According to Kate Zimmerman, who reported on this session, states, “Though Fox from Google claimed that “quality score is no longer a ‘black box’,” it’s evident that there’s still a lot of apprehension and confusion surrounding it. Many of the panelists’ statements seemed to contradict each other - Google encouraged ad testing, though Stylman pointed to evidence that testing has challenged some of Reprise Media campaigns. Microsoft praised increasing transparency, while Google claimed that their ‘opaque’ algorithm gives rise to industry expertise.â€
SEOBook’s Aaron Wall points these factors out which Google looks for:
• if your AdWords ads redirect
• your account history (are you a large reliable spender that has been spending for years? are you new to a saturated market? do you have a spotty past checkered with 20,000 unrelated keyword uploads? do your ads get a strong CTR?)
• history of competitors with similar keyword selections
• if your landing page links to known affiliate hubs
• if your landing page has redirect on outbound links
• if your landing page has many links to other sites or pages that are also advertising on the same or similar keywords
• if your page has duplicate or limited content (or conversely if it has a huge number of links to external sites on it)
• time on site
• rate which people click the back button after landing on your site
• outbound ad CTR on your landing page (especially easy if you are arbitraging AdWords to AdSense)
• conversion rate if you use Google Checkout, Google Analytics, or the AdWords conversion tracker
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