Ever heard of the alpha male?

It’s a term used to describe the dominant male among  animals that live in groups. Usually the alpha male has special privileges like eating first, drinking first, being the first to mate or even the ONLY  one to mate.

Wikipedia refers the alpha male as being the animal with the highest  RANK.

What does this have to do with AdWords?

Well, remember how Google ranks ads on search results… Using a mesure called Ad Rank.

Ads with high Ad Rank take high positions while ads with lower Ad rank sink at the bottom.

But that’s just half the story and like social animals, Alpha Advertisers (advertisers with ads of high Ad Rank) get benefits that their competitors don’t. If you can increase your Ad Rank, Google will be generous in terms of traffic, position and cost.

Ad Rank Formula

The formula is very simple…

Ad Rank = MaxCPC  x Quality Score

… and very important to understand.

Anytime you change your bid (maxCPC), Ad Rank goes up or down. Every time your Quality Score (QS) changes, Ad Rank goes up or down.  Every time Ad Rank goes up or down, your ads get preferential treatment… or not.

Where To Find Your Ad Rank

Well, you can’t find it. We know that Ad Rank exists but there’s no place in adwords where you can see exactly what ad rank each of your ad is receiving. However, it is possible for you to find out exactly what you’re missing out with a low Ad Rank using the Impression Share metric.

Impression Share is the percentage of the times your ads where shown out of the times they were eligible to be shown.  By customizing the columns in your Adwords account, at the campaign level, you can see how much impression share your ads have lost due to a lower Ad Rank. That’s one way to tell if you have great Ad Rank or not.

How To Get Higher Ad Rank And Dominate The Jungle

In order to have high Ad Rank, you need the ability to bid high and get high Quality Scores. It’s important to have both and it can be a challenge to obtain them. Although you can work your way up with high QS, it will be much easier and more profitable if you can afford bidding high as well.  Let’s get into more details…

Jungle Rule 1: Earn The Ability To Bid Higher

It’s all about your conversion rate. Every time you increase your conversion rate, you increase your ability to bid high. In fact, you should figure out the bid that yields maximum profitability for your business (yes, there is one) with every conversion rate you achieve.

How to have better conversion rates?

The offer. The copy. The design.

Those are my personal ingredients to high conversions…  in that order.

The offer is by far the most important component and it impacts everything else you do. To have the best offer, you need to know what your potential customers actually want. This is important and most people assume they know and fail to take the extra effort to “really” find out. If you’re interested in having a method to discovering what customers want, I always recommend The Perfection Of Marketing by James Connor, a book that I think every business owner/marketer should own.

Once you know what your prospects want, you need to know how to convey it with powerful copywriting. Spend time crafting a message that resonates  with your target market  in simple words.

Then comes the design. Crappy won’t do it (most of the times). Though some great copy writers can pull it off with crappy web design, you should leverage every tool at your disposal. A clear, clean and simple design wins. And by the way, simple and clear is usually better than beautiful.

Jungle Rule 2: Get The Highest Quality Scores

Ah, that little number we love to hate loving over at Tenscores.com. Are you still wondering how to increase Quality Score? Can’t blame you. There seem to be a conspiracy around the web to put people on the wrong track at every turn.

I wonder who started it…

Here’s the ONLY  thing you need to know about QS and it’s not complicated:

If you have low QS… unless the diagnostic bubble tells you otherwise, Quality Score  EQUALS click-through rates. Nothing else.

Let me explain.

The diagnostic bubble is that little place besides keywords that give you some indication about why you have low scores. Take a look at the screenshot on the lower right.

The “keyword relevance” part is key. What they really mean is keyword click-through-rate (CTR). So, unless that bubble tells you of landing page problems or load time problems, all you have to focus on is CTR. That’s it. The tricky part is, the CTR is not necessarily yours, it is sometimes other advertiser’s CTR. But even that is no big deal if you focus on increasing your own CTRs continuously (without sacrificing conversion rates of course).

So unless things change, as of today, November 2011, there’s no such thing as semantic relevance in calculations of quality score. And if there is any at all, it is small enough to simply dismiss it. Since the day I stopped worrying whether my landing page was relelvant or wether my ad had keywords in it and simply sharpened my ad-writing skills for higher CTRs, quality score has become the least of my challenges. All that Google cares about in regards to QS is CTR. Thanks to Craig Danuloff for confirming this in his book on quality: Quality Score  In High Resolution.  Anyone who wishes to disagree should read that book in its entirety first.

So please, will you give more attention to your Adwords ads CTR?! I beg you, for the sake of your business.

And here’s where the circle is closed: the best  way to get higher CTR is to figure out what searchers want and give it to them. Just like increasing conversions.

