The volume of misinformation and hoopla surrounding Quality Score (QS) is astounding!

Some of the kooky ideas I’ve heard and read recently:

1. Quality Score is a measure of how well the landing page relates to the user search.

Utterly False: Web design shops may be guilty of propagating this myth, but it’s certainly persistent! Landing page plays the following role: if your landing page is just a collection of links to go elsewhere (usually sponsored links) you’re an AdSense Spammer and your QS will drop to zero. Good riddance! If your landing page loads really slowly, that will hurt your quality score. That’s it, nothing else. As long as you’re a credible destination and not crazy slow, landing page plays no role whatsoever.

2. Quality Score is a black box with lots of mysterious elements.


Not Really: The exact mechanism for calculating QS is proprietary, of course, but the elements in play are not: measured/historic CTR of the Keyword-copy combination , measured/historic adgroup CTR, measured/historic account CTR, measured/historic domain CTR. From these elements Google calculates a best guess for the CTR of the ad in question. This is normed for position, calculated only from google.com traffic that matches the KW exactly and fixed on a scale of 1 to 10. More on this final bit later.

3. The advent of Quality Score represented a major change for Google

False: The notion that positions should be determined by Bid x CTR was the brilliant insight that maximized Google’s revenue per impression per ad. Any step away from CTR would reduce their revenue. Quality Score had a major impact on AdSense Spammers and Affiliates, but changed very little for legitimate advertisers. For legitimate companies this represented a shift from measured CTR to predicted CTR (one and the same given adequate volume).

4. The way CPCs are calculated has changed dramatically

False: The magic formula revealed by Google’s chief economist is exactly the same as it was before with the respective QS in place of the CTR. As long as we understand that QS is a linear function of CTR, so that a QS of 8 means you have twice the predicted CTR of a QS of 4, there is no difference in the calculation pre- and post- QS launch.

5. PPC Programs can be managed simply by focusing on QS and paying little attention to bids

Are you serious?!? We actually heard someone make this claim on stage at a conference. Writing compelling ad copy is important. Highlighting differentiating reasons to shop with you is valuable. However, once the copy is tightly targeted, and the messages tested and compelling, there are no more levers to pull. It’s very difficult to beat well-written control copy in a test. Bids can be changed dynamically and smartly to respond to changes in traffic value, there is only so much tuning you can do with copy. If you don’t have a flexible, powerful bid management system perhaps you don’t have any other levers to play with, but if you do have a system you’ll get far more bang for your buck analyzing, reacting to and anticipating changes in performance data through proper bid management.

For legitimate advertisers, QS is simply a normed system for evaluating an ad’s CTR. One of the really clever features of this normalization is that the advertiser can get an immediate sense of whether the CTR is good, bad or indifferent and that’s a huge boon.

In the past if you saw that a KW-copy combination has a CTR of 3% and it’s in position 3 on average, there’s really no way to know if that’s good or bad. Not only did the position impact the raw CTR, making it hard to know whether the copy or the position was driving the number, the range of “good” CTR changes dramatically based on the KW. The tighter the KW defines user intent the higher the range of CTR will be for the sponsored links. The less clear the lower the range. Someone searching for “Yamaha” could be researching motorcycles, pianos or stereo equipment. Someone searching for a “Yamaha FZ6R” is pretty clearly looking for a street bike, so the match between advertiser and user will be very tight.

Normalizing the CTR so that you know at a glance ads that have a good CTR (QS >=7) or bad CTR (QS < 5). This lets you identify the KW with problematic CTR performance easily. There may not be an easy fix for low QS. If your competitors pitch "Low Price Guarantee and Next Day Shipping" and you can't match those offers, then you may not be able to win the copy battle. But, sometimes tightening the copy for a particular cluster of ads can materially impact performance. Normalization has made management easier.

Quality Score is important, just as CTR has always been, now we just have a bit better ability to identify and address the problem children.

• Google: Search Quality Score is independent of Content Quality Score "Does your content Quality Score impact your search Quality Score?" Google says, "no"....
• Google Quality Score Linking over to SEL post on Quality Score....
• Google Provides More Details On Quality Score. Nope. "We'll allow an ad that meets the quality threshold to appear above the search results even if it has to...

