We took on a new client in the automotive ecommerce space a couple months ago. We were tasked with increasing year-over-year conversions while driving CPA lower or at least keeping it steady. We did a pretty thorough audit of the mid-five-figures per month account, so we were ready to implement our optimizations on a multitude of fronts. A day or two out of the gate, the numbers looked like they *might* be going our way, but each successive day brought less-than-stellar results.

Fast forward a couple weeks, and same status. The numbers didn’t look really bad, but where were the rockstar numbers we were expecting? Even though I’ve been doing PPC optimization for years, I was missing a key piece of data that I shouldn’t have been missing. Fortunately, a quick trip to Search Funnels solved the mystery, giving us and our client more insight into the account and more confidence that we were moving in the right direction.

First introduced in March 2010, AdWords Search Funnels are a set of reports describing the ad click and impression behavior on Google.com that leads up to a conversion. Search Funnels helps answer questions around time lags and attribution. To paraphrase Google: Search Funnel data helps clarify how users search for Advertiser products, and it also gives a more complete picture of the value of your campaigns.

Time Lag

AdWords Search Funnels have been updated in the last few months, and there is great data to be mined. Specifically, Time Lag data showed us that for this specific account, data from ‘yesterday’ would grow an average of 67% over the next 30 days. Data viewed in a ‘last 7 days’ format would grow 42%. This is due to the effects of the AdWords cookie and the way that AdWords records conversions, matching them to the date and time when the last click happened. We had begun to understand there was a significant lag after we took over the account, but we had no idea just how pronounced it was until we looked at time lag data in the right way. Here’s how to do it.

Click on ‘Conversions’ from the ‘Tools and Analysis’ dropdown menu from any page in the AdWords account. Next, click on ‘Search Funnels’, located in the left-hand column of the ‘Conversions’ page. Once there, you will want to click on the ‘Only show complete conversion paths’ option, located in the ‘All Paths’ dropdown on the upper right-hand side of the page (see screenshot below). This will ensure you are only looking at data where Google know the whole story. Because AdWords gathers conversion data over a 30 day period, you may want to choose a date range where the ending date is 30 days ago, which may give you a greater volume of ‘complete conversion path’ data to analyze.

Now, click on ‘Time Lag’ in the sub-navigation on the left-hand side of the page (see screenshot). Very importantly, for most situations you will likely want to look at ‘From last click’ data, rather than the default setting, which is ‘From first impression.’ Since the AdWords interface presents ‘last click’ performance data, it makes sense to analyze things from the same standpoint, for consistency. If you forget this step, the data may look much different and it may mislead you. Note the yellow highlighted text in the screenshot below, telling the user that they are looking only at complete conversion paths.

In order to understand by what percentage ‘yesterday’ data will increase over time, take the ‘conversions’ percentage of total in the first row.

In the screenshot above, the number is very close to 40%*. Since we are dealing with percentages, we can divide 100 by 40 and then subtract 1 to get our expected percentage increase of 150% (100/40 = 2.5; then, 2.5 – 1 = 1.5, or 150%).

Note, with each passing hour after midnight, these numbers will get smaller. If you waited till 11pm on the follow day to look at ‘yesterday’ data, you are almost into day #2, and so you must adjust accordingly. In order to understand by what percentage ‘last 7 days’ data will increase during the 30 day cookie window, you have to look at each day individually.

To illustrate, a ‘last 7 days’ view includes yesterday, which, using the example above will grow conversions by 150%. But ‘last 7 days’ also includes the day that happened 7 days ago. This day has already had the benefit of 6 to 7 days of conversion ‘cookie credit’, and so this day will show much less growth than will the day that was yesterday. One way to do the math is to list days 1 to 7 with their cumulative ‘percentage of total conversions’. Then, take the average of those cumulative totals. Now, divide this average into 100 and subtract 1, and you have the estimated growth percentage for any ‘last 7 days’ lookback. Below is a screenshot of what the Excel spreadsheet might look like.

Once we were able to point to actual Search Funnels data around time lags, we were easily able to communicate our true progress to date. Additionally, Search Funnels contributed both to our and our client’s understanding of user behavior.

There are also great attribution reports in Search Funnels, but that’s for another post!

