In-House PPC

Pros – In-house PPC is all about diving deep into specific problems. You’re devoting all of your time to one account (or several accounts owned by the same company), so you don’t have to worry about constantly switching gears and thinking about the problems posed by different industries. Also, all of your web development, marketing, and production are usually handled in-house as well, so it’s relatively easy to get initiatives pushed through from other departments in the company (for example, getting IT help with setting up landing page testing).

Cons – When you only work on one account, things can get a little monotonous. Once you cover a lot of the easy wins, you might get stuck with routine maintenance on an optimized account. You might end up as the sole PPC practitioner in your company, so you won’t be able to rely on second opinions before you experiment with something new or do some analysis on a completed test.

Outsourced PPC

Pros – Working at an agency (or working with one) can be fast-paced and exciting. You’re working with a lot of different companies and industries, so you can learn what works on one account and apply your knowledge to another one. There’s no lack of other folks to bounce ideas off of. And if you’re a business looking to outsource, sometimes it can be cheaper and quicker to hire an agency with a lot of PPC experience rather than struggle to find someone with the proper skillset in your city.

Cons – Some agencies give their account reps too many accounts to manage. This is bad for the account rep (trust me, it’s no fun juggling 20 different accounts that need help each week), and bad for the client. If you can’t devote more than 2-3 hours per week to an account, you won’t be able to do any substantially beneficial work. For some small businesses, it just makes more economic sense to hire a new entry-level person that will be able to devote 40 hours per week to the cause rather than pay the same amount for an agency that will only be able to squeak in a few hours of work. Also, at agencies you’re often so crunched for time and resources that you can make only the most superficial changes – deep dives into complicated problems just aren’t feasible.

Personally, I tend to favor the in-house approach. Of course, I’m biased since I’ve built my career around it, but I do think that the time and resources to be thorough generate better long-term PPC results. If any of you agency workers out there would like to offer an opposing viewpoint, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

I have had the privilege of using Raven Tools for the last couple of months at my day job, and I have to admit that I have been quite impressed. Raven is primarily an SEO tool, but it offers a lot of useful functionality for PPC marketing as well. For the purposes of this review, I’m just going to cover the aspects of the software that are relevant to PPC management.

First off, I should explain some limitations of the platform. Raven doesn’t do any kind of automated bid management, statistical analysis of ad testing, keyword optimization, or any of the other fancy PPC management gimmicks that come with some of your high-end PPC software packages. Raven also does not offer integration with Microsoft AdCenter as of the writing of this review. These are some significant downsides that I hope Raven will fix in later releases. But on the other hand, Raven is much more affordable than the more comprehensive software platforms, so the cost-to-usefulness ratio is actually pretty good.

Raven Tools excels as a paid search management platform in two areas: reporting and research. With Raven, you can get side-by-side comparisons of your AdWords and Analytics data, as well as data on top ranking SEO keywords. Here’s an example (with metrics blacked out to protect client confidentiality):

This is pretty handy for easily measuring how much your AdWords efforts are contributing to your overall site traffic and performance. You can also add in additional dashboard modules like Google Analytics Keywords or Google Analytics Referrers to get a more granular look at where your traffic is coming from.

For keyword research, Raven gives you a lot of options. Your monthly subscription gets you access to keyword research from data sources including Google’s keyword tool, SEMRush, SEOMoz, WordTracker, and Open Calais. If you do a lot of keyword research for new campaigns and ad groups, then you’ll probably save some money by getting Raven Tools instead of subscribing to all of the paid tools it has access to.

You can research keywords in several different ways. A good start would be to use the Research Assistant, which mashes up data from Google, SEMRush, SEOMoz and Open Calais. Here’s a sample report:

Here, you get data on estimated CPC, search volume, and competition. If you want to get information from individual sources within the data mashup, you can do that too. Here’s a look at the same report using only SEMRush data:

The Google keyword tool integration is nothing special, since you can get that data for free anyway. But it is nice to have it available in the same interface that you’re getting your other keyword data from. There’s also a WordTracker option. I’ve never been a big fan of WordTracker, since Google seems to provide more relevant and useful keywords (for free, I might add). But if you want to round out your research with another data source, you can do that too:

Another handy tool for paid search optimization is the Keyword Opportunities report. This one pulls data on your paid search keywords from Google Analytics to show you what you can improve on. The example report below provides site engagement metrics like visits, percentage of total visits, and bounce rate by keywords. With a report like this, you could see which of your paid search keywords have a high bounce rate, then go back to your account and add negative keywords or improve the ad and landing page to improve the bounce rate and increase customer engagement (and hopefully conversions as well).