Once you can afford bidding high because your conversion rates and profit margins are so good and you understand quality score well enough to increase it, the snow ball starts to roll, your ads get more exposure, you get more traffic to your website, your costs are reduced and you become an Alpha Advertiser.

Don’t wait any longer… rule your jungle!

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Certified Knowledge. If you would like to write for Certified Knowledge, please let us know.

Updated: Doh! It’s on Tuesday, 9/13/11

Next Wednesday, 9/14/11, I will be conducting a free webinar on the top 11 AdWords Mistakes as part of my Market Motive PPC class.

What I find top mistakes lists are useful for are learning what you don’t know so that you can focus on the areas where you can improve your PPC campaigns.

I often talk to advanced marketers who are unaware of modified broad match or aren’t using the display network properly. The webinar will be geared to all experience levels.

This workshop will cover the top 11 mistakes in about half an hour; and then we’ll leave plenty of time open for Q&A afterwards.

You can register for the webinar here.

I hope to see you there.

Every PPC account wants to know how to increase their exposure, especially if they feel there aren’t new keywords they wish to add.

There is a simple way to determine how to increase an account’s exposure that can be accomplished in less than a minute.

Generally, when looking to increase your exposure you need to know why your exposure is being limited. There are three common reasons why your ads are not being displayed:

• Budget
• Quality score
• Bid prices

In this article, we will look at how to determine what is limiting your exposure, and show how you can do this analysis in less than one minute.  In this analysis, we will assume you have expanded your keywords a few times and that you do not wish to add new keywords.

Impression Share Report

Start by running an impression share report. This is a report that can be run at the campaign level and shows you why you’re ads are not being displayed. If you need help running reports or finding all the features, please see this video that walks you through creating reports.

You will now have a view of why your account is not being displayed, through either budget or rank.

Budget Loss

In this first case (above image), the biggest reason that impressions are being lost is because of the budget.

When you lose impressions due to budget, then raising your budget can help get you more clicks that should have the same quality as your current clicks. When you see that you’re losing clicks due to budget you should be careful. If you cannot raise the budget, then you are probably overpaying for each click.

For example,, if your budget is $100 per day and you are paying $1 per click, then you usually receive 100 clicks per day. If you could lower your CPC to $0.80 and still spend all of your budget then you should get 125 clicks. That’s a nice increase in traffic without doing too much work.

Eventually, lowering your CPCs will put your ad in too low of a position to get enough clicks to fulfill the budget. When that happens, then you need to find other avenues to receive more traffic.

Rank Loss

The other main reason you lose impressions is due to rank. When you lose an impression due to rank, it means that your ad rank was not high enough to be displayed on a page.

 

Ad rank is comprised of both quality score and bid. Therefore, when you see impressions are lost due to rank, you need to examine the quality scores. There is a simple way to view the quality scores across the account:

• Run a report that contains spend, quality score, keywords, etc
• Download the report to a spreadsheet program
• Create a pivot table that keys off quality score numbers
  • If you need help with pivot tables, please see Josh Dreller’s excellent column on pivot tables.

 

 

I added the “percent of keywords by QS” column myself by just dividing the number of keywords in each QS range by the total number of search keywords in the account.

In this case, the vast majority of the keywords are a 5 or lower quality score. Therefore, many of these keywords are not being displayed due to low quality score or low ad rank that is caused due to low quality scores.

You can now be confident that this account needs to increase its quality score to be able to efficiently increase its exposure.

There will be times when most of your keywords have excellent quality scores:

In this case, there is some quality score work that can be done but as the majority of their keywords are a quality score 7 or higher; the main reason the account is lowing impressions is due to bids.

You can now be confident that this account needs to increase its bids to be able to efficiently increase its exposure.

There are many reasons your average position can be less than 3 and you still lose impressions due to ad rank. The two most common are:

• No ads were shown on the page
• Only a limited number of ads were displayed on the page, and you were below that

Usually when your impression share is above 90% – 95%, you are in great shape and you need to find new keywords before you can drive more traffic.

Conclusion

When you want to see account data at a very high level, the impression share report is a fantastic starting place.

It is common for accounts to see increases and decreases in overall traffic due to the natural changes in search patterns. Therefore, looking at overall traffic can sometimes give you an inaccurate picture of your search share. As the impression share report is a relative number, and not absolute, it is a good place to examine your account for changes to trends in your search share.

When examining how to increase your exposure, it comes down to: budget, bids, and/or quality score. What is your weak link? To increase your overall exposure, one (or more) of these items needs to grow larger.

This simple one minute analysis can quickly give you a starting place to determine where you should focus your time.