* Note: the screenshot was taken *before* I clicked on ‘from last click’, so the data here is actually wrong. Don’t forget this step, as I seem to have done in my screenshot!

 
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.

Quality Score is such an important factor of AdWords that you need to examine it on a regular basis so that you can monitor it and increase it when necessary.

However, if you have thousands or millions of keywords, then trying to find the best areas to improve quality score can be overly time consuming.

By using a single AdWords report and a few pivot tables (which are very easy to create) you can identify:

• How healthy your account is based upon quality score
• Where you have the greatest financial benefits to increasing quality score
• Where you have the more impression improvement potential by increasing quality scores

I put together a video that walks you though exactly how to run these reports and do the analysis which you can see below (if you are reading this via email or an RSS reader, you may need to click through to the site to see the video).

The video is in 720 HD format; so if you change the quality settings, it also looks good in full screen.

I hope you enjoy the video.

Google recently changed how they displayed the Quality Score tips inside of AdWords. The biggest change is that some of the factors will now be relative to your competition. While this is a huge, and very welcome change, it also opens Pandora’s box to show where quality score might not make much sense.

How Much Does Landing Page Matter?

First off, landing page speed is no longer being displayed. That’s not really a huge issue as I’ve never seen a problem with landing page speed. They instead rolled the landing page issues into one single ‘landing page relevance’ score.

For years, if your landing page was dinged by quality score, you were in trouble. Rarely would you ever see a quality score above 3 or 4 if you had landing page issues. That no longer seems to be the case.

Now, when I see a 10; this is what I was expecting:

But this is what I was seeing across several accounts as 10s as well:

I was floored when I saw this keyword. A below average landing page experience, and yet the quality score was a 10. It didn’t take me long to find dozens of examples where this was occurring.

The problem with relative data is that Google doesn’t tell you what fits into above or below average. For example, if average is 1, is below average 0.99 or 0.9 or 0.8. If average was a .8 to 1.2 range; then below average is meaningful. If below average is 0.99; then below average might not mean that much.

It is Mostly CTR

For a long time, landing page was more of a negative than a positive to your quality score; and it was all about CTRs. That seems to be the case. In this example, everything is average or above average; yet the QS is still a 4:

So, in example 1, the landing page was below average, but the CTR was good enough to get a 10. In this case, having an expected CTR above average, and everything else as average meant the QS was a 4. That seems quite counterintuitive; especially when you see this keyword which is also a 4:

There’s no way that both of these keywords should be a 4. The first one is all above average or average. This one is below average. This should probably be a 4; but not the first one.

‘Relevance’ Still Matters

While relevance is technically another set of CTRs, its usually best to think of this as semantics. And they matter:

The majority of quality scores I saw at a 2 had issues with relevance, not CTR.

‘Average Ads’ Can be 3s to 10s

Google has made enough claims over the years about 7s being good and 6s needing a bit of help; but what is average?

I’m seeing words from Quality Scores 3 to 8 where everything is ‘average’.

I’m seeing quality score 7 words that are all average, or 1-2 items is ‘above average’.

I’m seeing quality score 9 words that that have less above average items than quality score 5 & 6 words:

You Can’t Diagnose Paused Words

If a word is paused; the metrics will all be below average. This does lead credence to the theory (that I subscribe to) that a paused word can’t hurt you. Google isn’t collecting metrics; therefore it’s below average as there’s no data coming in. A better error message here would be a good idea instead of just ‘below average’.

So, What Can You Takeaway?

A good landing page is necessary for conversions. A bad landing page (in Google’s eyes – not the searchers) could have a negative quality score affect; or it could not.

An ad with ‘below average’ expected CTR can have a quality score of 1 to 6. I didn’t see any quality score 7 or higher words with below average expected CTR.

Ad relevancy matters. You can have a 10 with a high relevance, but average everything else. I didn’t see any higher quality score keywords with below average relevancy.

The ‘average’ benchmarks seem to be different for each of the displayed data sets. The fact that landing page can be below average and get a 10; yet relevancy and expected CTR can be average and be anywhere from a 4 to a 10 is either an error in the quality score algo; or the ‘average’ range is quite large.

In the end; while these numbers are relative; I think we need a better scale than average, above average, below average. A 1-5 range (if you want to make it semantic with bad, poor, average, good, excellent – that will also work, Google) would be much more insightful.

