Monitoring Your Google AdWords Quality Score

If you’ve been advertising on Google AdWords for a while, you know that it’s all about quality score. The better your quality score, the better you rank, the lower your CPCs, and the more revenue and margin you can squeeze out of your Google AdWords campaigns.

On a keyword level, it’s super easy to measure quality score. After all, quality score is exposed on a keyword level. (Side note: If quality score is low for any particular keyword, I always recommend breaking it out and optimizing ad copy.)

Now, let’s say you’re managing millions of keywords like me. How do you get a sense of your overall account level quality score? Here’s how… Each month, I recommend exporting your entire Google AdWords account with all columns. Then, I recommend creating a new column called quality score * cost that equals the product of quality score and cost. Next, sum the new quality score * cost column and also the cost column. Divide the quality score * cost sum by cost sum and you have your weighted average quality score for your entire Google AdWords account!

Make sure to to do this exact same exercise each and every month. On Google’s back end, quality scores are not on the simple 1 to 10 scale that they export to the end user. However, the 1 to 10 scale is the best we have. These days, a high-spending AdWords account with a lot of history and a great quality score should have an average quality score in the 7 range. When you start measuring on a month to month basis, you’ll see some fluctuations (usually within a 1 point range). Make sure your weighted average has at least two decimal points.

Why do you want to measure this number? There are a few main reasons. First and foremost, you want to see if all your ad copy and reorg projects are working. If your quality score improves, it indicates your work is paying off. Second, you want to keep an eye out of major issues with your account. If your quality score drops, there’s likely a new competitor in your category who is adversely affecting your click through rate (and therefore quality score) or something is wrong with your account. A drop is something to spend time investigating. Third, quality score is a great metric to manage upwards. It’s a way to benchmark your team’s performance. It’s not as important as revenue and margin, but is one other indicator of progress.

Image of check mark © alexsl

WordStream’s Free Quality Score Toolkit

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Oct 23 10

I’m very excited about today’s post! I’m going to discuss one of my all time favorite Internet marketing systems, WordStream Moreover, I’m going to discuss their amazing quality score toolkit which can be yours absolutely free! It seems like more and more companies are giving away free whitepapers and eBooks these days (and I can’t get enough of it). Well, WordStream takes it a step further and offers an entire quality score toolkit – comprised of a whitepaper, cheat sheet, video, and quality score worksheet – all for free!

What Is WordStream?

If you’ve been following PPC Ian for a while there’s no doubt you’re aware of my SEM automation obsession. I have discussed a multitude of SEM tools in past posts and even wrote a free whitepaper about evaluating SEM applications for your organization. What is WordStream? WordStream is an Internet marketing application that automates and adds immense process to keyword generation, keyword review, keyword grouping, ad copy writing, and much more.

The tool has taken the industry by storm! From my perspective (someone who has used the vast majority of the SEM tools out there), WordStream tackles a truly unique and exciting problem, one which few other tools properly handle. Said another way, I recommend coupling WordStream with your other SEM bidding/management solution if you have one. Below are just a few of my favorite aspects of WordStream (definitely not a comprehensive list, just a few highlights):

Adding structure and workflow to keyword review and grouping, WordStream ensures you always have the right keywords in the best possible ad groups. In turn, this translates to optimal click through rates and therefore lower CPCs.
WordStream is all about workflow. It conveniently organizes the manual activities of keyword review, keyword grouping, and ad copy writing into prioritized queues. You can work through the queues yourself or easily delegate/outsource. Once you’re done, WordStream works wih search engine APIs to upload your work.
WordStream ensures you continuously improve your search engine accouts. Are you adding new, relevant keywords to your account daily? Are they in the right adgroups with the right ad copy? How about custom ads?
It seamlessly integrates with your site, leveraging organic traffic to generate PPC keywords.

What’s In WordStream’s Free Quality Score Toolkit?

As you can tell, I’m a huge fan of WordStream! I’m also a huge fan of their free quality score toolkit. So, what exactly do you get in the toolkit?

First and foremost, you get an amazing 18 page whitepaper all about Google’s quality score. The whitepaper explains the importance of quality score, how you can improve your quality score, and how you can leverage WordStream to improve your quality score. I recommend reading this first as a great introduction to WordStream.
Second, you get a one page quality score cheat sheet. This is a super one pager that you can pass around your organization. Its a great way to educate your management team, should they have any questions about quality score.
Third, you get an amazing mastering quality score video.
Last, you get a sophisticated quality score worksheet that analyzes your Google AdWords account.

