I asked Google how quality score is affected when I completed a website url re-write and changed the urls in my account using the editor.  Their reply is below:

To answer these briefly, whenever you post changes with AdWords Editor, even bulk changes, the upload will update (not delete) all of the keywords, ad groups, and campaigns in your account. The impact is no different than manually makes the changes in the account. Your Quality Score, as it is based on historic data, is largely unaffected. However, updating keyword destination URLs will cause our system to recalibrate the relevancy aspect of Quality Score: how relevant the keyword is to the ad text and to the new landing page. Given that historic statistics such as CTR are unaffected, the shift in Quality Score is minimal and frequently very short lived.That being said, ad texts are the one exception to this. Whenever you make a change to an ad text, whether the change is made from the online interface or AdWords Editor, the old ad text is deleted and a new one created in its place. The historic information associated with the ad text is lost. Quality Score will take a momentary hit, but frequently rebounds very quickly assuming that the content of the ad and landing page are not dramatically altered.

It sounds like, if you need to update your urls, your quality score will be minimally affected.  However, changes to your ad text is treated differently.  When you change your adtext you are essentially creating a new ad in Google’s eyes so you will have to start over and potentially take a hit on quality score.  With this in mind, try to change adtext only when necessary.  You may be better off pausing the ad and creating a new one so you always have the option to restart the old ad again and go back ot the old quality score.

In 2009, you are not going to make more money from selling each product online.  One the ways to compensate for this loss is to sell more of each product.

Think “dollar store” marketing rather than trying to hit that home run and sell a few products at a huge profit margin.   You normally sell 500 products a day at a net profit of $20 each ($10,000 a day).  You are now seeing not only the number of sales drop to 400 a day, but your net profit dropped to $15 ($6,000 a day).   In today’s economy it is going to be very difficult to bump up your net profits, so the alternative is to increase the number of orders.  To match your previous revenue number of $10,000 per day, you will need to sell about 667 products a day instead of 500 you were selling (667 products x $15 = $10,000). So let’s take a look at increasing products sales. 

STEP 1: Increase your current revenue streams

1. Increase the number of paid search engines
I will assume you are selling your products in Adwords, Yahoo, and MSN Adcenter already.  It’s time to explore and test those 2nd and 3rd tier engines.  Remember, we are not looking for blow out revenue numbers.  We are simply looking to increase the number of orders while maintaining a positive return on investment.  Even if the other main paid engines are generating tens of thousands of dollars a month and these little 2nd and 3rd tiers are only netting $500 to $1000 each, keep them open.  You will see why in a minute.  Examples of some 2nd tier engines are Ask.com, 7search, MIVA, search123, and there are various niche ones and country specific ones as well if you search for them online.

2. Increase the number of shopping engines
If you are not in Google base and you sell products online, I want you to stop reading this article, go to your google account, sign up and get your products in their asap.  It is 100% free.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but you have absolutely nothing to lose.  We sell a lot of products through google base.  Did I mention it was FREE!!!  If you are already using shopping engines, using the same concept as above, add more of them. 
 
Here is a list of some shopping engines (in no particular order):
Google Base FREE
The Find FREE
Yahoo shopping
Shopping.com
MSN shopping
Bizrate
Like
Shopzilla
PriceGrabber
Nextag
Smarter
Become
Shop.com

Monitor everything closely at first, but once they get going, again, you can generate anything from a lot to a little bit more per engine.

All said and done, let’s you are averaging $1000 a month each.  Depending on the size of your company, you may think individually this is not worth it, however in these slow, low margin times, when you add up those 5 new second tier engines and 5 new shopping engines at $1000, you are at $10,000 a month.  This side extra $10,000 a month could mean the difference between layoffs or closing up shop.