The quality scores I’m seeing don’t make sense in many cases (and I only spent 10 minutes looking for these examples, they aren’t the strange ones – they are the norm); and I think it’s a range issue.

So, kudos to Google for showing some relative data; however, my hope is that Google goes much further with the ranges. The new quality score transparency is not that useful and will raise more questions that it answers.

Google recently announced that in May they will be adding certain queries to your current phrase and exact match keywords labeled "near phrase" and [near exact]. A lot of debate and frankly hysteria has ensued about what this will mean for advertisers. While each case is different, here’s a specific scenario in which Google’s new match types can actually help you and your account:

Broad Match Reduction

Advertisers have long struggled with the limitations of phrase and exact match vs. the unpredictability of broad match. While exact match is always the advertiser’s goal match type, broad match was a necessary evil, fishing for keywords that weren’t known to us yet but that could be potential gold mines. Along the way, though, a lot of money was wasted on trying to find these hidden gems. Modified broad match came along and has been able to take away some of the power of old broad match.

And now, by taking queries that are closely related to our phrase and exact match keywords out of the broad match realm, we can reduce the budget for broad match and re-invest it.

Currently, your account might look like this:

Re-Invest in Exact Match

So then, if your account is structured in a way that you’re bidding most for exact match, second most for phrase and least for broad, then these new match types can really help you. By re-routing these near phrase and near exact queries to actual phrase and actual exact match types, an advertiser will be able to utilize a higher bid and attain traffic for possibly better converting keywords than if they showed up under broad match. Think about it this way: prior to the change, if you bid $2 on broad, $3 on phrase and $4 on exact, the $2 bid would be used for the near match type queries. Now those queries would fall under either a $3 or $4 bid giving you an opportunity for a higher ad position and more impression share.

Again this could lead to a reduction in your broad match strategy and expansion into your exact match, which is what you really want!

Here is what your account could look like when moving budget away from broad match:

The same $3000 budget garnered 7 more conversions by investing more into exact match!

Tying It All Together

It is very possible that you have accounts where showing your ad for a simple misspell or plural version of a keyword could be very detrimental. In my experience, however, misspellings most often convert pretty well especially if it is a brand term. And if a plural or singular version could hurt you that much you could always negative match it out. The rest of the additions, including stemmings, accents and abbreviations, I would want to test anyway.

That aside, imagine your account with a lot less reliance on broad match and a ton more emphasis on phrase and exact match due to these changes. Bidding would be a lot more straightforward. Ad to keyword relevance would be a lot easier to attain which equals higher initial Quality Score and should lead to a higher CTR and a secondary bump in QS. This causes a rise in Ad Position and reduction in CPC’s. Profits should then increase as well as number of conversions. Just imagine!

 
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.
 
Related Entries: Google launches near match, should you use it?
 

If you’re managing an account with an overall CPA target and you’re also advertising on brand terms you’ll probably see two types of keywords in your account: brand terms with very low CPA’s (and CPC’s) and non-brand keywords with much higher CPA’s (often 10 to 20 times higher). Both CPA’s are usually not even close to the overall target, nor will they be for most keywords, even if you tried.

However, your boss or client is still mostly interested in the overall target. So if you consider your branded conversions as a given, what should the target CPA be for the non-branded keywords?

Let’s start by saying that this is not an ideal situation. Far from it. George Michie even calls it ‘the cardinal sin of paid search’ and gives 4 good reasons not to mix brand with non-brand results in his excellent article. Please tell your boss or client about these 4 reasons and hopefully you can switch to working with a non-branded target. That would be in everyone’s best interest.

Working with a non-branded target would indeed mean you’ll no longer get credits for the branded conversions. But neither will you be blamed if they drop.

If you think your non-branded campaigns often assist branded conversions, you might be right, but I’d say the burden of proof is on you. Analyze Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics, Search Funnels in AdWords or even request a Campaign Insights report at Google if you’ve been very active on the Google Display Network. Then take credit for the additional branded conversions you find in these reports. Those would be the ones that are preceded by a non-branded click with the subtraction of the conversions that started with a branded click and ended with a non-branded click (this also happens).