With monthly subscription plans starting at $99, Raven is both affordable and a must-have for any agency or business with a serious search marketing program. The data insights you get from the platform will easily help you recoup the cost of the subscription by improving your return on ad spend. And unlike most other PPC software packages, your monthly fee is not a percentage of your ad spend. You’ll pay the same for Raven if you spend $1000 a month on PPC or $1,000,000 a month. Raven is in my PPC toolbox, and I recommend that you put it in yours too.

If you want to see for yourself, Raven is offering a free 30 day trial. Setting up your Raven reporting is as easy as inputting your AdWords and Google Analytics IDs – it took me about 15 minutes to enter all of my accounts and set up the dashboards I wanted. I don’t normally endorse products, but Raven Tools is a worthy exception. Give it a try today and tell them I sent you.

Full disclosure: I was not paid by Raven Tools for this post, nor did I receive any free products in consideration. However, I am participating in Raven Tools’ affiliate program via shareasale.com.

Remarketing Pros

1. It helps you convert a customer you might have lost.

The most effective remarketing campaigns take a user that very nearly converted and give them the extra push to come back to your website. For example, you could set up a remarketing campaign that targets users who abandoned their shopping cart and shows them an ad for 10% off your store with a special promo code. That extra discount may give the reluctant purchaser a little boost, and make them come back and complete the conversion. It’s much better for you to get 90% of the sale value instead of 0%, so if your profit margins can handle it remarketing could bring in a lot of lost revenue.

2. It’s more effective than traditional display advertising.

With traditional display ads, you have a few good targeting options available. You can target by keyword interest, specific websites, or demographic data. But remarketing ads offer an even more focused targeting method: people who have already engaged with your website. You know that they’re already interested in what you have to offer, so it’s only a matter of giving them that extra push to go from a browsing customer to a converting one. Remarketing ads can be that push.

Remarketing Cons

1. You might pay twice to acquire the same customer.

The flipside of remarketing is that you’ll never know if the person you’re targeting was going to come back to your website and convert anyway. For a lot of websites, the conversion process may take days, weeks, or even months. Many customers like to think about a purchase before making it. So your remarketing ads may not have any additive effect on your conversion process. If a highly-interested customer clicks on your PPC ad, thinks over their purchase, then clicks on a remarketing ad to return to your site, you just paid for two clicks when one would have sufficed. This could run up your cost per acquisition across campaigns.

2. It’s kinda creepy.

Let’s face it: the average consumer isn’t as big a fan of privacy-invading advertising schemes as us marketers. Just take a look at the recent backlash against Google’s “Search Plus Your World” rollout. Customers get kind of freaked out when their searches and ads get too personal. Extensive remarketing could make potential customers think ill of your brand, and cost you conversions from every marketing channel. If you’re going to try remarketing, be sure to do it in moderation.

So should you try remarketing for your account? It depends. Some accounts will benefit greatly, while others will just waste money. Consider the pros and cons listed above, and think if your customers would appreciate the gentle reminder that remarketing offers. And when in doubt, do like we always do: test it out, measure your results, and calculate the difference to see if it worked.

Sure, I can hear the uproar from all the business owners out there: “But I’m special! I put my product on the internet, so it’s destined to make me a millionaire!” Sorry, dude. If you’re just starting an online business, you are really late to the party. If something can be sold for a profit on the internet, there are hundreds of people selling it already. If you want to set yourself apart, you really need to make sure customers understand why they should buy from you instead of all the other people selling it online. If you can’t make that distinction, your pay per click marketing efforts are going to fail.