3.  This one has to do with search engine optimization and usability best practices.  I am not going to go to deep into them because they are all over the internet, but will add a quick list of must do’s:

a. Each product/service should have its own webpage
b. Each page of your website should have a totally unique title tag, meta tag, and content.  If you sell red sticks and blue sticks, do not simply replace the words “red” and “blue” on those product pages and tags.  The tags and content need to be 100% unique.  By doing this, you may add 1000’s of pages to the search engines search results and increase your chances of long tail sales dramatically.
c. Go through your website as if you were going to buy something.  Ask a friend to do that as well.  You will be surprised by what you see.  “Buy” button hard to find? Once you find the product are there clear instructions on what to do next? How long is your check out process?  Is it simple, fast, and easy to buy your product or service?
d. Using your analytics program, which is an absolute must have, look at your bounce rates, and where people are leaving your site.  Why are they leaving?  Also, it is time to start testing! Test upsell pages and adding x/y promotions.  Test different promotion modules- is “Save Up To 50%” better than “Free Shipping?”

STEP 2:  Time to add new multiple stream of income
It is time to step back from your business.  You look at your business everyday and you are immersed in it.  It is time to step back and look at your business as if you were an outside consultant.  What are you missing? Do you sell shoes?  Are there popular brands or models you are not selling?  Get those brands and start selling them.   Do you have an affiliate program?  Look into starting an affiliate program and have others sell your products for you.
What payment types do you accept?  Do you ship overseas?  By simply adding PayPal as a payment method you may increase the number of sales not just due to the addition of a new way for your customers to pay, but our overseas sales increased as well because it is a trusted source of international payments.  Remember, we are not looking for one home run, we are looking to increase the number of sales through multiple channels and “payment method” is just another channel.

They added a couple of new ads and new campaigns (with new budgets).  One of the ads had a promotion code in it.  That code expires.  Were they going to keep checking when the code expired and then pause the ad or leave it running so people would click and not buy because the promo was over (either way, Yahoo gets paid).

So, what new program? The program where Yahoo goes into customers accounts:

1. Not knowing conversion data so they do not know which terms are actually generating income and which are not
2. Not knowing the products, margins, or inventory of the products you are selling
3. Yahoo tries to increase clicks, increasing my costs, and generating more revenue for Yahoo – Huge conflict of interest!
4. Plays with the account owners money without prior approval
5. Not knowing any restrictions that the account owner may have with merchants and manufacturers as far as terms they are allowed to use for ad copy or bid placement restrictions.

What would be the difference if I had money in a bank savings account and a bank stock broker, that I do not know, went into my savings account and bought some stock, using that money, without knowing my investment portfolio, diversification needs or retirement goals.  Then after he bought the stock, emails me and to tell me what they did with MY money.

I would like to hear from others and your feelings about this new program.  Here is the email:
Yahoo! is committed to the success of account “account name” and we believe there is an opportunity to provide you with improved performance.

To help you save time and get the most out of your campaigns, we are launching a new automatic account optimization program. It’s intended to help raise the performance of accounts that are experiencing issues like low quality scores, low lead volume or low click-through rates.

And the best part is, we will do the work for you: Our content developers will use their search advertising experience to help your marketing dollars go further.

What we will keep an eye out for:
-    Search ads with low click-through rates relative to competitors
-    Ad testing not in use? missing an opportunity to optimize ad copy
-    Ad groups that have a quality index score of 2 or lower

How we can help:
-    Create new ads for existing ad groups, enabling ad testing
-    Write multiple versions of ads for any new ad groups we create, enabling the use of ad testing to help ensure that the best-performing ads are displayed more often
-    Search our database for keywords that can drive more targeted traffic to your site

In short, our goal is to make sure that your account is firing on all cylinders–and do this while keeping your existing keywords and without exceeding your spending limits!

As always, you are in control of your account. If we make any optimization changes to your account through this program, we will notify you by email, and you can let us know whether the account changes are positively affecting your account. Also, you are welcome to contact your account manager to review, edit or ask us to reverse any of the changes. Finally, if you do not wish to participate in this program, you may opt out by contacting your account manager.

We’ve identified keywords and ads in your account that are significantly underperforming, and we’ve initiated the changes to the creatives that you will find attached.

We are very excited about this new program, and hope it will provide you with improved performance and a higher level of service. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.
I highly recommend everyone immediately contacts their account manager, or clicks the contact link in their account, and lets Yahoo know that you do not want to be part of this program.