So let’s hope this article will become obsolete sooner rather than later. In the meantime, if the overall target is the situation you have to work with, I’d like to show you how to create your non-branded target based on existing conversion data in your account. This will help you evaluate the performance of your non-branded keywords and give you a more realistic target for them.

Especially if branded conversions are significant in your account (or maybe even make up the majority of the conversions) the overall target will not be suitable for your non-branded keywords, so you’ll need a target that will work together with your branded conversions to reach the overall target.

I’ll use Google AdWords in the examples below, but if you get your conversion data from another source, the calculation works just as well, as long as you’re able to distinct brand from non-brand terms. Calculating your non-branded target works best with mature and stable accounts, but if your account isn’t, you’ll just have to recalculate more often to make sure the calculation holds true.

I will provide you with the steps to calculate your non-branded target for both of the following situations:

1. You have clearly labeled and completely separated your branded campaigns from the other campaigns, and added your brand terms (including misspellings) as negatives to all the other campaigns (for the past year).
2. You’re not 100% sure all branded search queries were only triggered by branded campaigns (for the past year).

1. The steps for the first (and ideal) situation in which you have completely separated branded from non-branded are as following:

1. Log in to your AdWords account and select the past 12 months as the date range:
   
   The reason for choosing a full year is to prevent a possible seasonal bias when choosing a shorter period. If your account is running for less than a year, select ‘All time’ in the date range field.
2. I assume all your branded campaigns contain the word ‘brand’ or another common and unique combination of letters you can filter on. Search for this in the search field:
   
3. Now scroll to the bottom of the page, you will find the aggregate statistics for your brand campaigns in the yellow row:
   
4. From the image above, we just need 3 metrics (highlighted in red): the number of branded conversions, the number of total conversions and the branded CPA.
5. Now divide the number of branded conversions by the total conversions, in the example above that would be 23,886 / 34,488 = 69%
6. Now let’s say our overall target CPA is $40. Given the metrics above, what should be our target for the non-branded keywords?
7. If our target CPA is $40, then 100 conversions can cost us $4,000. Now we know that out of every 100 conversions, we get 69 conversions for $2.19 apiece. So we get 69 conversions for $151.
   That leaves us with $4,000 – $151 = $3,849 to spend for the remaining 31 non-branded conversions. Therefore their target CPA would be $3,849 / 31 = $124
8. To make it easier for you, just fill in your overall target CPA, your amount of branded conversions and their CPA and the total number of conversions and this Excel file  will calculate your non-branded target.

2. The steps for the second situation in which you’re not 100% sure to have completely separated branded from non-branded take a bit more time, but at least you will be sure to get the right numbers by separating on the search query level:

1. Go to the Dimensions tab of your account and select the past 12 months as the date range
2. Select ‘Search terms’ in the view menu.
3. Customize the columns and only select Clicks, Conversions and Cost. Remove all the other columns.
4. Create a filter to show only search terms with at least 1 click:
   
5. Download this report and open it with Excel (if it gets too big, use a higher number of clicks in the filter).
6. Delete the first and last row of this report (title and totals)
7. Name column E (the first empty column) ‘Keyword Type’
8. Set a filter on the first row
9. Apply a filter on the first column (Search term) to contain your brand name
10. Fill in ‘Branded’ in the new Keyword Type column for all these keywords (make sure they all really are branded)
11. Remove the filter from the Search term column
12. Select the empty cells from the Keyword Type column
13. Now you should see all your non branded queries.
14. Now fill in ‘Non-branded’ in the Keyword Type column for these queries.
15. If all went well, all your queries are now labeled as branded or non-branded.
16. Create a Pivot Table based on this data. If you need to learn (more) about Pivot Tables for PPC analysis I can highly recommend reading Master Pivot Tables by Josh Dreller.
17. In this Pivot Table use Keyword Type as Row Label and the sum of conversions as Values.
18. Create a Calculated Field called CPA that divides Cost by Conversions
    
    and add this to the Values field
19. Create a Calculated Field called Conv. Rate that divides Conversions by Clicks.
    
    and add this to the Values field
20. Now you should have an Excel file similar to this one.
    