I created the diagram below about a year ago. I use it every time I have writer’s block and completely out of ad writing ideas or when I need to brainstorm new ad texts quickly. It comes in very handy especially with content network ads since I can test as many of them as I want at the same time without fearing any repercussions on my quality scores.

Using it is quite straight forward. When you have figured out the main benefit that resonates with your customers, you navigate through the diagram brainstorming new ways to express the same idea – supplying you with an almost endless repository of test ads.

An example would be most suitable to help you fully understand how it works. Let’s say I had a business that sold a tool to help Adwords advertisers lower their adwords costs, here’s how I’d use the diagram to brainstorm new adwords ads to test…

I. Two Different Ways To Express The Same Benefit

We are always trying to go towards something or away from something. Every benefit you find can be written in the form of going towards a solution (gain) or going away from a situation (pain). Tenscores.com, for example, sells the benefit of lower Adwords costs. That can be thought of as getting lower costs or going away from high advertising costs. And here’s how that would translate in 2 different ads:

Notice how each variation can be said differently with synonyms. For instance lower costs can be called cheaper traffic and too expensive can be replaced by too pricey (or anything similar) thus creating new ad variations to test. Some words are far more powerful than others, up to you to find them through testing. But we’re just scratching the surface.

II. Compounding It With 7+ Different Ad Themes

Once you’ve decided in which direction you want to phrase your ad (going towards a gain vs going away from a pain), you can put a twist on them by putting the spotlight on what you offer instead of what the searcher gets.

In doing so you can then choose where to fall among 5 ad themes that have proven to be effective:

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As you can see, these themes can also (actually they should) be mixed together to create multiple variations of ads to test and always keep improving performance.

Talking about curiosity, here’s one you may have seen everywhere on the web, I didn’t come up with it but I have used variations of it and it works impressively well in the weight loss niche.

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Of course, the themes suggest that you have a landing page that offers what you’re promising. I personally often test different themes even before creating a specific landing page for it. It allows me to find the message that resonates most with searchers and I use that information later on to create better landing pages. It saves me a lot of time.

Do you have other themes that can be added to the list? Let me know in the comments.

In case you were wondering, I do own a business that sells a tool that does help Adwords advertisers lower their costs and it does bear the name of Tenscores.com. We open the beta platform to the public about once a week, sign up here to be notified next time registrations are open or get the login details to our demo account here.

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Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Certified Knowledge. If you would like to write for Certified Knowledge, please let us know.

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If I ask you what you need to do in order to increase your ads’ click-through-rates (CTR) for higher quality scores, your immediate answer might be: write a better ad.

And you’d be right.

But it’s not the only way and too often advertisers rely on ad spit-testing when trying to achieve a higher CTR.

If you’ve read a little about quality score (QS), you know that the biggest factor that influences it is CTR. When we plan about increasing CTR, new ads in more focused ad groups come to mind, sometimes we even remember to include and keep expanding a good list of negative keywords (although we know that that has no direct impact on QS).

What we often forget is that ads have varying performances depending on the hour of the day or the geographical region in which they are displayed. Two things that Google takes into account when calculating quality score but are rarely talked about.

If you’ve hit a brick wall and can’t improve your CTR no matter how hard you try, these are the 2 targeting settings that might get you the results you want.

Day-Part Targeting

You may be getting lots of impressions at 2 in the morning but very little clicks and conversions without even knowing it. If that’s the case, it would be very beneficial to prevent your ads from showing at those times of the day.

To find out how your ads are performing by the hour of the day:

1. Choose a campaign in your adwords account.
2. Click on  the “dimensions” tab (or make the dimensions tab viewable in the sub menu).
3. Click the “view” sub-menu and select “hour of day”.

You should now be able to see at what times of the day your ad group is under performing.

The next thing to do is to exclude your ads from showing at those times  by changing your campaigns settings: Advanced Settings > Ad Scheduling. Make sure your data has reached statistical significance.

When you do that, the average CTR recorded for your keywords will start to increase and your quality scores will slowly rise.

Geo-Targeting

If you’re like most advertisers, your adwords campaigns are probably set to show on the whole territory of your chosen country right now (or even many countries at once). If you run a geographic report in adwords, you will find that your ads perform better in some specific regions than others.

You need to find the regions where your ads perform really poorly and exclude your ads from showing there.

To find out how your ads are performing by specific regions in the country you’re targeting:

1. Choose a campaign or an ad group in your adwords account.
2. Go to the “dimensions” tab once again.
3. Click on the “view” sub-menu and select “Geographic”.

Now you can see the specific regions where you might be receiving lots of impressions but low clicks and conversions compared to others.