In reading over the legal document, it really only applies to Google Adwords accounts using daily budgets to cap spend. Furthermore, it pertains to instances where Google has overcharged advertisers an amount beyond that Account Budget Overrun. I believe this has previously been billed to advertisers as “Account Budget Overrun”, the total amount charged above and beyond the daily budget limit. Within the document, Google denies any wrongdoing.

Don’t take this as legal advice, but…
If you have used Google’s campaign daily budget feature over the past few years and have frequently been “overcharged” (above and beyond your daily budget), it might be worth taking a look at the settlement. Otherwise, it may not be worth investigating or pursing.

Barry Schwartz has a nice write-up of the payout breakdown.

• Yahoo’s Latest Class Action Settlement Yahoo's settlement agreement with OMS raises interesting questions about open vs closed auction bidding....
• AOL Search Data Release: Class Action Lawsuit Filed Search data not be used for commercial purposes? Too much money at stake -- never going to happen....
• Pay-Per-Action Adwords For Adsense Network Google releases pay-per-action beta for content network. ...

ASCII art is disallowed by Google advertising policies, and such ads get filtered pretty quickly.

Nonetheless, the worms.com ad gave me a laugh.

Other ASCII art sightings: an EKG trace; the word “collective”; blocks; and rental cars (possibly fake)

This makes it easy to monitor the web for mentions of your brand — or for mentions of your competition, or your key execs, whatever — via a RSS reader.

I use Google Reader for RSS. Here are some of the searches I’ve set up to scan blogosphere, the news wires, Technorati, and Twitter:

(click image to enlarge)

Simple, relatively comprehensive, and free!

• Monitor Your Brand With HowSociable.com Monitor your brand across 22 social media sites. ...
• The New Distinction: “Housefile vs. Aquisition” Meets “Brand vs. Non-Brand” Even from a previous buyer, an order following a non-brand search is likely incremental....
• Search Tip: Brand vs. Non-Brand Results For many search advertisers, paid search ads on the retailer’s brand name (Brandname”, Brand Name”, BrandName.com”) generate 20% to 50%...

Essentially, Google will no longer police trademark usage. Those of you who have submitted your marks to Google expecting them to prevent anyone unauthorized from using them in the text of ads, understand that as of June 15th those protections will be gone.

As long as the advertiser has the trademark on their website, selling the product or service, or providing “unbiased” information about the product or service, they are free to use the trademark in their ad text, regardless of whether the owner of that mark has given permission for its use.

This is a BIG deal. Google pitches it as a benefit to advertisers, but the fact that Google’s policy allows an advertiser to use a mark doesn’t mean the law allows it. It does mean that policing trademarks will fall back onto the shoulders of the mark owners and unless they have an army dedicated to the project they may have to throw up their hands.

Those who relied on Google to protect their marks against their own affiliates should pay particular attention to affiliate “performance” improvements in June.

This is a smart move on Google’s part. Fighting these battles cost them money, resources and angst, and provided no benefits to Google in return. I suspect the lawyers will be the ultimate beneficiaries.

• Eight Important Online Retail (and Marketing) Policy Issues Scott Silverman of Shop.org talks about internet privacy, interstate collection of sales tax and other issues facing online retailers....
• Google Broad Match: A Change for the Worse Google's Broad Match changed over the summer -- unbeknownst to them!...

This is isn’t a big deal for online retail yet, but it will be, in the next 6 to 18 months.

Today, HTML markup is about how data should be presented. By tagging elements on a HTML page with standard class names, microformats are about what data mean. Microformats will form the foundation of “Web 3.0″, aka the Semantic Web.

Google is starting with microformats for people (hCard) and reviews (hReview).

It seems clear Google support for the SKU microformat (hProduct) is coming soon, as there’s already documentation for it on Google WebMaster Central.

What will this mean to online retailers long-term?