    Now you have all the data you need to calculate your non-branded target. Just fill in the numbers in this Excel file and it will calculate it for you.
21. In the Pivot Table you’ve also calculated your branded and non-branded conversion rate. Though you don’t need these metrics for your non-branded target, they’re quite useful to know for the following reasons:
• When you add a new non-branded keyword, you can use the average non-branded conversion rate as a benchmark for when to expect the first conversion. If your non-branded conversion rate is 1%, your non-branded keywords need 100 clicks to convert (on average). So you can optimize accordingly.
• By regularly comparing your branded and non-branded conversion rates you can look for interesting trends in these metrics, for example: if one rises, does the other rise with the same relative amount? If not, why not?

It goes without saying that your calculated non-branded target holds true as long as the proportion of branded conversions and its CPA does not change in your account. But it probably will, so it would be wise to recalculate it regularly (at least once every 3 months I would say).

And if you’re not sure your current CPA (non-branded or overall) is realistic and want to reevaluate it, this guideline explains how a target CPA can be calculated. If you just want to estimate your CPA based on metrics like CPC and Conversion Rate, you can use this calculator.

I hope this guide is helpful for all of you working with an overall CPA target. I also hope this will be a temporary situation for you

 
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.
 

Google just announced they are taking near match out of beta and rolling it out to everyone.

What this does is match you to close variations of search queries. It’s pretty similar to modified broad match, only it works for phrase and exact match.

What Near Match Does

For instance, if you are advertising on the keyword: “buy plasma TV”; you will NOT show for these queries:

• buying plasma TV (stemming)
• buy plasma TVs (plural)
• buy plasa TV (misspelling)

With the near match options, you will show for those keywords.

Dartboard Image credit: Velo Steve

Google Does It Again – Auto Opts You In – You Have to Opt Out

I really don’t like when Google does this – they opt you into something instead of leaving existing campaigns alone. I logged into an account today and all the campaigns were changed to the new match type by default.

So, if you don’t want to use it, you need to go through every campaign and disable it. It’s not in the AdWords editor yet, so you have to do this campaign by campaign. You do have until mid-May (supposedly) to change this.

To change the settings; just go to the campaign settings, and near the bottom of the page you’ll see the Exact and phrase matching options:

From there you can turn it off (or enable it if you turned it off earlier).

Update:  Various readers are seeing a large variety of things going on in their accounts. Some are seeing that all campaigns were opted in, and now only half are opted in. Others are seeing that they are completely opted in, yet others are changing the setting only to have it changed again after a couple hours (without them doing anything).

It seems that Google should not have launched a setting that wasn’t in use this far in advance of it going live. It’s only making people more confused and annoyed.

Will Exact Match Trump Near Exact Match?

I’ve talked to several people at Google about the near match ad rank issues to see what will trump what. I don’t have a clear answer. This is what I hear:

• Google always uses the most precise matching option, so if you have the exact match version of the word and the near exact match version of the word; then the exact match will be displayed
  • This isn’t true to begin with (always uses most precise match); so the extrapolated answer seems incorrect; but it could be correct
• Ad Rank is max CPC x QS. Since QS will be the same, then if your near exact match bid keyword is much higher than the exact match version of the word, then the near exact match will show and not the exact match
  • I’m guessing this is correct; and it could mess up stats.

How Stats Can Become Corrupted

Let’s say you have these two words:

• [Restaurant waiter clog]
• [Restaurant waiter clogs]

There are usually less ads on the ‘clog’ version of this keyword, and the CPC is generally lower than the ‘clogs’ version. However, it also has a lower conversion rate. Therefore, you bid the ‘clog’ version down a little bit, but as there are so few ads, it doesn’t matter.

Now, with everyone being opted in by default into this option, the ‘clog’ version is going to get a lot more competitive; so the CPCs will go up. As the ‘clog’ version has a lower conversion rate, you just accept the fact that you’ll get fewer conversions from this word and bid the word based upon ROAS.

However, the bid is so low for the ‘clog’ version that when someone searches for ‘restaurant waiter clog’ Google no longer triggers the exact match version; they trigger the ‘clogs’ version as it is a ‘near exact match’.

Now, the search query report should show that the ‘clog’ version received the click; but you can’t bid on a search query. You have to add it as a match type first. But, this keyword is already a match type with a lower CPC. So, you’ve now lost ad serving control.

How Often Do “Near Exacts” Have Different Conversion Rates?

That really depends (yeah, I hate the answer too).

I’ve dealt with accounts where the singular and plural versions sold different products, or used different pages.