Before you start any PPC account, take a look at what your competitors are doing online. Is your product cheaper? Do you ship it faster? Is it of better quality? If you can’t say at least one of those statements is true, considering every one of your online competitors (yes, I said every one), then don’t bother with PPC. In fact, don’t bother with starting that business at all. It is not going to end well for you.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s assume that your product doesn’t totally suck. Now you have to convince your customers of that. This is where your ad text and landing page comes in. If you are cheaper than your competitors, talk up that point in your ads and display your prices prominently on your landing page. People love to get a good deal, and CTR is always great on ads with a discount percentage or a dollar amount discount. But if you’re not the cheapest, don’t even think about stating your price point in your ad. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve seen a PPC ad stating “Lowest Prices!” when at least three other competitors had a lower price right in their ad text. If you do this, you’re telling your customers that 1) you are not the cheapest, and 2) you are a liar. Don’t be that guy.

If you can deliver your product faster, tell your customers that! People love instant gratification. This is especially important for time-sensitive things like gifts. If you have a special shipping hook-up, you can make a killing on holidays like Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Mother’s Day. There are an awful lot of people who are really bad at planning ahead, and they’re willing to pay a significant markup on shipping if you can promise them that you can get a package to them in just a few days. This is especially effective if your competitors can’t make the same shipping promise.

But if your product isn’t cheap, and you can’t ship it quickly, you can always rely on the quality of the product. Of course, you really have to have a quality product to pull this off. Apple is a classic example. Their gadgets are way more expensive than every other computer manufacturer, but you won’t have trouble finding someone willing to pay the Apple markup because their products are genuinely high quality. This can work for your product too, but you have to be able to convince potential customers who don’t know who you are. Use customer testimonials, high-resolution product images, and starred reviews to prove your point. Show your customers (and not just through slick marketing copy) that they would be suckers to buy anyone else’s cheap, low-quality crap. If you can’t be the cheapest or the fastest, be the best.

Before you start a PPC account, take a good, long look at your product. Does it suck? Well, then your account is going to fail. Before you even buy one click, work on making your product better. If you don’t, you’re going to waste a lot of time and money.

Prediction 1: Tablet targeting takes off.

Marketers have been talking up the virtues of mobile targeting for a couple years now, but I gotta be honest – I haven’t seen the appeal. Unless you’re an advertiser that can condense your user experience to work on a smartphone screen, you probably won’t see good results from mobile targeting. This rules out anyone with a multi-step conversion process, a long lead form, or anyone who uses some kind of custom web tool (that may not work on smartphones) to complete their conversion event. There are a lot of businesses that fall into that category.

However, tablets change the mobile marketing game. They’re small enough to be portable, but large enough to convey a full-screen user experience to website visitors. And I’m sure that the ranks of tablet owners have swollen after this holiday season as people received them as gifts. I expect that in 2012 we’ll see a lot more people tapping away at PPC ads on their tablet screens. Perhaps it’s time to segment out your tablet traffic into separate campaigns, analyze your tablet traffic in Google analytics, and think about how you can optimize your conversion process to look great on a mobile screen.

Prediction 2: Readability and ad-block apps hinder display network performance.

I admit that I’m a power user of ad-block extensions such as Ad Block Plus, and reader bookmarklets like the outstanding Readability. Those of you with iPhones and iPads may have noticed the “Reader” functionality in iOS 5′s Safari browser. These are indicators of a larger trend that’s been percolating since the first banner ad – users just don’t want to see ads and other distractions in their web content. There’s no doubt that there have been some lost ad impressions due to this technology over the years, but with the Reader inclusion in iOS 5 I think we just saw the cultural tipping point where these services went from being neat gadgets used by hardcore web users to entering the mainstream web toolbox. It’s going to be tougher to get your ad message out on display networks with people stripping out ads from their content by choice. It will be hard to tell the exact impact that ad-stripping widgets will have on display network performance, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see image ad performance flatten or decline by a few percentage points in 2012.

Prediction 3: SEO suffers, and PPC thrives.