• The first retailers to add hProduct tags to their product pages will enjoy an early sales advantage, as Google will present their products first because of the extra data.
• The advantage will be short-lived, as large retailers and standard e-commerce platforms will quickly jump on the band wagon.
• Retailers will chafe at the simplicity of the format. hProduct doesn’t encompass shipping, tax, bundled pricing, or even UPC. Argh. When Google miscategorizes or misprices your product atop their SERP, get ready for additional customer service calls.
• hProduct markup is essentially a product data feed, albeit with limited fields. Google’s current product search hasn’t gained much traction, but widespread hProduct data will help Google disintermediate the shopping comparison engines.
• Long term, hProduct markup will increase consumer perception of Google-as-store, eroding weaker retail brands (see “search engines atomize retailer brands”, halfway down this post.) Building a strong well-defined brand is key.
• When Google presents more SKU-centric multi-merchant data on the top left of the page, paid search on the top right becomes more crucial to get your link in front of shoppers. The paid search core competencies –optimal bidding, extensive keywords, and solid “why-shop” copy — become even more important.

What should online retailers be doing about this today?

I’d recommend keeping a close eye for mentions of hProduct on the WebMaster Central Blog.

I’d also recommend planning to add hProduct tags to your SKU pages, probably by late ‘09 or early ‘10. (Here’s the link the Google hProduct documentation again.)

For better or worse, this is where online retail is heading, and your marketing and merchandising teams will benefit from being there at the beginning.

• Eight Important Online Retail (and Marketing) Policy Issues Scott Silverman of Shop.org talks about internet privacy, interstate collection of sales tax and other issues facing online retailers....
• Online Retail Stats: CyberMonday 2008 vs. 2007 One day isn't an entire retail season, but I thought it interesting to compare CyberMonday 2008 to 2007....
• IsabellaOliver.com Overcomes 3 Key Challenges of Online Retail Videos Because they overcome the typical (and non-trivial) challenges with such panache, it's worth your time to check out to the...

1) Google has gradually increased their PlusBox “show rate” among eligible AdWords campaigns. Over the 6 month time frame, we’ve seen this rate increase from 38% to a more recent mark of around 70-75%.
2) PlusBox “expansion rate”, users who actually expanded (clicked) on the PlusBox component of the ad once shown, is 0.5% or about 1/10th the standard ad’s CTR, (sans PlusBox).
3) The overall CTR of ads containing PlusBox, click-through on headline or PlusBox offer component, had a slightly better rate as compared to the standard ad.
4) Of users that expanded the PlusBox, 1 in 15 actually clicked on an offer (product) to follow through to the site. Furthermore, of those clicking the PlusBox only 1 in 7 actually made it to the advertiser’s site. (by virtue of headline or product listing)
5) The CR of users who did follow through to the site once expanding the PlusBox was on par with the standard ad.

Here’s how I view the above;

A final thought:

If Google’s intent for PlusBox was to give the user a quick glance at a number of retailers product offerings without leaving Google.com, I believe this product could lead to a minor loss in order volume for the advertiser due to the pre-click “abandonment rate” phenomenon. If however this negative attribute is offset by increased interaction with the ad, both Google and the advertiser win (This is true to what I’ve seen so far). The success of PlusBox then, has little to do with the expansion of products within the ad itself, and is mostly a result of the CTR boost by merit of having a PlusBox next to your ad, while other advertisers do not.

• Google Now Displaying SKUs in Paid Results Helpful or harmful to users and advertisers?...
• Google’s Web PlusBox & Wonder Wheel Test? Today I noticed a new feature on my Google results pages: A "web" plus box that expands to show new...

A couple of notes on the data:

• The benchmark we’re using is advertising expense not impressions or traffic volume.
• We looked at Paid Search only, not content or banner deals
• We studied the advertising network, not strictly the engine’s domain.
• Our systems are engine agnostic: our clients do not set engine budgets, indeed most don’t have budgets at all. We allow money to flow based strictly on where traffic can be purchased within efficiency tolerances.

Given that understanding, here’s what we saw over the past 15 months:

Two observations come to mind:

1. It appears that since last August, Yahoo! has regained some ground.
2. Google seemed to get a larger holiday kick than the others.
3. Even with MSN Cashback and MSN’s willingness to buy Market Share from Google — I’m sure others saw Google ads for Live Search on high traffic KW, yes? — MSN gained no share whatsoever.