I’ve dealt with accounts where everything similar behaves the exact same way.

Only you can find out this data for yourself. Take a look through the search query report and see if there are any commonalities amount singular words, plural words, misspellings, and stemmings.

It’s the stemmings I’m more concerned with that the plurals or misspellings.

What will this be matched to (note: phrase match): “Cleveland Driver”

• Cleveland driver (brand of golf club)
• Cleveland drive (the 1987 John Elway Game ‘The Drive’) or a street name
• Cleveland driving school
• Cleveland drivers license (drivers vs driver is a huge difference here)

And I’m sure there are much better examples that will come to those who have had more coffee than myself.

Can You Test It?

You can test almost anything; but this will be really hard to test. Cross campaign ACE (AdWords campaign experiments) would be really useful. That is among my top 5 wish list items for AdWords.

From a conceptual standpoint, there seem to be two ways to test it.

Exact Match Positive & Negative Keywords

Sometimes, Google won’t show you when you have the same word as a positive and negative in the same ad group or campaign – so this might not work.

• Copy/paste your exact match keywords to a new campaign
• Copy/paste those same keywords as negative exact match keywords
• Enable the setting
• See if you get traffic (uncertain if you will)

Since the new campaign’s keywords say show me for this, but don’t show me for the exact same item – then only if it’s a near match should the keyword be displayed.

In the old campaign, leave the ‘near match’ setting off so that it will capture the true exact match data.

Collect some info and compare the two campaigns.

Duplicate Campaigns w/ Lower Bids

This method is how you use to control search partners:

• Duplicate the campaign
• Change the setting to ‘near match’
• Lower the bids by 10%-20%
• Collect the data
• Examine the results

Now, this method is not as good as the other one. As the bids are lower, you will receive fewer clicks. And as you’re not controlling the info with negatives, you’ll get some corrupted data. However, it’s much faster than trying to match up all the negatives.

Should You Use It?

I have very mixed feelings about near match.

I work with some accounts that have loaded up on so many exact match and phrase match variations of words for their auto-bidding system; that the setting really isn’t that useful. In this case test it or leave it off.

I work with some accounts that have loaded up on exacts and phrases when it seemed useful, but they don’t spent enough time really controlling all of the display and they prefer to let the bidding system handle it. In this case, test out the setting to see how it performs.

In some accounts modified broad match is doing great, and when there’s a lot of traffic they also add the keyword as an exact match. For these accounts, it might be more useful to let the modified broad catch the ‘near match’ impressions and then use search queries, negatives, and true exacts to manage the bids – when there is a lot of traffic.

I think that might be the difference, the above management method is great for medium to large accounts. It is very difficult for accounts with little traffic.

So… are you a control freak? Then leave it off or split it out into another campaign.

Do you want the most exposure for the least amount of work, or do you have a small data set? If so, turn it on.

Are you in the medical jargon industry where misspellings outnumber correct ones? If so, turn it on.

Time vs Control

With these new betas, such as Display Campaign Optimizer, it comes down to control vs time. If you want lots of control, then it’ll take you longer, but you have control.

If you don’t want a lot of control, or have very little time, turn them on, benchmark how they do, and then decide to keep or turn off the setting.

As Google tries to make AdWords more appealing to the masses who don’t have lots of time, or sophistication; expect to see even more features that offer time saving methods, but at the cost of losing some control.

The overall Quality Score Factors haven’t changed in several years. Some of the weightings and algos have changed; but Google’s page about QS has remained relatively static.

There was one change in October of last year that pertained to landing pages and how they would receive ‘more’ weight; where ‘more’ is very undefined. Overall, most companies did not see a difference when this factor was changed.

I noticed that recently there is another change, and that is:

Your keyword/search relevance: How relevant your keyword is to what a customer searches for
Source: AdWords Help

This is an interesting change as it shows that if your keyword isn’t related to what they are searching for; then your QS can be lower. But, if your keyword was triggered – isn’t the searcher looking for something pertaining to your keyword?

This seems like a catch-22 and something is amiss.

Is this a match type problem?

On the surface, it might seem that this is a strike against broad match as in that case, you can often show for something totally unrelated to your keyword. However, Quality Score is only calculated when the query matches your keyword regardless of match type. So, that can’t be the issue.