I highly recommend downloading WordStream’s free quality score toolkit and learning all about how WordStream can take your SEM team’s game to the next level.

Image in this post © WordStream

Quality Score: SEO Tips For PPC Landing Pages

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Feb 22 14

If you’ve been in pay per click search engine marketing for a while, there’s no doubt you’ve faced landing page quality score issues at least once. I’ve managed AdWords campaigns for dozens of sites. Thankfully, the majority of these sites have been multi-million-dollar category leaders with excellent landing page quality scores. However, a few of them have not been so fortunate. Today, I’m looking forward to sharing my thoughts around optimizing your landing pages for Google’s quality score. Specifically, I’ll discuss a few SEO-style tips that directly impact PPC quality scores.

Tip 1: Meta Data Affects PPC Quality Score

Red Matrix

If you’ve optimized sites for SEO, you’ve definitely worked with the title, meta description, and meta keywords tags within the HTML head section. In the SEO world, these tags are extremely important – they directly affect the ad copy of your listing within the organic results. However, I’m here to highlight that these tags also affect your PPC quality score. Just think about it: The existence of targeted meta data shows Google that your landing page is part of "real" website, one that is well thought through and directly relevant to the keywords in question.

Some tactical tips: Keep your title to 8 to 10 keywords (or fewer), your meta description to 156 characters or less, and your meta keywords to 8 to 10 (or fewer). Moreover, make sure the keywords that you’re targeting are included throughout (especially at the beginning), but don’t overdo it.

Tip 2: Keyword-Optimize Your Landing Pages

I’m sure you’ve heard it time and time again: Content is king! This statement is absolutely true for PPC, just like SEO. It’s critical to not only keyword-optimize your title, meta description, and meta keywords, but also your overall landing page. You don’t need to go crazy, but it’s super beneficial to sprinkle your keyword across the page, at least a few times.

So, you have millions of keywords. Does this mean you need millions of custom landing pages? Absolutely not! My advice: Work with your engineering team to build a dynamic landing page (or a series of pages around the major themes), one that renders "customized" depending on the incoming keyword. My preference is to have a table on the back end that maps keywords to the custom, dynamic content rather than passing the content in through the URL string.

Tip 3: Leverage All Major HTML Text Formatting Tags

Another simple, yet very practical tip: Make sure to leverage the common HTML formatting tags. Some examples include <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <strong>, and <em>. The story behind this: You’re trying to show search engines that your landing page is well thought through. By including these tags, your PPC landing page becomes a well optimized SEO experience, one that shows search engines just how relevant your site is to the user.

Tip 4: Include Important Links In Your Footer

From my experience, there are several absolutely critical links that must be present in all of your PPC landing page footers: Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions, Site Map, and Contact Us. Google is all about credibility and transparency. By including these links in your footer, you’re being absolutely open and honest with your visitors.

If you leverage AdSense on your site, it’s actually required that you have a privacy policy on your landing page discussing Google’s use of cookies. Moreover, new FTC guidelines require Ts and Cs, Privacy Policies, and Affiliate Disclaimers to be more robust than ever. I take all of this stuff very seriously.

Tip 5: Add Alt Tags To All Images

The title of this tip says it all: Make sure your image alt tags are descriptive and relevant. It’s yet one more data point that can help Google determine the relevancy of your landing page. Of course, it’s very important to be accurate and keep your alt tags short.

Tip 6: Make Sure Search Engines Don’t Index PPC Landing Pages

So far, all of my tips have been geared toward improving the landing page quality score of your pay per click landing pages. However, I wanted to close out with a tip that will help maintain your great relationship with your organization’s SEO team.

I highly recommend coordinating closely with your SEO team, informing them of all your PPC landing pages. Most of the time, you will want to make sure to noindex your PPC pages. In PPC, it’s totally ok to have hundreds (or even thousands) of very similar pages that may differ only slightly for the keyword in question. However, such a practice in SEO is very bad, one that would be considered duplicate content. The solution: Orphan your PPC landing pages from the main site while noindexing them as well. The user will be able to go from your landing page to the main site, but a user from your main site will not find your pay per click landing pages (and moreover they will not get indexed by search engines).

