Blame It (and Everything Else) on Quality Score
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Written By Peter Hershberg | June 6, 2007 | Share This
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This week’s SMX Conference featured a panel called “Inside the Auction Black Box.” Not surprisingly, most of the panelist’s presentations – and nearly all of the questions from the audience – focused on the search marketing community’s collective inability to understand exactly how Google’s Quality Score (and all the associated mechanics of the ad ranking system) works. Questions ranged from “Why did my ad’s minimum CPC go from $.25 to $5.00 when it was getting a 10% click-through rate?” to “Are my landing pages being crawled?”
What was somewhat surprising, however, was the amount of time spent discussing how the black box impacts the type of support Google provides to its advertisers. And I couldn’t help but walk away from that session feeling that my suspicions had been confirmed - that the account teams at Google either have no better understanding of how their ad ranking system works than the rest of the search marketing world does OR they’ve been advised that, when in doubt, blame the unexplainable on Quality Score.
For example, for the past few weeks we’ve been managing an AdWords campaign for a local advertiser. His keyword list, consequently, is extensively populated with local “tail” terms. Not long after the campaign launched, a high percentage of keywords were deactivated due to low quality scores - which we pretty much expected to happen. To our surprise, however, dynamic keyword insertion wasn’t working for many of the city names that we wanted to feature in the ad creative. The instances when it was working seemed to be completely random.
We reached out to the folks at Google to see if they could help us address the issue. Nearly two weeks after opening a help ticket, we received their formal response:
“You’ll recall that we spoke specifically about keywords like ‘XXXX,’ ‘YYYY,’ and ‘ZZZZ.’ These keywords are not dynamically inserted into your ad text because their corresponding Quality Scores aren’t high enough to qualify for keyword insertion.
Maintaining high-quality ads for both users and advertisers is important to AdWords. Your keyword’s Quality Score reflects your clickthrough rate (CTR), plus your keyword, ad text, and landing page content.
This quality standard can affect your ads and keywords using dynamic keyword insertion. Therefore, if a keyword’s Quality Score is low, the keyword won’t appear in the ad (we’ll insert the default text instead). This ensures that users see relevant keywords in a dynamic keyword insertion ad, so that they continue to see relevant ads overall.
To learn how to improve the quality of your ad text, please visit https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=27648&hl=en_US.”
Needless to say, I wanted to see how Google suggested we could improve the quality of our ad text, so I visited the url they had provided us with.
Unbelievably enough, Google suggests the following:
“Review your keyword list to choose your ad title. Find keywords with the highest number of clicks or impressions. For example, if the keyword phrase ‘online advertising’ is clearly generating the most clicks and impressions in your account, use this term in the title of your ad. This is an effective way of increasing clickthrough rate because users can see immediately that your ad is relevant to their query. Also, any keywords you include in any part of your ad text are automatically highlighted in bold type on Google, when a user enters the keywords as part of their query. This helps draw the user’s attention to the ad.”
So, the best way for me to increase the quality of my ad is by featuring the keyword that the user searched for in my ad copy? That would be great were it not for the fact that I was just told that my ad’s Quality Score wasn’t high enough to justify using dynamic keyword insertion to feature the keyword in my ad copy. How else can I make sure that user keywords are always featured?
Well, according to Google:
“To help ensure that your ad appears for a specific keyword and includes this keyword in the ad text, please manually create the ad. Such ads that do not use keyword insertion are considered ’static text ads.’ The static ad you create can appear with your specific keyword when your dynamic ad is not eligible to appear with that keyword. “
Forgetting for a moment that creating tens of thousands of “static ads” is a complete pain in the ass, I’m having a hard time following the logic here. On the one hand, Google is suggesting that the use of dynamic keyword insertion on ads with low Quality Scores may cause users to see “irrelevant” ads. But if I manually create a static version of the *exact* same ad that was previously deemed irrelevant, users will suddenly find it relevant? Right.
Call it a catch-22, call it poor customer service…or just blame it on Quality Score.
Topics: Advertising: Online, Conferences & Events, Google, Google: AdWords, SEM: Ad Creative, SEM: Keyword Generation, SEM: Paid Search |
Peter,
I knew where this post was leading well before I got to the end…
I’ve gotten the “create a static ad” version piece of advice recently as well.
I just do it.
Not sure yet whether it really works yet.
The crime is that I’ve given up on the AdWords API due to cost and hassle, so I generate all the ad groups, and then cut and paste them into AdWords Editor.
I must be getting too predictable with these posts… or maybe it’s Google that’s getting too predictable
In any case, we’ll likely go down the “static ad” path as well. What impact that will have, if any, on our campaigns remains to be seen. If nothing else, it’s fodder for my next post.