Isn’t this against the point of search marketing?

Now, this new factor doesn’t care about the landing page or ad copy, just how related ‘what someone is looking for’ is to your keyword.

Isn’t the point of search marketing that the keyword is always related to the query?

To answer this question, we might have to think a bit more about keyword intents.

Search Query Intent

When you have a keyword such as:

• Nike tennis shoes
• Caribbean vacation packages
• Chicago accountant

Then the query is quite obvious; but what about these words:

• TV
• Radio
• Lawyer

In those cases, you could be looking for TV repair, TV guides, Plasma TV, family planning lawyer, how to become a lawyer, Pandora, Spotify, or any number of items.

In this case, your keyword will rarely be related to the query.

Device Types Change Intent

If you search for ‘movies’ on a mobile phone; you usually want near by theatres and movie times.

If you search for ‘movies’ on a computer, you could be looking for online movies, movie reviews, or any number of various items.

This factor could help Google better understand how to serve ads by geography or device types.

Search or Display

Google doesn’t do nearly as good of job at breaking down Quality Score factors between search and display as they use to. It might be that this is only used on display and is part of the new display initiative to show you keyword level stats for display. In that case, it could be a way for them to start showing quality score information for display (which they don’t right now).

Displayed or Used Quality Score

You see the Quality Score in your account as its rolled up across all of the factors to a keyword. You don’t see the real time Quality Score. For instance, if you are advertising for ‘TV Repair’ you could have a QS of 7. However, if the query is ‘Chicago TV repair’ your QS might be 8; and when the query is ‘Fix my TV Set’ your QS might be a 3.

If this goes to the real time QS; then it makes a lot of sense. If it goes to the displayed QS; then there must be some bad matching or keyword selection happening that forced Google to add this change.

Wrap-Up

I didn’t see this change until today when I was examining some feed information. However, this change was made about a month ago.  In fact, it was made right around when the new display changes were taking place. That could be coincidence; but something to keep in mind if you saw some odd changes to display.

Yet, Google didn’t mention anything about the change. There was no mention by reps, agency newsletters, or even blog posts about this change. I did reach out to some reps, so I’ll see what they have to say about this change. If anyone else has any info – please leave a comment.

Regardless of the change – it isn’t earth shattering. It might cause lower quality scores on ambiguous keywords, or on words that normally have a different intent by device type or geography; but as a month has gone by and no one has seen anything crazy; the effect can’t be too drastic.

However, when you start working on Quality Scores and are wondering why certain words might have lower or higher scores than other keywords regardless of the CTR – this is a factor to now keep in mind.

Google just announced that the Display Campaign Optimizer (DCO) is open for everyone. Before you start jus using it, I wanted to give some feedback on how its worked for a few accounts as I’ve been using this feature for more than a year.

Please note, these are large accounts that participated in the beta. Some of them have spent more than $40 million on DCO all time with monthly budgets of a few million just for DCO. Other campaigns have spent somewhere in the $5-$10 million range.  I think the smallest campaign was spending around $10,000/month on DCO. So, there was a lot of data available.

First, you should know how successful display campaigns are run, and then we’ll look at the differences of how DCO works.

Successful Display Campaigns

Most successful display campaigns use a few steps in optimizing their overall performance:

1. Choose a handful of keywords by ad group
2. Let the ad groups collect data
3. Examine the placement data
   1. If a site does not meet your goals – block it
   2. If a site meets you goals – make it a management placement (often in a new campaign)

As your goal is to find sites that meet your target CPAs, and you’re constantly playing with ads, bids, and exclusions and that can be quite time consuming.

Note: Another way to manage display is to just use managed placements, which is usually best for small budgets.

The main question is: can DCO take out some of this work? Let look at how DCO has worked.

How Display Campaign Optimizer Works

With DCO, you only write ads in the campaigns and set a CPA. You do not choose keywords, placements, topics, interests, or other targeting options.

Based upon your ads and landing pages – Google does all the work.

So, what you lose is control. What you gain is time.

The Big Change to DCO: Minimum Conversions

During the beta, you needed at least 150 conversions a month to be eligible for DCO. Google just opened it to everyone as they lowered this threshold to 15.