Exclude those areas in your campaigns settings: Under Locations and Languages>Locations click edit.

A window will pop up, look for the Exclude areas within selected locations link at the bottom of that window and exclude the areas that are poorly performing for you.

If you don’t want to completely exclude those areas, you might consider creating a separate campaign for them.

When you do that, your average CTR will also slowly rise since it won’t be affected by low performing locations and it will result in better scores.

Those are two quick but very rewarding actions that you can take right now to achieve higher CTR’s and better scores.

In case you’re wondering how effective these two little techniques can be, here’s what Brad confided to me in email conversation (don’t tell him that I told you):

“I can’t agree more with your two points – I do it all the time – in fact I have an account that just by changing the geo settings and splitting up the ads by their geo CTRs, the accounts CTR almost doubled.” ~ Brad Geddes

If you want to track how these actions affect your keyword’s quality scores and your first page minimum bids, I’d like to invite to you to try our Quality Score tracking tool… sign up here and I’ll send you a quick email the next time we open doors.

Warning

• Before excluding your ads from showing at a certain time of day, make sure you have enough data to make the right decision. Use splittester.com to see if your data has reached statistical significance.
• DO NOT use CTR as your only measure of performance. Google uses CTR to increase or lower your scores and as a result, increase or lower your CPCs… however, it is not a measure of your profitability. Learn about Profit Per Impression and use it as the final verdict.

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Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Certified Knowledge. If you would like to write for Certified Knowledge, please let us know.

I’ve known Shelley for several years and she’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met when it comes to Display Advertising. In fact, she’s earned the name Display Advertising Evangelist due to her dedication to the space.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Shelley for Marketing Nirvana. The episode will air June 6th at noon EST (9am PST). You can hear it live at WebmasterRadio.fm.

While we covered a range of display network topics; we mostly focused on topic targeting.

Topic targeting allows you to serve ads based upon a topic – no keywords or placements are required. Choosing just a topic can bring in more inventory that most companies can handle (and convert). This feature only works across the Google display network.

While most people won’t want to use topic targeting all by itself; it can be a fantastic restrictive marketing technique when used in conjunction with placements, remarketing, or even keywords.

In fact, I so much enjoyed the topic with Shelley that I also wrote my most recent Search Engine Land article on 3 Ways Topic Targeting Can Improve Your Display Advertising.

If you can’t catch the show live, you can always subscribe via iTunes.

Please note, if you’re a premium member, you can watch the Topic Targeting Video Lesson and receive more insights on topic targeting.

If you’d like to learn more about Shelley, you can see her blog or content network insider training site.

From 10 to 8, it’s in fabulous health…

At 7, it is still in great shape…

6, 5, 4 are signs that it’s getting weak…

At 3 or 2 it is seriously sick…

At a 1/10 quality score, your keyword is dead.

A craftsman uses his hands to do the labour and without them he cannot make a living. He trains them, makes them stronger and hones his skill… but if he ever gets a heart attack those hands are useless.

The same is true in Adwords.

Your landing pages and products make you money, you can tweak things here and there, optimize continuously but if your quality scores drop low enough… all advertising become meaningless. You’ve just had a  heart attack.

Quality score is the heart beat of every Adwords account. It defines how much  search share a keyword’s ad receives and how expensive or cheap the advertiser pays for it. Although it is not the metric that makes you money, it is the one that will stop anything from happening if it goes down low enough.

How Low Quality Score Kills Your Advertising

Unprofitable Advertising Costs

The differences in costs between one score level to the other can double, triple, quadruple and even be ten times higher at the lower end of the scale.

Here’s a graph that shows the average first page minimum bid for keywords at each quality score in one of our adwords accounts:

Notice how first page bids double from 7 to 6, then from 5 to 4 and how they quadruple from 3 to 2.

Surprising? Not really.

If you’re a math geek too, you surely have already reverse engineered the formula for first page minimum bid and you know that it is minBid = minAdRank / QS which is a simple rational function thus the shape of the resulting curve.

And… the only purpose of that last sentence was to make me sound clever 

Forgive me.

Here’s the graph that says it all better than any mathematical gibberish. It shows the average cost-per-click (CPC) at each quality score for the account:

Notice how the price doubles from a 10/10 quality score to a 7/10. And 7 is considered to be a great score to have. Notice the sudden bump between 5 to 4.

Could that mean the difference between profit and loss? Absolutely.

Now imagine two advertisers in this same market advertising on the same keyword. One has a 10/10 and the other has 4/10. The chart above tells us that the advertiser with a 4 could be paying 10 times more that his competitor.

