The state of Adwords Advertiser Accounts have changed over the years where it was once very common to find an account without negative keywords and now it is rather uncommon. In time, advertisers have either become savvier to Adwords best practices or they have hired agencies to implement strategies.

But how far have they really evolved?

I can tell you for certain that the Google’s profit algorithm has evolved even further and is always 10 steps ahead of its advertisers. So my job is to make sure you guys are keeping up with the times.Search queries happen to be a major part of the account research we do here at our ppc management company. Looking at what people actually type into Google tells us a lot about the visitors you are attracting and what they are looking for. Routine search query analysis is a paramount component for many advertisers but we feel most have just gone part of the way to maximize its usefulness.

3 Things to Analyze with Search Queries

Irrelevant Queries-This is the area where we’ve actually seen progress from Adwords’ customers. They pull a [Search Term] report, look through it, and add negative keywords for any irrelevant searches. Easy enough.

Incorrect Adgroup-This is where we start to see major problems. Incorrect adgroups refer to when the search query is relevant to the business offering but not the specific adgroup it is in. When this happens, the visitor can sees the less targeted ad and; if clicked, is sent to the wrong landing pages.

Example: query=dark bold coffee when adgroup=light body coffee; you might sell them both but you want the dark bold queries to go to the dark bold page, not the light body page.

This error is commonly overlooked because when Adwords managers review the query list, they are looking for discrepancies in the query defined but not which adgroup it belonged to. Problems with incorrect adgroups lead to lower CTRs, lower quality scores, higher CPCs, higher bounce rates, higher conversion costs, etc. A process which guides traffic down the appropriate avenues will have a positive impact on the account.

General Queries-This is the easier fix but often a more dangerous culprit. General terms tend to have more volume, competition, and cost associated with the clicks. So when general terms are plagueing the account, they are often putting a big dent in the wallet.

General terms can describe your business offering in either an overly vague sense or a more general category sense. When queries are general, it helps to evaluate how general it is and if it should be considered a candidate for your keyword list.

Example: query=coffee beans when adgroup= light body coffee; you certainly sell coffee beans but maybe they want to see the entire coffee selection of light and dark body types.

When general queries go to specific landing pages, the visitor often mistakes that page for the entire product offering. They are more likely to bounce and have the same negative effects as incorrect adgroup discrepancies. They are actually one in the same.

Sometimes you find that a general query doesn’t refine the visitor to be qualified enough to be a good paying customer for you. In this case you don’t want your ads to show for general queries. For example, “coffee” by itself might be too general for your taste (pun intended) but you would like ads to show for “gourmet coffee” and “dark roast coffee.”  Negative exact matched keywords are in order for these. i.e. [coffee]

More is better, right? Hell, it’s the American Way.

“If I have more keywords, I can cover more bases when customers do a search for my products. The more I have, the wider that net is and that means I’ll be seen more. Where can I find more keywords?” Tell me if this sounds familiar?

This is a very logical point of view. In fact, it’s not a bad strategy at all when you set limits and don’t spread the keyword mix too thin. That plan will work fine until you’ve gone too far. That’s when things get out of hand.

Here’s the rub. When you have X amount of budget to spend monthly/daily on keyword clicks, X gets distributed throughout all the keywords you bid on. Keywords that don’t have many clicks and impressions don’t have a high population of statistical data. When the distribution is over a vast amount of keywords, a higher percentage of the budget becomes lost to all the many keywords that don’t produce enough volume of clicks. There won’t be sufficient data to make any assessment to whether the keywords are in fact performing greatly, poorly, or even average. That’s when you’re stuck!

The more of the budget that gets spread over these types of keywords, a higher percentage of your budget is rendered “non-actionable” and potentially wasteful. The only way to assess these keywords would be to wait it out for months or even years. One keyword by itself is not a great danger to your bank account. It’s the aggregate of all the other keywords accruing little data over time that makes this situation expensive and problematic.

When you find yourself here, you become paralyzed in your choices to improve your keyword performance. You simply won’t know where to start. You’ll bleed money through your keywords but you won’t know exactly which ones are killing you.

It is a silent dilemma that goes unnoticed in so many accounts. Advertisers have little understanding how to solve this because they don’t know what they’re looking for. They only know their conversion costs are high and they aren’t as profitable as they would like to be.

In table above, you’ll notice that the highlighted keyword data is substantially low in clicks. If this were taken from a period over a day or two, it would not be long before we could make an assessment on how “most” of these keywords were performing. The bottom four keywords which have only accrued 1or 2 clicks might take some time. If this were data taken from one day of activity, it would be several months before the population of clicks was large enough to assess.

We are not advising that you should pause or delete all low traffic keywords. The recommendation is that you try and keep the percentage of budget spent on low traffic keywords to a minimum.

Take the bottom 4 keywords for example and imagine that 40% of your budget was spent on these types of low traffic keyword variations. Let’s also assume that at least half of these keywords would end up being poor performers. That would mean that 20% of your overall budget allocation would end up being wasteful. The dangerous part is not only that you find out you have been wasting this money but also that it’s taken you months to find out.

