Why The Quality Score Rocks!

The Quality Score has always been a bit of a contentious issue. Some people argue that as it pushes adverts with high clickthrough rates up to the top of the search results, and hence increases Google’s income, it’s evil. But who does it actually hurt?
Well, there’s no doubt that it’s become more and more difficult for affiliate marketers to use Adwords, and arbitrage (bidding on cheap keywords, and covering your website with Google adverts with a much higher cost per click, in order to make money from clicks on the more expensive adverts) has all but died out.

But Google is a search engine – and in the long run, they live and die by delivering relevant results. If you search on Google for a product or service, but don’t find what you’re looking for, you’ll probably end up using Yahoo or MSN…
The Quality Score is intended to be a measure of relevance, and to a certain point, it is. It’s based on the clickthrough rate, and also looks at whether the search query is contained in the advert, and on your website.
If people click on an advert, it’s likely to be relevant – in the absence of artificial intelligence, Google are using ‘real’ intelligence to judge the relevance of the adverts. And if the advert mentions what somebody is searching for (without dynamically inserting the keyword), then the advertiser must have written an advert specifically for that search query – so it’s likely to be relevant (unless they are e-bay).
So how well does the Quality Score work? Look at the Quality Score from the perspective of each of the interested parties, Google, the searcher and the advertiser.

Google

For Google, it’s clearly great. The way to maximise the number of clicks that they get on paid adverts is to put the most clicked-on advert at the top, followed by the second most clicked-on advert and so on. Of course, in order to maximise the revenue from clicks, they want the adverts with the highest bids at the top, so by multiplying the two factors together, they get the best of both worlds – lots of clicks, with a high cost-per-click.

But they also get adverts that people click on at the top – which improves the relevancy of their search results. Without the Quality Score, the adverts at the top of the search results will be ones with the highest bids – regardless of whether they were advertising what the user was searching for. The result would be fewer clicks, and disappointed users.

The Searcher

If you go onto Google searching for a toaster, do you really care why the adverts that you see are there? Does it matter whether they paid to appear there, or simply have an old website with lots of links to it? What matters is that the advert links to a website that sells lots of toasters.

Since the PPC adverts have to bid a lot to appear high in the search results, and need to convert their clicks to sales in order to make money, PPC adverts should be of high quality – an e-tailer with just one or two toasters is unlikely to appear high in the search results for long, as they simply won’t convert clicks into sales.

So what effect does the Quality Score have on this? The first thing it’ll do will be to weed out adverts that can afford to bid high because nobody clicks on them (so it doesn’t cost them much). This can only be a good thing for the user-experience. What about other benefits? Well, it’s likely that household names will get a higher clickthrough rate than other adverts, as they have a level of trust. Part of the Quality Score is based on the landing page. So websites that are covered in spammy adverts, lack things such as a privacy policy or contact details, or don’t relate to what was being searched for, get severely penalised. Which has to be good for the user.

The Advertiser

This one’s perhaps the most controversial. Clearly, Google are happy or they wouldn’t be doing it. And the users approve, or Google wouldn’t have the market share that it does.

The fact is that the Quality Score makes life much more difficult for the advertiser. When writing adverts, there are now three things to consider – the effect on the conversion rate, the effect on the clickthrough rate, and the effect on the Quality Score.

You don’t want people to click on your advert if they aren’t likely to buy, but you do want anyone who is likely to buy to click on your advert. But the Quality Score complicates things further, by rewarding you for including the search query in your advert, ideally in the title. What do you do if all the other adverts are doing the same? Clearly, your advert won’t stand out if you include the search query, but if you don’t, you’ll get penalised on the Quality Score.

And to improve your Quality Score, you need a high clickthrough rate – but you only want to attract people who are likely to buy, or you are wasting money.

Yet, here I am, an advertiser, saying how great the Quality Score is. Why?

Firstly, I know that as long as I only advertise on relevant keywords, I’m likely to competing with other companies selling the same sorts of products or services (plus e-bay).

Secondly, not understanding the Quality Score can cripple your account. Conversely therefore, understanding the Quality Score can only make things easier for you. And it’s not as though the Quality Score is some kind of Google or Agency secret – the information’s out there, freely available to anyone who bothers to look it up.

The Quality Score rewards you for actively managing your account, testing adverts and keywords, adjusting your bids etc. This gives you a big advantage over somebody who just sets up an account, and leaves it for months or even years at a time.

So does it penalise small advertisers? Do you need an agency to stand a chance of making money using Adwords now? It’s certainly true that in order to do a good job, it takes a certain amount of time – particularly in the early stages, where you have to read up and understand how to set up and manage an Adwords account. Small companies should ask whether they can spend the time required to manage the account effectively, but if they are willing to set aside a few days initially, and an hour or two per week, they should be able to do an adequate job of managing an Adwords account.

Overall, I like the idea that you can improve the performance of your account by actively managing it, and definitely think this is a good thing for advertisers. Since Google have revealed most of the processes behind their algorithms, there aren’t really that many industry ‘secrets’ that give agencies an unfair advantage over other advertisers.

Don’t get me wrong here – agencies have huge amounts of experience in managing campaigns, generating keyword lists and writing adverts, so there are clear advantages to using an agency – but small businesses can manage their own accounts on a (roughly) level playing field.

Assumptions

There are a number of implicit assumptions with the Quality Score that don’t necessarily hold true.

The first is that clickthrough rate is an indicator of relevance. It’s an indicator of the relevance of the advert to the search, not the website. Whilst the landing page is a small part of the algorithm, an advert can generate clicks by being misleading, or simply well-written. The fact that you are better than somebody else at writing adverts doesn’t necessarily mean that your website is more relevant than theirs. But then, the quality of an advert affects its performance across all advertising media, so it’s not really an issue.

The second is that putting the search query into the advert is an indicator of relevance. Firstly, it’s a better indicator of a well-structured account (since every keyword in an Adgroup shows the same advert, dynamic keyword insertion notwithstanding). But if you are a plumber in Birmingham, should you really have to make the title of your advert ‘plumber in Birmingham’, just because that’s what people are searching for?

The Quality Score isn’t perfect, and until Google can understand better what the user is looking for, and what your website is all about, it never will be. But Google know this – just this month, in the Google ‘Founders Letter’(http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/2008-founders-letter.html), Sergey Brin stated:

“Perfect search requires human-level artificial intelligence, which many of us believe is still quite distant. However, I think it will soon be possible to have a search engine that “understands” more of the queries and documents than we do today.”

As artificial intelligence becomes more adept at measuring how relevant a website is to the searcher’s requirements, so it’s likely to become a larger part of the Quality Score. This will, in turn, make ‘tricks of the trade’ less and less of an issue.

Google are also doing other things to ensure that the user sees all of the relevant adverts – offering spelling corrections, alternative searches, and predicting what you are searching for being just three ways to try to kill off the ‘long tail’.

 

The Quality Score may not be perfect, but I believe that a world with Quality Scores in it has to be an improvement.