Now imagine that the advertiser with a 4/10 is… well, you. Yes, right now you might be paying 10 times more than you should on those keywords you’ve neglected to optimize.

Little To No Traffic To Your Website

You can set up ads in 5 minutes and reach 1 million users with Adwords, right?!

Well, it’s not that easy… and quality score will shatter your dreams of traffic orgies in an instant.

Let’s talk about Impression Share (IS).

Impressions Share is the percent of traffic that Google is willing to send you for a given campaign versus the amount of traffic that is actually available for that campaign. (You can view the impression share of all your campaigns by customizing the columns in your adwords account at the campaign level)

Impression share depends on two things: Ad Rank and Budget.

If you have a big budget to spend, obviously Google won’t really stop you from throwing money at them and if you want more Impression Share, just pay more.

Increasing your Ad Rank, however, is the smarter way to go. Ad Rank – a (secret) number Google uses to rank ads in sponsored search results – influences Impression Share and itself is greatly influenced by quality score. It’s formula is AdRank = MaxCPC x QS.

The higher your quality scores, the higher your Ad Rank, and the more impressions Google  is willing to send your way. The lower your quality scores, the lower your Ad Rank, the less generous Google is with traffic.

Every time your keywords’ scores drop, traffic is chocked, the pipeline gets thinner until ultimately the flow is completely clogged.

I don’t know about you, but I hate paying more than I should and I despise getting less than I deserve. And that’s why I don’t ever settle for low scores — ever.

How To Increase Low Quality Scores

It all boils down to relevance.

Yes, we all know that click-through-rate (CTR) is the main factor that influences quality score. But what is behind a great CTR? It is having the most relevant ad shown to Mr Searcher. CTR is Google’s best measure of relevance. The importance of understanding relevance beyond what Google tells you is really crucial. The relevance I’m referring to has NOTHING to do with having the same keyword appear in the ad, the ad group or the landing page.

It is about having a deep understanding of who the searcher behind the keyword is. Understanding what led him to typing those words in Google. Understanding his emotions, his frustrations and the short or long series of events that caused him to turn to a search engine for a solution.

It’s about understanding what relevance means to him, NOT what it means to you.

Only when you have that kind of understanding can you write an ad that instantly resonates with him and lift your click-through-rates.

I’ll give you an example.

Once upon a time, in a distant land, an affiliate marketer decided to try the dating niche. One of the products he wanted to sell was a book about how to be better in bed – more specifically, the book claimed to have “500 Love Making Secrets”.

After trying out a few ads, he found one that worked pretty well in terms of click-through-rates, it said:

The last recorded click ratio was 2.04%, the average cost-per-click was $0.21. Not too bad, wasn’t it? The quality score was 7/10 and it stayed at 7 for a very long time.

But profits weren’t that good.

He had no control over the website he was sending traffic to so landing page split-testing for better conversion rates was not an immediate solution.

The answer came from the following ad:

Click-through-rate jumped to 3.84%, quality score swelled up to 10/10 and the cost-per-click was cut in half: $0.10.

Profits got better and he lived happily ever after.

The successful ad wasn’t the result of looking at the website and trying to think up ways to write a better ad. It wasn’t born by trying out tricks like putting keywords in the title, adding a question mark or putting capital letters in the display url.

It was born after intensive research on the person behind the keyword.

I pictured myself being a man looking for love making tips. “What images would be flowing in my head, what do I secretly want, what experiences led me to this search and what is the ultimate result that I’m looking for?”, I asked myself.

Then I typed the words in Google. I took a look at all the websites that were returned, and I asked myself why those results would be relevant and why some wouldn’t be. I looked into blog comments and forum threads to read what people on the same quest were saying about it and how they were expressing themselves.

What I realized is that no man really wants to learn 500 love making secrets just for the sake of it. Instead, they want their partner to be the happiest woman alive and they want themselves to be the source of fulfillment a woman craves for. (And they want to witness her inner animal – grrrrrr!).

This exercise can be done for any type of website, any type of offer, any type of product. Whatever it is you are selling, figuring out the deepest needs buried in the searchers mind will give you the competitive advantage you need to dominate your market.

It will help you discover the features and benefits you need to put forward about your offer to align it with what searchers are looking for, resulting in above than average click-troughs and conversion rates.

6 Steps To Getting Into The Searcher’s Mind And Writing The Perfect Ad

Step 1 – Possess their bodies
Choose a specific keyword in your list and sit in front your computer. Close your eyes and put yourself in the shoes of your prospect. Imagine what happened to you just before you decided to type that keyword into Google. Imagine what you felt, the urgency of the matter or frustrations tied to it. Imagine what the best solution to your problem would be. It could be information about something, it could be a better price for the product, a better feature…

Step 2 – See it like they see it
Type your chosen keyword in Google and look at the natural search results. Glance over the 10 results and find the general theme of the results. Are they mostly commercial in nature or are they informative. What are the words used and how, as a searcher, do you feel when looking at them. What are the ones that grab your attention?