This is how advertisers become paralyzed in their accounts. But where does this type of scenario root from? How do advertisers get pigeon-holed into having so many keywords with little traffic?

It’s because more is better, right? Not in this case. Focus the budget more toward higher traffic keywords with good conversion costs and limit the keyword expansion on low traffic words with no conversions that get less than 100 clicks a month.

Chances are you won’t know which keywords work until you test them. Lower traffic words tend to have lower quality scores anyway so just keep an eye on how many you have. Some advertisers have separated high performing keywords into separate campaigns so they receive as much budget as they need. Low performers are then segregated from the high performers and given a smaller budget.

The bottom line: You have to spend within your means. If you have a set budget, spend on keywords that you know to benefit you. If your budget is limited, you won’t receive more traffic by simply having more keywords.

I have to admit: I’ve been dying to write an updated piece about Quality Score (QS) since 2 years ago when we put out THIS BLOG piece. The game has changed forever and I’ve spent more time gritting my teeth and cursing at my monitor (logged into Adwords) than ever before. The reason is because we were told quality score was to help ‘reward’ advertisers for constructing highly relevant campaigns and adgroups. But its all different now. Where’s the reward?

When QS was first introduced to advertisers in 2005, it was just a static score used to determine the minimum CPC based on the ad relevancy to its keywords. Over the next five years, Google would add in: CTR, landing page relevancy, account history (a combine average of all CTR’s in an account, and (the best part) “other relevant factors.” I’ve always gotten a big laugh out of “other relevant factors” because as I would dissect QS, I could see there was much more unexplained reasoning for low quality scores.

An Illustration of Traditional Quality Score (Pre-2009-2010)

In August of 2008, Google restructured QS and made it a “real-time” score that would take effect as soon as someone searched on Google. Some of the other differences Google made were: replacment of minimum CPC  to “first page minimum bid”, landing page quality, and landing page load time. In expectation of a rough change to quality scores, we were surprised that existing advertisers who had been advertising a while, didn’t really see much change…until 2010. Now we go into the accounts and look around at QS but we’re not in Kansas no mo.

I’ve always been indifferent to conspiracy theories except when it came to my own. I had to put the pieces together myself. Google’s published material were of little help and of what Googlers would say about QS, you would have to wash the automatic procedural responses from the more helpful factual things that no one could officially comment on. And when Q4 2009 hit, something was happening. QS was changing forever.

If you currently have low quality scores then first I suggest trying these steps which have been published time and time again.

1. Increase your CTR by creating highly relevant ads to the keywords in each adgroup.
2. Make sure your ads point to landing pages that contain relevant content.
3. Use  ’call to actions’ in your ad to improve CTR.
4. Ensure your landing pages load quickly. If they timeout often, compress you page file sizes or image sizes, or increase the server bandwidth.
5. See if you get a better QS from testing  new match settings.

Prior to 2009, the above techniques probably fixed everything 95% of the time. Chances are that if you’re reading this, you have already exhausted the above resources aren’t seeing improvements. In many cases, they no longer work for your quality scores. We always start with the reasons above because they are more obvious and if they do not budge, we work our way deeper into the investigation if those don’t work.

I have spent the greater part of 2009-2010 troubleshooting quality score with my team. During the coarse of investigation and screaming bloody murder, and with the help of anonymous Googlers, I have unlocked 8 new criteria which have a certain effect on QS. Much of these points have never before been published anywhere by Google. Other points that Google has published have helped to support my investigations and case studies.

8 other things you can do to fix low quality scores:

