2011 September

Real Time Quality Score Defined, with Google’s Frederick Vallaeys

9/29/2011 by Eric Enge 3 Comments

photo of Frederick Vallaeys

Key Points

Hoo boy! I went through this interview to try and extract the most important points made, and I will do the best I can here. However, if you are a serious AdWords professional, I’d suggest you read the entire interview from end to end.

The main thing you will get from this interview is that the Quality Score you see in your Google AdWords account differs significantly from the Real Time Quality Score that Google uses to determine how your ad ranks. There is definitely a strong correlation, so Quality Score is a useful metric, but an understanding of Real Time Quality Score can give you an extra edge in understanding what it is you need to do to make your optimization efforts as successful as possible.

Quality Score is the number you see in your Google AdWords account. It is a number between 1 and 10, where 1 is a horrible score, and 10 is an awesome score. Some key points about Quality Score are:

It is mostly based on historical clickthrough rates of the keyword and ad text.
Additional factors include landing page quality and load time of the page, but these are secondary factors.
Quality Score (QS) is based on data from exact match only. Even if you bid on a broad match keyword, such as “cruises”, only exact matches with the keyword are used to determine the QS.
The published number is the aggregate for all instances of that keyword in your account.
When you first add keywords into an new account, Google will show the system wide average for that keyword as your Quality Score.
If you have an existing account, and you add a new keyword, than the account history is a factor in the default Quality Score.

Real Time Quality Score is the number used by Google to help determine your ad rank. It has a lot in common with QS, but is calculated in real time and takes into account many additional factors. Some key points about Real Time Quality Score (RTQS) include:

Specific query performance is taking in to account. For example, if you bid on “tennis shoes” and someone searches on “discount tennis shoes”, but you sell only expensive tennis shoes, chances are that the resulting user interactions will end up in a low RTQS for this particular query.
RTQS is personalized to the user based on query history. For example, a recent search on “Rome” followed by a search on “hotels” is more likely to show adds for hotels in Rome.
RTQS personalization is session based. Once the session cookie is deleted the query history used for personalization is lost.
Other personalization factors include location and time of day.
The +1 button does not factor into RTQS … yet. However, it can impact QS and RTQS by increasing Clickthrough rate.
+1 is associated with the URL, regardless of whether or not it is clicked on in the ad, organic results, or on the web page.
Site links drive CTR increases ranking from 17% to 30% and can also result in more qualified customers (higher conversion).
CTR expectations are normalized by position. So if the number 1 position usually gets a 30% CTR and you are getting 20% that is a negative.
RTQS is determined at the keyword-ad level. There are no ad group or campaign components to RTQS.

That’s it for the summary points. However, in the body of the interview there is much more, including Frederick’s recommended process for optimizing your QS and RTQS, lots of examples, and why bidding your keywords high when you first launch them is a smart thing to do.

Full Interview Transcript

Filed Under: Google, interviews, PPC

adCenter Quality Score Defined, with Bing’s Ping Jen

9/19/2011 by Eric Enge 3 Comments

photo of Ping Jen

Key Interview Points

One of the things I learned when I was out at SMX Advanced in June was that the Quality Score that you see in the search engine PPC services (both adCenter and AdWords) was that the Quality Score you see displayed in your account is not the same as what is used by the engines in ranking your ad. For that reason I asked Ping Jen of the adCenter team to join me for an interview. Below we talk through exactly how Quality Score works in adCenter. Here are the key points from the interview:

Original content, content relevance to the ad, location, and layout are all factors in landing page relevance.
Advertisers whose pages are deemed to be harmful will get banned from the adCenter marketplace.
(Ping Jen) “Our philosophy is that we want our advertisers to have high ROI, and one of the ways we do that is by requiring them to have higher quality landing page user experiences and relevance. To help advertisers, we provide feedback through the Landing Page User Experience subscore and Landing Page Relevance subscore.”
(Ping Jen) “If you have some outliers within an ad group or campaign, determine why. Should I use this keyword? Does it belong to this ad group or campaign because usually KWs that share an ad group are tied to the same landing page? In some cases, it may be time to move those keywords to another ad group because they don’t fit into this landing page.”
(Ping Jen) “Before clicking your ads, search users will look at the content of your ads. Immediately, they can see if they are relevant to what they are looking for. We follow the same logic to validate your ad copy relevance.”
(Ping Jen) “badly spelled ad copy immediately reduces the confidence a user will have with the ad and they will shy away from it.”
(Ping Jen) “Placement is still determined by relevance, the landing page experience, the historical CTR and the advertiser’s price.”
(Ping Jen) “We have always been upfront that adCenter Quality Score is not directly tied into a rank score.”
(Ping Jen) “How do you know your KW performance against others bidding on the same term? We tell you with the keyword relevance sub score.”
Rank score, which is the term adCenter uses for the actual method used to determine ranking, is calculated on a marketplace by marketplace basis. This is done because the needs of each marketplace are different.
(Ping Jen) “Ads must comply with the adCenter Relevance and Quality guidelines. Then the ad’s competitiveness in KW relevance, landing page relevance and their bids will decide their ranks.”