This year, I switched jobs and took on a role that has me managing both SEO and PPC. I was always tangentially involved in the SEO world, but now I’m getting a first-hand look at the struggles SEO practitioners go through on a daily basis. SEO was dealt a major blow in 2011 with Google’s SSL encryption of user queries, and the subsequent loss of organic search query data in Google Analytics reports. PPC escaped unscathed from this change – we can view all the user search queries we want, as long as someone clicked on an ad instead of an organic result. As I’ve written before, this schism between Google’s priorities for user privacy in regards to organic search versus paid search concerns me. This change showed that Google is willing to throw SEO specialists (and users) under the bus while leaving paid advertisers untouched. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see another similar development in 2012 – at least one incident where a Google policy change shows a naked favoritism for paid advertisers over SEO’s. I don’t think that SEO is going to die off by any means, but I do think it is going to get battered around a bit.

That’s it for this year’s predictions. Best of luck in your 2012 advertising efforts, and stick around for another great year of PPC Without Pity!

Prediction #1: PPC Effort Increases, Although Spending Does Not

I think I was half-right on this one. PPC effort has no doubt increased, with new targeting options, ad extensions, and search engine policy changes keeping even the most experienced paid search marketers on their toes. However, PPC spending has still shown a strong trend of increasing year-over-year. According to a study by Ignition One, a digital marketing firm, total search spend was up 7.2% year-over-year Q3 2011 vs. Q3 2010, and search spend was up 11.8% YoY Q2 2011 vs. Q2 2010. Another study by Performics showed that this year’s Black Friday search spending was up 112% vs. Black Friday 2010, and Cyber Monday search spending increased 68% year-over-year. There’s clearly more room to grow in the PPC space as more retailers get online, and more consumers make the switch from brick-and-mortar purchases to e-commerce. I’m going to stop predicting a plateau for PPC spending. Based on the last couple of years, I expect search spending to continue growing for quite some time.

Prediction #2: Microsoft makes significant improvements to AdCenter to compete better with Google

100% true. AdCenter has really stepped up their game this year, adding a better UI, better data visualizations, enhanced geographic targeting, quality score calculations, and more sensible budget options to their product. Ever since the Yahoo/Bing search alliance, it seems like Microsoft has been making a flurry of improvements to their advertising platform to continue to make it a viable option for search advertisers. The only persistent problem is market share – Google is still the 800-pound gorilla in the room on that one, and it doesn’t look like they’re about to give up that search traffic share any time soon. I think that Microsoft has decided to stop going head-to-head with the Big G, and instead offer themselves as a complementary product to reach an audience that has rejected Google for whatever reason. Case in point: this year, AdCenter made it stupidly easy to export an AdWords campaign and import it directly into your AdCenter account. This shows that Microsoft is aware that search marketers aren’t facing a choice between AdWords and AdCenter. They’re almost forced to use Google, the choice is whether or not to supplement that coverage with AdCenter. I’m on record for being in favor of using AdCenter, and with the product improvements they’ve done in 2011, it has become a much easier choice to make.

Prediction #3: Facebook PPC gets big

True. On a personal level, I’ve been hearing a lot more about Facebook ads than in previous years. But to really back me up, let’s run some numbers:

Google Ad Revenue, Q1-Q3 2011: $26,357,000,000
Bing Ad Revenue, 2011 (estimated by eMarketer): $1,470,000,000
Facebook Revenue, Q1-Q3 2011 (according to a Gawker source): $2,500,000,000

If Gawker is to be believed, then Facebook is on pace for driving twice the ad revenue that AdCenter is. Not surprising, since by some estimates Facebook is now responsible for one third of online ad impressions in the US. Facebook has already reached ubiquity in the lives of most everyone with a first-world internet connection. It’s not surprising that they would evolve into one of the most valuable advertising platforms out there, since Facebook captures so much of the world’s attention. They’ve still got a long way to go before they overtake Google, though.

So the final tally is 2.5 out of three. Better than last year! Join me next week, when I take a shot at some PPC predictions for 2012.

In this final installment of our “Fixing AdWords Quality Score Issues” series, we’ll be covering quality score issues on the Google Display Network. Quality score on the display network is calculated a little differently than your search campaigns, because the user experience is so different. Users are actively searching for information in search network campaigns, but have information presented to them passively on the display network. Here’s what Google has to say about display network quality score, taken from their help topic on the subject:

The Quality Score for calculating an ad’s eligibility to appear on a particular Display Network site, as well as the ad’s position on that site, consists of the following factors:

• The ad’s past performance on this and similar sites
• The relevance of the ads and keywords in the ad group to the site
• The quality of your landing page
• Other relevance factors

The Quality Score for determining if a placement-targeted ad will appear on a particular site depends on the campaign’s bidding option.