There’s a reason why google is the number search engine, one of those reason is that they do a great job at showing searchers what they want. Researching the natural search results helps you understand better what is happening in the mind of a searcher. Google has already done half the job for you.

Step 3 – Experience what they experience
Visit each of the websites returned and try to understand why the first website is number 1, why the second is number 2 and so on. Take a look at what information is offered and understand how each is relevant to your quest – and if it isn’t, find out why it isn’t. Start thinking of ways each website could give you, as a searcher, the solution you desire in a better way.

Step 4 – Eavesdrop on their conversations
Find blogs or forum related to you keyword. Read what people are saying about it. Learn how they express themselves, how they talk about the subject. Figure out what they want, what questions aren’t answered and what solution would make their live easier. Amazon reviews of a similar product as yours is a great place to start.

Step 5 – Spy on your competitors (quietly)
Now look at the sponsored results. You could use a spying tool that tells you how long each ad has been showing for your particular keyword. This will tell you – just like the natural search result – what searchers are really looking for. Your competitors have done the other half of the work for you so you should piggy back on their efforts and do a better job than them.

Step 6 – Hit ‘em!
Write 2 or 3 ads to test with what you’ve discovered. It should now be clear to you what type of message resonates most with your prospect. If you’ve taken notes during your research phase in the previous 5 steps, that will help.

When you have done this exercise, you will know who is behind your keywords and what they are looking for. You’ll be able to segment your ad groups according to your ads and searchers desires. You’ll be able to fine tune your campaign settings to target the right person for the message you’ve written.

Your ads will be sharper, Google will be happy and your wallet will feel it.

Of course there’s more to it and there are other little ways to tweak ads for higher CTR. But there’s nothing I have found that improves  ad efficiency better than deeply understanding who you are marketing to.

How To Keep High Quality Scores

Understand That QS Varies — A Lot!

The search market place is constantly changing. Advertisers come and go, competitors rise and fall. So do quality scores:

The  graph above shows the  quality score evolution of one of our keyword over a period of 23 days. The blue line represents quality scores progress and the green line represents first page minimum bids evolution, both having their numerical values displayed in the table below the chart.

Notice how QS has been jumping from 4 to to 7 to 10 and back to 4.

There are many reasons you may wake up one day and find that costs have doubled for your main keywords due to a decrease in quality scores.

Knowing the main causes of quality score rise and fall will help you react fast when it happens.

Here’s what to watch for:

• Unsuccessful ad split-tests
  When testing new ads, bad ads can have nefarious influence on your keyword’s average CTR.  Your quality score will drop even when one of your ad is performing very well. That’s why it is sometimes a good idea to have one test ad being tested against 3 copies of the successful ad in one ad group. This ensures that your average CTR doesn’t drop too much due a bad test.




• The competition beating you
  The competition for your keywords may suddenly start performing better. Google compares your CTR to the average CTR being achieved in your market. You get rewarded for performing better than your competitors, you get punished for under performing. If your competitors suddenly start showing more relevant ads to your poll of prospects, and if that goes on for a while, your quality score will drop since you’re no longer on top of performance. Keep an eye on what others are doing, and try their ideas on your ads.




• Keywords changing meaning
  You keywords may change meaning. It’s not uncommon. In his AdWords book, Brad gives an example with the word “Bleach” which shows results for a cartoon. Before that cartoon existed, you would have probably found results for the detergent. There was also a time when typing the words “make the cut” in google would show results of movies and amazon books. Today it mostly shows results for a scrap booking software that was created about a year ago. This all means that your keywords may suddenly start attracting searchers that have no interest in what you’re offering due to a change in keyword meaning. Keep a special eye on what your broad and phrase match keywords are triggering, make sure they stay relevant to your ads.




• Uncrawlable landing pages
  Forgotten to renew your domain name? Or did you remember to check that the new landing page was actually uploaded correctly? Or maybe you work in a large organization in which different people work on the same set of pages. Working on a website can sometimes lead to errors not caught in time. When spiders come for a visit and find nothing, you get slapped with 1/10 quality score — a heart attack. Make sure your landing pages are always available and crawlable.

The fact is: quality score varies and it can vary a lot. Those variations may mean the difference between good ROI and great ROI. They may mean the difference between profits and losses.  So whenever you think you don’t need to keep an eye on quality scores, you’re doing a disservice to your wallet (and making Google richer).

