Google Adwords Improves on Quality Score

Written by Pablo Palatnik on August 23, 2008

In the coming days or weeks, you’ll see some changes in your adwords account as Google has announced changes in their quality score algorithm. Quality score though probably one of the most transparent (and not really) guidelines Google gives to advertisers, as some out with further improvements.

• 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 most siginifacnt change as explained by the Google Adwords blog is the following:
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What Does The Yahoo & Google Partnership Mean for PPC Advertisers?

Written by Pablo Palatnik on June 13, 2008

As most of you online marketers have probably heard already, Microsoft and Yahoo have stopped all talks for good and Yahoo may partner with Google to outsource their paid search. Yahoo has been struggling with paid search for years trying to compete with Google, and now eventually they are giving in paid search.

Personally, I’m not sure if this will be a good thing or bad and whether it will be a good thing or bad thing. I was thinking about how this could affect my campaigns considering I’ve had some very good success with Yahoo that I haven’t had with Google because of quality score issues for the most part. Yahoo has been good to me for the simple reasons that it was very different than Google in its paid search platform.

Don’t get me wrong, Google has proven great for me as well but it actually has kept me from launching some campaigns because of quality score issues where Yahoo has been less restrictive in that respect.

An example is an eBook campaign I have run. When I first launched it months ago, Google proved to give me results in terms of good quality score but no real conversions. Yahoo has always converted with lower cost-per-clicks. I spoke to a Google Adwords rep and she told me because of user experience, ebook sites are ranked with poor quality scores and bids start from $5.00. You may get away with a good or OK quality score, but I’m talking in general.

I’m not exactly sure how the partnership will be handled in terms of Yahoo panama disappearing or Yahoo just using Google for content paid search which Yahoo has lacked for…well, since always.

We’ll see how this affects us search marketers in the coming weeks.

From the Financial Point of View:

Is TV Marketing More Effective Than Search Engine Marketing?

Written by Pablo Palatnik on June 3, 2008

It was about 2:15am this morning when I was up watching Countdown with Keith Olberman on MSNBC. A commercial came on which was about scanning and repairing your PC for spyware, registry errors, and more. I found it rather interesting since I think it’s a great product because we all have problems with our PCs. It’s a site called FinallyFast.com and it is free.

Anyhow, it got me interested to see why this site, out of all sites that do this, decided to market on TV. I started looking around in Google a few minutes ago and typed in keywords such as “repair pc scan”, “scan pc for problems”, “remove spyware”, “check pc for problems”, and so fourth. I couldn’t find an ad for FinallyFast.com but I’m sure they do have search engine marketing, just probably not a very effective campaign (I’ve only used Google to search for ads)

I went to compete.com to see what the traffic stats were for FF and its main competitors online. I choose two companies I saw most in Google and of course, Finally Fast, here are the results:

FinallyFast.com is growing in traffic and could most likely be from its TV ad, but look at PCTools and the other site.

PCTools.com bids on 2,132 keywords
PCDocPro.com bids on 181 keywords
FinallyFast.com bids on 78 keywords

I couldn’t find FinallyFast.com almost anywhere on paid search so it could be a mistake that those are the numbers of keywords those companies are bidding on, they could also be from organic search.

My point from this post is if you’re an online company providing an online service, I think the most effective strategy before going on TV is to make sure you have your online marketing well in place to really compete against the competition. Could have been a very smart move to make a TV commercial where no competitors are in that space, I’m not saying its not. I just think you have to look at what will be more effective and wondering what kind of research the company did before deciding to go the TV route.

Worry About Ads Before Conversions

Written by Pablo Palatnik on May 8, 2008

One thing people are quick to base their success with search engine marketing as they first launch a campaign is conversion rates. Sure, conversion rates is probably the most important aspect of your campaign but the way to make sure you get good conversion rates meeting a good ROI is making sure you pay as little as possible for that click.

If you read the post below, #1 Quality Score Factor in Google: Quality Ad, you will see that the campaign I’m working on started decent…actually…pretty good CTR’s but my quality score was still not what it could be with those numbers. Within 24 hours of that post, here is what happened (image shows pertaining to one particular ad group):

I was never TOO concerned about my conversion rate cost at first, but rather making sure to have a good CTR so Google would allow me to pay as little as possible for a click with good ranking. I am now seeing the reward and making tweaks to pay as low as I possibly can per conversion. Again, it does all come down to ROI (Return on Investment), but make sure you are willing to go through the motions to get there.

**For further information on Quality Score, you can read a post I did for the Search Engine Journal, Ads in a Quality Score World.