the PPC Book|Pay Per Click Blog | Long Tail Thoughts in a Short Tail World

This is the first session I went to yesterday. It was a packed house as this is obviously a hot button issue with online marketers. Overall impression: I was impressed with the people on the panel, they were articulate and presented well enough, but the information in the presentations wasn’t nearly granular enough. No one really provided any insight beyond what is already widely known.

The overriding message was “relevance”. And after the Yahoo party last night I don’t think I could particularly well explain how this relates to actual quality score calculations (it doesn’t, just look at ebay ads). Maybe Yahoo put something in my Yahoo-tini so that I would forget.

One guy in particular I do enjoy listening to is Jonathan Mendez from Otto Digital. He showed off some impressively designed mutlivariate testing. Or, I just like charts with real information in them, and he had lots of them.

OK, my mind is on turkey now almost 100% of the time, but….

2 important pieces of information I wanted to make light of.

1. Bad Brad Geddes posted his pubcon presentation on the Quality Score. You should read it.

Highlight: At the bottom of slide 4, “There are over 100 factors that can affect quality score. However, not all will be triggered depending on the conditions involved.” – Google Engineer.

2. A member of Digital Point claims to have been invited to beta test a Quality Score Display in Adgroups. I’ll try to speak with some of my sources to verify that this is indeed upcoming, and I’ll do my damndest to get an invite as well.

OK, that’s the last post before Thanksgiving Day. Have a great holiday everyone.

Yesterday the Google Adwords team posted a mea culpa to advertisers regarding the latest quality score adjustment.

You say, “Jeff I don’t have time to read that stuff, tell me what they said”. And I say, Grasshopper, the whole thing boils down to one sentance:

“the Quality Score doesn’t incorporate any conversion information”

Hmmmm…….

I’m thinking maybe conversion is a good indicator of quality, no? Other folks have shown hard data that clearly illustrates there is a problem with their algorithm.

The tone of this post kind of reminds me of George Bush talking about Iraq. He can say whatever he wants but intelligent people all over the world know it’s seriously fubar. My message to Adwords? Your intentions may be good (maybe), but you are driving people away in droves. And not neccessarily the kind of people you want to drive away. I’ve seen far too many real campaigns from real advertisers get smoked with the new LPQS changes.

Anyhow, I won’t complain, I’ve always said we need at least 3 major, competitive, PPC platforms. Right now we have approximately 1.5. The more Adwords tries to make sweeping overhauls with poor execution, the more opportunity for someone else to step in and take that business. Anyone? Buhler? Anyone?

In another move to shake the pesky affiliates from their saddle, the Adwords team announced this week that they will require you to take a lie detector test as part of the account sign up process.

Wait, that’s the news form 2009. In the present day, Adwords did announce some changes coming soon regarding their calculation of landing page quality. Most conspicuously, these changes will effect the content network ads:

In the next few days, we will be making two changes to how AdWords evaluates landing page quality. First, we’ll begin incorporating landing page quality into the Quality Score for your contextually-targeted ads, using the same evaluation process as we do for ads showing on Google.com and the search network.

This makes sense to me and really is no big suprise, but what is more vague and won’t be measured to any extent for weeks and months to come is this comment:

Second, we’re improving our algorithm for evaluating landing page quality and incorporating landing page content retrieved by the AdWords system.

Obviously, this will make things more difficult, and not easier, for both middlemen affiliates and everyday advertisers. Google is currently in a position in which they can afford to approach the market from a position of strength, exerting their utopian advertising dreams upon everyone at will. In Larry and Sergey’s perfect world, every advertiser will be like wikipedia.com and there will be nary a call to action anywhere on your site. If you think I’m joking you don’t know Google very well.

You won’t find me complaining, though, as moves like this make professional grade PPC management a necessity, not an option. Even better if your PPC analyst has figured out the adwords algorithm;)

Well, until today, I had no clients under my management that were adversely effected by the quality score changes. My previous thought was that only arbitrage and straight affiliate sites were being targeted. That no longer appears to be the case. No, I’m not going to over dramatize this as most bloggers have in the industry. I’m just going to show you what happened to my client.

The one reason I want to highlight this is that it is a real business with a storefront and real human operators. It’s a service oriented company. It’s not arbitrage or affiliate related. They spend more than a couple thousand a month with an IP targeted campaign and conversion tracking. Once the quality score algo changed last week, I noticed a massive drop in traffic. Here’s why. Some of their best keywords had been disabled. In fact, 75% of their keywords were disabled. This is not a junk campaign with one adgroup and 2000 keywords. Each adgroup is carefully crafted with about 20-25 keywords. 7 adgroups. 5 ad copies per. Here’s an example of the performance I was getting and you tell me why it’s shut down. Notice, the CTR is ok, and the conversion rate is good (relative to the call to action)…

Here’s another example…

This isn’t an example from a huge client, and that’s why I chose it. This demonstrates the potential effect to your everyday advertiser who runs a legitimate business, with legitimate ads, who’s trying to use this platform to generate business.

I think, as with so many Google innovations in the last 2 years, that the intention is good, but the execution is extremely poor. The intention here is to devalue sites that don’t offer value to the searching public. They are after arbitrage sites, thin affiliate sites, and MFA’s. What it appears they are catching is some of the baby with the bathwater. The small, medium, and large sized advertisers who are doing things the right way.

This isn’t a disaster by any means. I know exactly what can be done to get this campaign back on track. I believe Google will get better at discerning the MFA’s from the ‘real’ websites, and at the same time, we as marketers have to get better at telling Google what our site is about.

Again, at the end of the day, I see more and more that Pay Per Click and SEO optimzation are becoming one in the same. In order to have a successful Adwords campaign you now have to optimize your site just as you would for SEO.