This is similar to CPA bidding. When it launched you needed 60 conversions/month. Then it was lowered to 30, and finally 15. While CPA bidding is wonderful if you have 60-100 or more conversions each month in your campaign, it does not work well if you have 15 conversions and 10,000 keywords. There just aren’t enough data points for Google to optimize.

Because you set a CPA, you must be using the Conversion Optimizer bid system with target CPAs enabled.

Should You use DCO?

If you have a large budget and are willing to try DCO out with a budget of at least $5,000/month AND you have found some success on the display network; then please give it a try – you’ll probably see some good results.

If you can spend at least $10,000-$100,000/month on a DCO campaign and have had some success on display – then definitely try it.

If you have a budget that is only going to receive 15-50 conversions a month on the display network, you can either:

• Proceed with a lot of caution as it really might not work
• Use DoubleClick adPlanner to find managed placements and maintain lots of control

You are giving up control. So if you have a well organized display campaign that is working well and you don’t have ‘new budget’ to add to DCO – meaning you’ll be moving existing budget – then proceed with caution as you’re pulling budget away from effective advertising.

I’ve found more success with DCO when you give it a new budget and then as it works, you can transition budgets from existing display campaigns that are working marginally to the DCO campaigns.

How to Enable Display Campaign Optimizer

Enabling DCO is easy. Navigate to the campaign settings and then at the bottom of the page, change the targeting options as seen in this screenshot.

The Confusing Part – You Can’t have Keywords, Placements, or other Targeting Options so How Do You Get to 15 Conversions?

In the beta test you needed a rep to enable this for you. So, you or your rep made the campaigns, you added your CPAs, budgets, and ads and then the system went to work.

You could not have keywords, placements, topics, interests, or other targeting options enabled.

Now, in the new system you must have at least 15 conversions – which means you must start with placements, keywords, topics or some targeting option that will get you enough conversions so you can enable CPA bidding and DCO.

So, it would seem that once you meet the threshold you have to delete all your targeting options for it to work or pause your old ad groups with targeting options, make new ones, and then let it go to work.

This step seems very odd at the moment. I reached out to Google to see how this is going to work. If anyone knows, please leave details in the comments.

In the beta, you really needed to give the tool a couple weeks to collect data and really get going. Sometimes it worked immediately, other times it took a while. Most of those reasons were based upon Google collecting enough data to show your ads. As the new system requires a campaign that already has conversion data, the wait period for success or failure determination could be much lower.

Overall Success

So far, I have put several accounts into the beta. In almost all cases (there was one exception) DCO did a great job of finding new conversions and acceptable CPAs.

It did fail for one account; but I have a feeling that part of that issue was it was a product with a landing page that didn’t have lots of text data on it (it was images and video) and DCO mostly had the ad copy to work from for targeting purposes.

As DCO uses only ad text and landing page data to serve your ads, landing pages with at least a few paragraphs of descriptive text seem to do a little bit better overall – at least to start. Once the system gets going, it has enough historical ad serving data that the landing page info matters a bit less.

The landing page importance of DCO for small to mid sized budgets that won’t have lots of conversion data might (again, I don’t know as there haven’t been small accounts in DCO yet) really come into play for proper ad serving. In other words, if DCO isn’t working and your landing page doesn’t have much text, changing the text of your landing page might help DCO serve your ads better.

Conclusion

If you have additional budget that you aren’t spending and have found success on display – definitely try it out.

If you have had marginal success on display and a healthy budget, then put some budget into DCO to see if it outperforms what you have been doing.

If you have a small to mid-sized account and are an experimenter – try it out – it could be really good (or not).

If you have a small to mid-sized account and prefer to let others fail or succeed first so you can make a highly informed decision about trying it out – then wait until some more results from these types of accounts are published.

Overall, I’ve really enjoyed it – but I have been working with large accounts with lots of data. If DCO works for small to mid-sized accounts, then the display network just got a whole lot more attractive.

Additional Resources

• DCO announcement from Google
• DCO help page (note, its not updated to reflect the fact its open to all)
• Google Promo video for DCO with Dale Carnegie

Google video on Display Campaign Optimizer:

Alpha males have the highest Rank. Alpha advertisers have the highest Ad Rank.

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

You can do it.

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

Sorry.

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

Yikes!

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

Yep!

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.

Adwords diagnostic tool

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.