Domain Investing and URL History

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Nov 18 2

I enjoy investing in domains during my spare time. In my opinion, domains are an amazing investment, just like real estate before the market got crowded and efficient. Each and every day there are awesome inefficiencies in the domain market that give savvy investors the opportunity to unlock great value. However, as with any investment you can quickly lose serious money if you don’t do your due diligence. Today, I’ll discuss one of my domain due diligence checks: The importance of investigating your prospective domain’s PPC search engine history.

Search Engines Store PPC History on a Domain Level

Domain Investing

Google has been focusing on permanently removing websites from AdWords that do not adhere to their policies. Whether a webmaster intentionally violates Google’s policies or does so unknowingly, it’s actually very easy to create bad search engine history for an otherwise good URL. Moreover, when a URL accumulates bad history, that history follows it forever. It doesn’t matter who owns the URL or who’s AdWords account you’re using, the bad history will always be there. The bottom line: Don’t Buy a domain that has bad search engine history, period. I will show you how to test a URL’s history later, but let’s first illustrate the problem with an example.

Example: A Domain With Bad AdWords History

Hypothetically, let’s say Domainer XYZ buys a one-word domain in the financial services industry for $20,000. Domainer XYZ doesn’t feel like developing the site so he simply creates a "doorway page" that basically asks the user to enter their zip code before redirecting to another site that has an affiliate offer. Thin sites like this are clearly against Google’s policy. However, because masters of PPC can make a quick buck (especially if their domain is good), this type of thing happens every single day. Now, let’s say Domainer XYZ advertises this thin user experience on Google AdWords for months and make a few thousand dollars profit.

Months go by and everything is fine. However, one day Google finds out what’s going on and they assign the URL a quality score of 1. Immediately, all of Domainer XYZ’s PPC traffic dries up. Because he has a ton of things going on, Domainer XYZ decides to abandon this site and work on other projects. A few months later, Google emails Domainer XYZ and says his site is permanently banned from Google AdWords. Sound unrealistic? It’s not, trust me! This amazing $20,000 domain is now tarnished forever. Regardless of who owns it, this domain will never be valid in AdWords again. History is stored on the domain level so it does not matter who owns it or which account is used for AdWords.

Now, let’s say you’re a new domain investor and decide to buy this domain from Domainer XYZ. If you haven’t done your due diligence, you could end up with a URL that has been banned from Google AdWords without even knowing it! (Side note: If you’re happening to read this too late and this has already happened to you, I highly recommend calling Google AdWords support. Google is there to help and they may be able to help in your situation, but it’s much easier to walk away from this type of deal than hope you’ll be able to get the quality score reversed after buying.)

Google Makes Quality Score Mistakes From Time To Time

I want to point out that this is just one example of how a domain could accumulate bad history. In my experience, Google is large enough these days and has enough automated processes that innocent websites can get assigned poor quality scores as well. I’ve actually seen this several times. Thus, if you run across a low quality score website, I wouldn’t just assume the seller is a malicious webmaster. At times, it’s just a function of Google’s algorithm making a mistake. The unfortunate part: Google will rarely be able to reverse a quality score mistake unless you’re a huge spender. However, if this does happen to you, never give up! Make sure to contact Google and explain your situation. At the end of the day, they are there to help and please keep a positive and optimistic attitude.

How To Protect Yourself As A Domain Investor

Now, let’s get to the fun part. How do you make absolutely certain that you don’t buy a bad domain that was previously used to abuse AdWords? It’s actually quite easy. First and foremost, just open a Google AdWords account and send traffic to the site (even before you own it). Send traffic to the homepage, but also a variety of deeper landing pages. Invest some real time in this. Let the campaigns sit for a few days. If you’re not seeing good or great quality scores (7 or better) and are not getting consistent click volume, you may have a red flag. Important Disclaimer: Do not send traffic to the site if it’s undeveloped. If you’re buying a URL that currently just has a list of GoDaddy ads, you could do some damage to the site’s history if you send traffic.

In addition to the AdWords check, I highly recommend running your site through the Way Back Machine. Understand the site’s look and feel over the years. Was it ever used as a thin affiliate website? If so, you may have a red flag. However, I don’t like this check as much as the last one because the seller can still hide "marginal activities" underneath and otherwise solid site.

To close out, I hope I’ve helped mitigate some potential downside in your future domain investments. Due diligence can be a long process, but it’s totally worth it. Invest the time and test the pay per click validity of a URL before investing your hard earned money.