Landing Page Quality and Relevance with adCenter

Eric Enge: Can you give us an overview of how Quality Score operates in adCenter?

Ping Jen: Our Quality Score is a strong signal of campaign quality and performance. The reason we introduced the adCenter Quality Score was to help our advertisers enhance campaign performance and raise the visibility of improvement opportunities.

We consider campaign quality an important factor and we want to showcase the best experiences in the marketplace and continue to grow the traffic volume and increase market share.

Eric Enge: How do you measure that landing page user experience? What factors are involved?

Ping Jen: If you Bing “adCenter relevance and quality guidelines”, you will find that adCenter has published very specific requirements for landing page and user experience. We measure the Landing Page User Experience and then validate whether advertisers have followed the guidelines and show the results through the Landing Page User Experience subscore.

Filed Under: interviews, Microsoft, PPC

How Bing Uses CTR in Ranking, and more with Duane Forrester

9/7/2011 by Eric Enge 17 Comments

photo of Duane Forrester

Key Interview Points

Let me start you with the big ones up front. This interview had two startling parts to it. These were:

The huge weight placed by Bing on user interaction with the search results as a ranking factor. This was amazing stuff. Basically, Bing is willing to test any page by indexing it. In fact you can pretty much directly inject any URL you want into their search results using the Submit URL feature of Bing Webmaster Tools. Then they will test it, and if the click interaction data is bad, out (or down) you go.
The ranking of the priorities for publishers in Duane’s eyes. #1 Content #2 Social Media #3 Links. Links were rated as the third most important area. Third.

This was fascinating stuff. Of course, each search engine is different, and they each test different things. But this is a very different headset than what we are used to in the world of SEO. Here are some of the other key points from the interview:

(Duane): “You need to remember that the search engine sees everything across the web on every layer and as a whole, all at the same time. So, when you delight someone with the best user-experience possible, we pick up all those signals that person shares about their delight, and those signals will help influence our perception of your quality.”
(Duane): “The end goal of everything we do at Bing is to provide a better result set for a searcher. That’s the core reason why a search engine exists”. To help put this comment in perspective, I find it useful to think about the search engine’s goal as being to provide the searcher with the fastest possible answer to their question. This is an incredibly important mindset to establish in your mind as you work on your Internet marketing strategy.
(Duane): “If we are actually finding your pages, but we are not keeping thme in the index, there is a reason for that”.
(Duane): “Search engines are evolving and things like RSS are going to become a desired way for us to find content … It’s a dramatic cost savings for us”.
(Duane): “Your Sitemaps need to be clean. We have a 1% allowance for dirt in a Sitemap. Examples of dirt are if we click on a URL and we see a redirect, a 404 or a 500 code. If we see more than a 1% level of dirt, we begin losing trust in the Sitemap”.
(Duane): “Millions of movements per hour are happening across Bing”.
Bing Webmaster Tools offers a crawl scheduling type feature where you can indicate times of days whern you prefer that Bingbot does its crawl.
Bing does not use page performance as a ranking factor. This is because a page with a 4 second load that has all the content someone wants may well be a better experience than a page with 1 second load time that does not answer the question as well.
Bing’s Webmaster Tools inbound links feature shows a reasonable representation of links with a focus on those that matter most to your site.
(Duane): “We have our internal metric that folks may or may not be familiar with. It’s called Static Rank and this is where we judge the value of a particular URL as we perceive it”.
Take advantage of the Bing Webmaster Tools data to see the Average Impression Position for the search phrases that are delivering traffic to your site. If the reported position is decreasing (moving up in the search results) this is an indication that the trust in the page is growing.

Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Duane, you are now running the Bing Webmaster program at Microsoft but you were formerly a SEO. How has that transition been?

Peak under the hood Duane Forrester: It’s like being a kid in a candy store. What every SEO wants is a peek under the hood. When I started, I was told to come down to the garage and we will show you what we are doing now, and what we are planning for the future.