If the campaign uses cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) bidding, Quality Score is based on:

• The quality of your landing page

If the campaign uses cost-per-click (CPC) bidding, Quality Score is based on:

• The historical CTR of the ad on this and similar sites
• The quality of your landing page

So you can see that a lot of the factors that influence quality score in the search network also have bearing on your display network quality score. You still need to make sure that you have high-quality, relevant ads (that will help you achieve a high historical click-through rate), and your landing page is highly relevant to your ads and appears to be a quality site to Google (basically, it should not seem spammy).

The unique quality score factor that you can control only on the display network is the placements in which your ad appears. You can’t exclude Google or the search partner sites from showing your ads in search network campaigns, but you can pick and choose which web pages your ads appear on in the display network. Remember – a single bad placement could impact your ad-group and campaign-level quality scores in display network campaigns. It could be even worse if you’re not picky about your placements and you have a lot of low-CTR ads as a result. To fix this, you need to periodically review the placements in which your ads appear, and remove targeted placements or add negative placements whenever it’s appropriate. Cutting out the low performers should help your ad CTR improve, which will help repair any quality score damage as you accrue a good account history.

You should also take note of the relevance between the product you’re offering and the sites your ads are appearing on. Whenever your ads don’t match up well to the page content, you’ll not only notice worse performance, but you might actually incur a relevance penalty from Google that could cause a dip in quality score. If a placement is not relevant (determined either by common sense, or poor performance stats like CTR and conversion rate), then you should exclude it from your display network campaign to prevent potential quality score damage.

And finally, be aware that Google is not only rating your quality score based on the sites your placement is appearing on, it’s also taking into account your performance on similar sites. If you start to see your quality score really suffer, you may need to take out entire categories of placements (i.e. coupon sites or auto blogs) to repair the damage.

And that’s it for quality score. If you have any personal successes with quality score improvement, I’d love to hear about them – just leave me a note in the comments.

This week in the “Fixing AdWords Quality Score Issues” series, we’re going to cover quality score repairs at the ad and keyword level.

Ad Level

Of all the elements in your account, your ad may have the greatest influence on your quality score. Most of the points outlined in Google’s quality score help file deal with ads, particularly these:

• The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on the Google domain
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
• The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• The quality of your landing page
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query

The two main points are click-through rate (CTR) and relevance. A more relevant ad should generate a higher CTR, so the points are intertwined. History plays a role too. You can’t generate a solid CTR history without time, and a good account history is probably the most influential factor in quality score based on my experience. So that means you’ll have to be constantly vigilant in maintaining a good CTR and high relevance for all of your text and image ads so that you can develop a solid account history.

But every good account history has a beginning. Start by creating highly relevant ads off the bat. A highly relevant ad should contain one of the top traffic-driving keywords in your ad group. Preferably, this keyword should be in the headline, but within either description line is fine, too. When a user’s search query appears in a text ad, it gets bolded. That should help draw your customers’ attention and give you a little CTR boost. Also hint that searcher will find what they are looking for if they click on your ad. Prove to them that you’re going to solve their problem, and they’ll click on your ad. Also, don’t be afraid to use ad features like sitelinks and ratings stars. These have been shown to increase CTR in testing, and that extra CTR boost might make a difference in a quality score point or two.

Also remember that you’re being judged on the domain that appears in your ad. This may not matter so much if you only have one domain to advertise, but it could make a huge difference if you have several microsites within the same AdWords account. It may be better for you to have separate accounts for each microsite, and use an MCC (My Client Center) interface to manage them all.

Lastly, consider your landing page. Make sure the keywords in your ad group appear on your landing page. Also, you definitely want to ensure that anything you promised in your text ad is going to be delivered on your landing page. If you promise a discount in your ad and it never gets mentioned on your website, you might lose a customer and take a hit on your relevance score as well.