Track Your Quality Scores Changes And Optimize When Necessary

You went on vacation and left your ads unmanaged. “They’ve been quite stable and since revenue is steady there’s no risk”, you tell yourself. After 2 weeks in Hawaii, you come to find out that your top keywords have stopped generating traffic or that their costs have become unprofitable…

Oops, quality score did it again!

Having a system in place for tracking your daily scores and being notified of changes will prevent drops from sneaking up on you with serious consequences.

That’s one of the reasons why we developed TenScores, which is a web platform that automatically tracks quality score changes of an entire adwords  account. (It is still in beta and we open doors infrequently, please sign up here to be notified next time we’re open).

A free way to do it is with Excel sheets. I really like this little quick guide Jacqueline Dooley put together, in it she explains how her excel sheet shows her at a glance where she’s lost quality score points. If I didn’t have TenScores, I would personally use her method weekly – instead of monthly like she advises – on all my main keywords until they are all above 7.

How To Start With High Quality Scores In The First Place

Start With Your Brand’s Keywords

People who are searching for your brand’s name, your domain name or product name aren’t shopping around, they want you and they know it. The CTR you achieve from those keywords sets a foundation for your accounts history that influences the scores you receive for other keywords.

Build On Your Typical Visitor’s Profile

Start in first gear and shift gradually.

Before you go in and load millions of keywords and ads in your account, start small and test the waters with  a few ad groups. Although the searcher behind every keyword is different, people in your market place share common frustrations or needs that need to be met. Use the tips mentioned above to figure out the kind of message that resonates most with prospects in your market.

Once you have found the kind of message that generates above average CTR, it’s ok to scale and use the same message on millions of keywords if they fall under the same kind of market and same demographics.

A common mistake that many new advertisers make is to start in  5th gear with too many keywords without having a deep understanding of what their market responds to. They end up having poor performance in a short amount of time, quality scores drop and the account is almost doomed to failure. Don’t make that mistake.

I hope this helps you get closer to achieving your goals, if you have a friend who would benefit from reading this page, email it, tweet it or facebook it to hook’em up (it’s also a great way to give back to CK for the great content you receive).

Chris Thunder

PS —  ↓ or even ↓  (thank you for the love!)

Google recently make a blog post about a free webinar they are hosting to teach people about remarketing.

However, that’s not the interesting part of the post. This is:

97% of new visitors do not convert the first time they arrive at your site.

To me, that says that if 97% don’t convert – 3% do convert.

I’ve long used a typical conversion rate as:

• Simple email collection: 5-25% (unknown sites 5-10%, established sites 10-20%)
• Whitepaper download (minimum data required) 10-15%
• Lead Gen 0.5-5% (again, depending on data required)
• Ecommerce – very expensive – 0.5% – 1%
• Ecommerce – inexpensive – 1-2% for less established stores, 2-3% for established
• and the list goes on (Premium members can see the full data here)

I mostly use those average conversion rates for establishing bids for brand new accounts before there is enough data to know your own conversion rates. Those numbers are based upon looking at tens of thousands of accounts over the years (and based upon direct keywords, conversion rate isn’t static – it’s based on the specificity and commercial nature of the keyword, referring site, etc).

Of course, some accounts do much better and others much worse – those are just starting places – not ending ones.

I have heard Google state before to use 2% overall conversion rates (which sounds like ecommerce to me – not everyone).

However, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Google flat out state in public that 3% of visitors convert.

This is a guest post by Chad Summerhill, Author of the blog PPC Prospector, provider of free PPC tools & PPC tutorials, and AdWords Specialist at Moving Solutions, Inc. (UPack.com and MoveBuilder.com).

Earlier this month, I was auditing data in our web analytics data warehouse when I came across some AdWords keywords that were being tracked improperly.

At first, I thought that AdWords was using my ad’s destination url instead of my keyword’s destination url.   After some investigation, it turns out I was wrong.

The issue was originating with clicks from AdWords sitelinks that have their own destination urls.  In my case, they just happen to look like the urls on my ads which caused my initial confusion.

While I was under the hood, I noticed that Google had disapproved my brand campaign sitelinks (without telling me).  Apparently, you can’t have your sitelinks all pointing at the same url (which is what I had done when I first got access to the sitelink beta).  If someone rats you out (a competitor I guess) then AdWords can disapprove them after a manual review process.

The truth is I just added the sitelinks without much thought.  Seemed like a no-brainer at the time—my brand ads would take up more SERP real estate. Yes! Sign me up.

