By Karon Thackston © 2009, All Rights Reserved
From the moment Google announced it was implementing a quality-control measure it called Quality Score, the pay-per-click (PPC) world has been abuzz. You can find countless articles online about how to improve your Quality Score in order to save money and reduce your overall PPC spend. But what most people haven’t considered is that there’s much to be said for ignoring Quality Score.
One of the primary factors with Quality Score as a whole is the keywords quality score. Google checks the relevance between the keywords you’ve selected for your campaigns and the ads you’re running. In addition, they measure your clickthrough rate (CTR). Basically, the higher the CTR, the higher your Quality Score, provided relevancy is evident.
But here’s the thing. Weeding out irrelevant clicks by tightening your PPC copy can help bring in more qualified site visitors. I’ll show you what I mean.
Highly Targeted vs. Untargeted Ads
Let’s say, for the sake of example, you sell office furniture. In order to raise your Quality Score, you’ve created PPC ad copy that gets a lot of clicks. Your most popular ad reads:
Quality Office Furniture
Huge selection of brands & styles.
Recep. areas, offices & conf rooms.
Very general. This add just screams, “Hey anybody and everybody… come click me!” And it works, too. With your current account settings, you’re averaging about 1,000 clicks a month for which you are paying $500. Your conversion rate on this PPC campaign is .05%. In our theoretical example, that half of one percent equals $5,000. (I’m using a pretend average sale of $1,000.) That means your net profit would be $4,500. (Sales minus PPC ad expense.)
Being the savvy marketer you are, you’ve noticed that you get a lot of bounces. After conducting an exit survey of your site visitors, you’ve come to realize that most people who clicked your PPC ad didn’t realize you were a high-end office furniture store.
You don’t deal with the assembly required stuff. No… the furniture you offer is only the best featuring solid wood desks, genuine leather chairs, exceptional quality upholstered sofas and upper-end brands. Most of those who’ve clicked to your landing page take one look, gasp at the price and leave!
That’s costing you money. With the meter running, you’re shooting your Quality Score up to an 8, but it’s costing you $ .50 per click multiplied by 1,000 every month. Here’s an idea. What if you changed your ad to better reflect what you offer? What if you actually worked to eliminate unqualified clicks by using some filtering-type language in your PPC copy?
Weeding Out Unqualified Clicks
Here’s the new ad:
High-End Office Furniture
Distinctive styles. Top brands w/
solid wood, genuine leather & more.
Immediately you see your CTR plummet. Holding your breath, you check your Quality Score. Sure enough, it has dropped from 8 to 4. You give it a month before checking figures. Amazingly, here’s what you find.
Instead of 1,000 clicks a month, you’ve gotten 635. Instead of paying $ .50 per click, you’ve paid $.75 per click for a total of $476.25. However, you’ve also noticed something else that’s rather shocking: your conversion rate has shot up.
Instead of .05%, your overall campaign is converting at 4%. That means you’re now making $39,523.75 in net profits. Hmm… $4,500 with a Quality Score of 8 and a CPC of $.50 or $39,523.75 with a Quality Score of 4 and a CPC of $.75. Gee… I wonder which one you’d rather have .
A Universal Law?
Does this work for every company on every campaign? No. You will need to test this just like you need to test every other element of your SEO and PPC campaigns. However, more times than not, you’ll find highly targeted PPC copy that ignores the Quality Score gives you more in overall profits than general ads that appeal to the masses. Test your PPC copy and see how much more you could be making.
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Analysis is certainly true but not sure whether it is due to ignoring QS.
As a purely hypothetical scenario it would need, as suggested, to be tested and tested again, over time to see if QS did, in fact, half as in the example.
That said, looking at the 2 ads, I’m not sure that it would!
QS also takes into consideration landing page copy which would presumably focus on higher end quality office furniture with more relevance to offer of the second ad hence the high bounce rate associated with the first.
Depending on the actual choice of keyword combination(s) together with the 2nd ad copy and a highly focused landing page, QS would most likely increase.
CTR relates to ad impressions and a tighly targeted combination of keywords, ad copy and landing page could well result in less page impressions but increased CTR lower CPC’s and higher conversion.
Yes, Rob… strictly examples here focusing solely on the keywords quality score. Not suggesting that in every case the QS would half or that a .05% CTR would jump to 4%. I have, however, the changes in copy make very similar improvements in clients’ AdWords campaigns where every other element remained static. As suggested in the article, this is something worthy of testing that could very possibly have a positive effect on overall ROI.
You are assuming that looking at Quality Score means you aren’t looking at other metrics. Not sure I know any search marketers who look at Quality score and scratch their heads “why did quality score go up and revenues not? I guess I should just ignore it”
No, James, not assuming that. But this is one way to test and see if copy will produce better end results by bringing in more targeted traffic on ads with high CTRs and low conversions.
You raise a good point, Karon. But Ad Copy, in and of itself, has very little to do with Quality Score.
As Rob noted, you never mentioned which keywords these ads display on or the landing pages they point to. If you were bidding on “high-end office furniture” or “distinctive office furniture” or “genuine leather office furniture”, I’d think the second ad’s CTR would rise, not fall. Your quality score would probably go up as well, depending on landing page relevance.
Still, putting quality score aside, your advice is sound – writing highly-targeted ads for the audience you wish to attract is vital.
Hi Michael,
LOL… you can tell the right-brained writers from the left-brained SEOs 🙂 No particular keyphrases were used in this article. Although I have used this technique and seen good results from it with several clients, this particular article is not a case study and does not reflect specifics. Everything within this article is for example purposes only. Thanks for stopping by and for your comments.