With respect to 1, I’m not sure if the fluctuations between Google and Yahoo relate to Yahoo showing Google ads for a period last spring and summer, or network partners coming and going. Could Google’s holiday bump be a function of advertiser’s focusing more on Google bidding than others at the holiday driving up CPCs for those of us who apply seasonal adjustments automatically across all engines?

Do others see similar trends? Do others have better explanations than I do for them?

• June 2007 Paid Search Market Share: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Google continues to comprise three-fourths of our agency's total monthly PPC spend. In June, Yahoo held steady, while Microsoft picked...
• Google, Yahoo “Panama”, and Microsoft: Paid Search Market Share May 2007 We review May 2007 ad spend data for our agency. Google continues to dominate, with three fourths share. Google lost...
• June 2008 Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Paid Search Market Share Looking at our agency's client base in aggregate, last month Google received 79% of our clients' ad dollars. Yahoo received...

Today, I get to participate.

I noticed a new feature on my Google SERP for all of my searches this morning. An extra “web” plus box in the upper left hand corner, under the Google logo.

Expanding the box gives the user an opportunity to further filter their results by recency (day, week, month, year) or by type (videos vs. forums vs. reviews). It also provides the ability to add images from the websites that appear in the results or to add widgets that allow you to see the SERP in a different view.

Of the views, “Wonder Wheel” seems to be the most novel and the least helpful. Changing the view to “Wonder wheel” moves the traditional organic listings to the right and create a spiderweb-like display of related search terms. Clicking on a more specific term pulls up another web with more deeply related terms.

The plus box appears regardless of whether I’m logged in or not and whether I allow the SERP to be tailored to my locality or not. Others around there aren’t seeing this, although the folks over at Blogoscoped picked up on these changes and even provided a way for you to check them out.

Officially, Google did announce two updates yesterday regarding longer snippets and their implementation of Orion. (Greg Sterling also posted a description and examples of those changes over at SearchEngineLand.)

Has anyone else been “selected” to test these features? Any thoughts?

• Test Driven Development At Google Google advocates for test driven development, no matter where an engineer sits....
• Google PlusBox Performance Results Reaction to 6-months of Google AdWords' PlusBox performance data....
• With All That Traffic, Does Facebook Test Its Site? When Facebook makes big changes that affect their users, do they test first? ...

It’s entirely possible that this is not quite the honor that I fancy it to be. I also received an invitation to the Presidential Inauguration, which made me quite proud and honored. On closer inspection it appeared that the invitation only entitled me to be in Washington DC on the day of the inauguration, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t need an invitation to do that…then they wanted me to buy some stuff…

I’m not sure how exclusive this club is — entirely possible that up ’til now I was the only one excluded — but I plan to take full advantage of the opportunity to “speak truth to power”. We meet next Monday at the Googleplex in advance of SMX West. Google will give us a tour of some of their new products and plans for 2009, but we also get to talk to their product development teams about their current products.

What RKG wants from AdWords and AdSense can be summed up pretty easily: transparency and control. We want full control over keyword matching, we want to know every variable that goes into Quality Score. We believe that with all the controls at our fingertips and the fingertips of other sophisticated practitioners, advertisers will be able to best target the traffic they’re willing to spend money on and control where that traffic lands. That will maximize conversion efficiency, allow the most aggressive bidding, and provide the best user experience.

There could be two types of Google Accounts: the automated Google-knows-best accounts for folks who can’t manage the complexity; and the “Self-serve” account with all the knobs and dials exposed for the “power users”.

This level of transparency would benefit Google financially, as improved targeting would generate higher CTR and higher CPCs for almost every search: one company’s dregs (”used yamaha piano clevland”) are another company’s gold. It might also head off government regulatory agencies who are becoming increasingly concerned about Google’s control of the industry. To the extent that transparency would prove that like the stock exchange, Google is just a marketplace for buying advertising, Google could save itself a great deal of trouble down the road.

Let me know if you’d like to grab a beverage at SMX, or if you have other specific requests to make of Google. I probably have as much clout with Google as does their cleaning staff, but what the heck, I can pretend can’t I?