1. Use keywords that have enough volume to be deemed relevant. If you have keywords in your mix that just don’t carry the search query volume, it is quite common that you’ll find lower QS across the board. Google demonstrates that if the keyword search volume is extremely low (less 25 impressions a day), the keyword must not be very relevant and deserves a low QS. We have found the same to be true in many instances of using very specific keywords. For our local advertisers, we used to create several keywords with city targeted names. As the search volume for “service+city” decreases in less populated areas or suburbs, so does the QS. A real problem is that the accounts were flooded with these low volume (low QS) keywords and it seemed contagious to the better volume keywords in the account. These days it is best to delete the great majority of lower volume keywords in an account and lay refuge to the keywords that substantiate for most of your per-click spend.
2. Pay close attention to your industry’s average quality score for each keyword. Google now factors in the average QS of your industry or competitors when determining your quality score. There are competitive industries where it’s hard for new businesses to get involved in Adwords. Heavy ‘barriers to entry’ protect existing advertisers but make it hard for new advertisers to perform well and keep up good QS levels. An example of this is the PPC management industry. It’s extremely difficult trying to compete for “PPC Management” keywords (as you could imagine). Somethings you can’t control. Go after other keywords that are less competitive.
3. Avoid industry keywords that Google might want to put the “SMACK” down on. Google announced last year that it would not condone advertisers who were promoting products and services which they had no hand it delivering. This is because businesses nationally complained that the Sponsored Results were cluttered with affiliate marketers and get-rich-quick schemes. If you share the same keywords with affiliate marketers, get-rich-businesses, and other banned industry types; be aware that Google could mistakenly think you are one of these business types and make your advertising days hell. (To avoid other mistakes read about Quality Components below, specifically around Navigation.)
4. Use multi-word keyphrases. One-word keywords and extremely general 2-word keywords will often lead to low QS. By nature, these terms are more vague and ambiguous. If Google finds there to be no specified meaning to your keyword, it will be faulted.  This occurs more frequently in 1-word terms rather than 2-3-word terms so weight this factor more heavily with your single-word keywords. In multiple word terms, try and judge the vagueness and compare to more specific terms to see if they are getting higher QS.
5. Make sure you are not hosted on servers that are shared with malicious phishing websites, affiliate marketers, and competitiors. There is not really a sure way to know who you are sharing a server with. Recently, we created a small targeted campaign for a client who initially had some coding problems. Once the coding bugs were fixed we saw no change in QS. Google was smacking them with 1/10 across the board with in a few minutes of launching. The diagnostic tool listed the problem to be the landing page. After troubleshooting every possible reason for this atrocious scoring, our second to last resort was to change the hosting. (The last resort would have been the change the domain name.) The hosting change worked and he was 7/10-10/10 across the campaigns.
6. Look deeper into Google’s Landing Page Quality Component. Google states, “Other than complying with our Advertising Policies, we also recommend that advertisers bear in mind the three main components of a high quality website: relevant and original content, transparency, and navigability. Maintaining a positive user experience in these areas will help improve your site’s landing page quality.” Particularly in the areas that talk about Content and Navigability. Things to look for and avoid right off are: mirrored landing pages, duplicated or non-original content on site, having a website with no link structure or navigation (it looks like and affiliate offer so sales pitch page), data collection modules that offer free stuff to harvest data, linking to shopping comparison sites, direct linking to affiliate offers, linking to redirects (what’s the point?), and similar scenarios. IMPORTANT: Google will associate poor quality score with the website and not the Adwords account so if you get in trouble here, you might try a new URL if all other techniques fail. Do so once your website and Adwords account comply with guidelines mentioned on this page.
7. Don’t build too fast. No one likes a bully. Whoever coined the term, “Patience is a virtue” should have said, “If you’re not patient, you will suck mud and die.” After countless bouts of troubleshooting QS, I have found success often when I scaled back and tried to advertise 1 or 2 small adgroups to start. One of the major observations I made is that Google might try and protect existing advertisers from new advertisers bullying their way into market. This makes a lot of sense  (from the mom and pop business owner persective). As  the smaller business owner who has been advertising on Google since Nam, how sad would it be if some schmuck-o with deep pockets came in blew them outta the water by over-bidding hundreds of keywords? That kinda of activity, unchallenged, would be the death of small business.  This goes back to ’05 and the original principles and intentions Google had for QS which was protecting advertisers from bidding wars. To set up an optimized campaign, its gonna take time anyway. I suggest you start super slow in the first week or two and then pick up the pace if you need to from there. If you launch a campaign and you’re getting hit with poor QS, try reviewing the other factors and when you start again. Build out a new but smaller campaign/adgroup and re-launch. Delete the previous failures.
8. Investigate deeper reasoning for slow landing page load time. Now and again, we will find an advertiser who is just really having a hard time getting pages to load quickly. Here, we just want to make sure there is no coding errors which would cause server timeouts. The way to notice this is if you try and visit the landing page but it never fully loads. You notice that the browser is still loading or “thinking” (if we give it human qualities as we often do with computers). If this is the case, investigate whether it is a server load issue or whether there is something on your website that won’t allow the page the load completely every time. You might seek the help of your web developer with this. Also, avoid Flash components that are not embedded into your readable code. 100% Flash intros are a “NO-NO” for Google. Google doesn’t read Flash…yet.

This blog was inspired out of frustration with Google’s ever-changing quality score algorithm. Right when you think you have it locked down, something changes and makes it more difficult. I am NOT going to be the one who says its a profitability scheme designed to make Google more profitable but I am sure someone will.

My only advice to advertisers seeking higher quality scores and better ROI is not to give up. Be patient and explore every option. If you don’t, you’ll never reach the light. Advertisers have always stood up to Google’s challenges to guarantee their own success with quality score. Just like SEO, most advertisers eventually fulfill every criteria for it until Google comes out with some new hurdle to overcome. Its harder now than ever to overcome. This is how Google sorts out competition jockeying for position and restores order to these environments. The good news is that less people will be willing to go the distance this time; leaving you with the true opportunity. This is the next hurdle. This is the new Adwords Quality Score Frontier.

Sincerely,

Peter Dulay-Quality Score Skeptic