After learning that the sitelinks had been turned off, I needed to understand the impact and determine if I needed to turn them back on.

Sitelink reporting in AdWords

There two places in your AdWords account for retrieving sitelink data: ‘Segment> Click type’, and ‘Ad extensions> Sitelinks Extensions’

By Click type Segment

 

When looking at your ‘Click type’ segment you can see the number of impressions, clicks, etc. on your actual sitelinks.  This view of how many searchers clicked on your ‘Headline’ vs. ‘Sitelink’ isn’t all that helpful when trying to understand the overall impact of having my sitelinks turned off.

Under the ‘Ad extensions’ Tab

 

When I turned to the ‘Ad extensions’ tab, I started to see a better picture of the performance boost of using sitelinks.  This view, reports all the ad performance metrics of ads clicked when sitelinks were displayed regardless of where the searcher clicked the headline or the sitelink. So, you can see the difference in CTR, etc. when sitelinks are present.  But it still didn’t really help me understand the overall impact of losing the sitelinks.

Trend your data to understand the impact of sitelinks

The best way I found to understand the impact of using sitelinks was to turn them back on and do a time comparison (pre-sitelinks & post-sitelinks).  This easily accomplished by pulling a campaign report segmented by day and analyzing it in Excel with a pivot table.  Of course, you can see your important metrics trended over time inside the AdWords interface as well.

 

In the image above the blue line is CTR and green is Conversions, so it looks like sitelinks made a big impact just as I had suspected.  In my case, turning on sitelinks improved my overall campaigns CTR by 40% while having no affect on my Conversion Rate.  Consequently, my overall daily-spend was up by 54%, so I decided to dig a little deeper.

Evaluating the impact of sitelinks on your organic traffic

Adding sitelinks makes your paid ad look more like an organic listing (at least I think it does) and it also takes up more real estate on the SERP, so I decided to look at what adding sitelinks did to my overall branded search traffic (both PPC & SEO).

This was easily accomplished using Google Analytics.

1.    Go to: Traffic Sources> Keywords (if you want you could also create an Advanced segment for just Google search)

2.    I filtered for keywords that contained my brand using a regular expression.

3.    I then downloaded both the paid and the non-paid report and analyzed them in Excel.

What I found was very interesting.  Overall year-over-year branded visit growth didn’t change at all.  Growth just switched from organic to paid after I turned sitelinks on.

 

Now I need to decide whether or not to keep sitelinks running.  I’m almost certain that I will; the traffic is cheap and it seems like the right defensive move to protect my brand.

Now imagine what sitelinks could do for your non-branded, competitive ads (Google reports and average increase in CTR of 30%).  Sitelinks could help you take marketshare  from your competitors when you don’t own the SERP like you probably do with your branded keywords.

My next analysis will involve a non-brand, competitive, high-CPC keyword that I rank well for, in both PPC and SEO to see how much I cannibalize from SEO.  Maybe that’s a topic for a future post.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Certified Knowledge. If you would like to write for Certified Knowledge, please let us know.

I often find that my image ads (for accounts without reps) get approved within 1 hour, 3 days, or they stay in the ‘review status’ forever.

The Google AdWords queue seems to break quite often as I’ve seen this trend for more than a year where most images are not either approved or disapproved – they just sit in the review status. This leaves marketers in a state of perpetual waiting.

There seems to be two quick ways to get images approved:

Use the Display Ad Builder

Google’s display ad builder makes it easy to build image or video ads within their system.

When you select the display ad builder option, you can choose a template to customize and quickly build out rich media ads.

These ads are good, not great, as they are being built from templates. I do like the system for quickly creating and testing image ad messages.

There are two major advantages to using the Display Ad Builder:

• It’s easy to create image ads
• The ads seem to be approved very quickly

I can only count a handful of times when I had to ask Google to approve my display ad builder ads.

 

 

Contact AdWords Support

Contacting Google for ad approval purposes seems a bit convoluted as Google has some pretty bad forms and explanations of what a form does. I do find if you contact them about approvals, the ads are almost always reviewed within 1-3 days. To contact Google to have your images (or any ads) approved, follow these steps:

1. Click on the help link (make sure you’re not blocking popups as a popup window will appear)
2. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click ‘contacting us’
3. Navigate to Ad visibility, approvals and performance > ad approval and policies > how long does it take my ad to be approved
4. On the side of the page, click email
5. Fill out the very short form (contact info, ad group, campaign)
6. Submit data

The form doesn’t really say what’s going to happen, but if you fill it out – then your ads will re-enter the AdWords approval queue.

Of course, if you have a rep – feel free to contact your rep as they can help put the ads back into the review process, and some can expedite the process.