That is right, optimistic Al says, “if you have been adhering to SEO best practices, most will not notice any drop is sales or leads due to personalization.”  As many of my blog readers know, I won’t leave it at that, I am going to outline some things you should do and why your site will probably not be affected. 

Here goes:

First let’s try to figure out why Google started personalization.  It makes complete sense to me that they would want to do it.  If someone searches a broad term, like “soccer,” are they looking for news about soccer, do they want to purchase soccer balls, looking to buy soccer apparel, are they looking for a soccer league to join, etc..  Google will see that you have been searching and viewing daily news about soccer and may start bumping some of those more relevant sites that were in positions 7 and 8 to higher positions.  Makes sense and is good for the searcher and for Google (always keep the word “relevant” in mind).

Now, why is it important for you to understand that?  People are searching smarter.  It is very unlikely a person that types in “soccer” is ready to immediately buy soccer equipment.  If someone wants to buy soccer shoes, or better yet have a brand they like, and search for “Adidas soccer shoes” or cleats, I will bet the personalization will not negatively affect the rankings of this search. As people learn more and more about personalization and searching, they will search for more specific things when they want to buy.  If someone searched “adidas adiPURE TRX FG cleats” Google will not be serving tons of press releases and news articles to people even if they searched some soccer related news articles a couple of times before.  I also feel as searchers get more educated they will be using “buy,” “discount,” “sale,” and other “ready to purchase” terms in their searches which will bring the highly relevant stores selling these products to the top.

In a nutshell, personalization may affect the less relevant one keyword searched broader terms more than specific long tail terms.  As many in ecommerce know, the long tail is the most relevant, highest converting traffic.

I try not to ever talk in absolutes.  I have helped optimize 100’s of accounts from mom and pops to Lowes Home Improvement and Motorola and I know first hand all sites are not created equal.  I can not say personalization will never hugely affect a specific site, but I will say it is not all doom and gloom.  Most will not even notice any changes to revenue solely due to personalization, some may see a slight drop, some may see a slight increase and there actually are things you can do to help your site.  Here are a few things you can do to help reduce, or possibly eliminate, the affects of personalization.  Basically, these 3 simple things will help Google a) understand what is on your site, b) who your potential customers are, and c) where information is located on your site.  All of these suggestions have been written about before, nothing earth shattering, but now that you have a better understanding of personalization, you can see why these recommendations are even more important and how they will help.

1. Descriptive Unique Title and Description Tags
The long tail is going to be even more important with personalization.  Every single one of your products/pages MUST have a unique title and description tag.  The tags must contain the specific product/service you are offering and possibly other information as needed.
2. Write for the User, Write for the User, Write for the User!!
Did I mention write for the user?  Describe the product or service in the body of the page as if someone walked up to you and asked about it.  Use the specific product/service name, similar words (example- shoes, footwear), and be thorough.
3. Use a Google Site Map

Lastly, if your traffic and sales have been dramatically affected by personalization for a particular search term, and after checking with many people on multiple computers it appears your competitors has not been affected, then it may be your site.  Why do I say that?  If many people search a term like “soccer cleats” and you feel your competitors ranking stayed the same, but only you dropped, you have to ask yourself “why does Google think my competitors site is more relevant for that term?”  Review the competing sites title, description, and content and compare it to yours.  Try to get backlinks with that keyword adtext.  Again, this falls back to best practices.

If Google does make a mistake and ends up dropping the rank of your site and of your competitors for a converting term, you have another tool you should be using to compensate for these lost sales (notice I didn’t write lost traffic, I wrote lost sales), Paid Search!  Take advantage of this opportunity and run some highly relevant, compelling, ads with great calls to action.  This may be only a temporary glitch.  Your paid search manager will be your hero!

Conclusion:  Relax, take a deep breath and follow SEO best practices.  Personalization is your friend and is simply a feature Google created to serve relevant (there is that word again) sites to their users requests.  You obviously made it through the “Universal Search” doom and gloom hysteria, you can make it through this as well.

I would love to hear you feedback on what I wrote and from people that have experienced any changes to their site due to personalization (good or bad).