Keyword Level

What you do at the keyword level is going to affect the ad level (for good or for ill), so it’s best to work on these in tandem. First off, make sure that your keyword groupings are highly relevant – close synonyms and plurals only within the same ad groups. This will not only improve the relevance metrics for the ad group, but will also make it easier to develop specially-tailored ads and landing pages for specific ad groups and keyword sets.

Negative keywords are also a huge asset for quality score improvement. More negatives equals a higher CTR for your ads and keywords, since you will be eliminating irrelevant traffic that won’t drive clicks or conversions. If you have an established ad group with good historical data, run a search query report and look for queries with high impression counts and low click counts. Adding these queries (or specific words within the queries) as negatives will eliminate this low-CTR traffic and raise your overall CTR for the keyword they were matched to, and the text ad by extension.

It’s also a good idea to add negatives as soon as possible to eliminate poor account history. There are a lot of negative keywords that are safe to add at the very beginning – the word “free” comes to mind, if you’re in the business of selling items or services. This keyword indicates a total lack of purchase intent, so you’re unlikely to ever get a sale from this type of user. Your negative keyword list is going to vary drastically between industries, but nearly everybody has a few negatives that will be useful to add without having to back them up with historical data.

That’s it for this week. Next week, we’ll close out the series with a guide to improving quality score on the Google Display Network.

The next stops on our tour of improving Google quality scores are the campaign and ad group levels. Here we go…

Campaign Level

The most influential campaign-level quality score factor is mentioned in Google’s quality score help topic:

Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown

Geotargeting is available only on the campaign level (for now), so if your campaign is doing particularly badly in a specific area, you can always exclude traffic from that area. If you’re still getting conversions, you can create a brand-new campaign that is targeted only on that area, thereby isolating the bad quality score from the good. Factors that incur a bad quality score can “contaminate” an otherwise good campaign, so it’s better to isolate the worst of the worst in to it’s own segment so that it won’t bring down the aspects of your campaign that are working.

Another campaign-level tactic is to make sure your campaign target either the search network or the display network – never both. Quality score on the search network is calculated very differently than quality score on the display network (more on this in part 4 of this series), so you really need to separate these tactics in order to optimize for quality score. Plus, it’s a general best practice. You can’t target each network effectively when they’re both jammed in to the same campaign, so it’s a good idea to keep them separate regardless of the effect on quality score.

There’s also something to be said about separating your campaigns by product line, search intent, or other relevance categories. It probably won’t have an effect on your quality score (although we never know what’s behind those “other relevance factors” mentioned in the help topic), but it will put you in the right mindset for categorizing things in aspects of your account where it will affect your quality score. Plus, it helps you manage your budgets and campaign settings to make sure that each category stays profitable (and is easily cut out if it doesn’t turn a profit).

Ad Group Level

This is where we really start to see big impacts on the quality score. Two factors specifically mention ad groups:

• The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group

Granted, these factors are affected by your ads and keywords, but you can take some steps at the ad group level to fix these issues as well.

First off, each ad group should contain only a few keywords that are tightly related to each other. I use 5-20 keywords as a general rule of thumb, but I’ve also seen ad groups of only 1-2 keywords do pretty well. Try to avoid anything over 20 keywords unless you can come up with a really compelling reason why 20+ keywords are very closely related. Even the thesaurus only has about four or five synonyms per word – think about that the next time you try to determine if all of your keywords are relevant to each other.

You also need to make sure that the ads in each ad group are tightly related to the keywords you’ve selected. I always try to make sure that the top keyword in each ad group (defined by either total clicks or total conversions, preferably both) appears at least once in the ad. That’s a good start, but you can also manipulate the rest of the ad text to be relevant to what you’re offering. But don’t forget that your ad is a sales tool as well – you just need to balance the needs of the customer with the needs of the search engine, like a lot of other things in search engine marketing.

Also note that you’re being graded on the historical CTR of the display URLs in your ad group. Each ad that runs with a low CTR pointing to your domain is going to be a bad mark on your Google report card. Don’t ruin your reputation with a couple of crappy ads.

That’s it for part 2. Stay tuned next week for part 3, where we tackle quality score issues at the ad and keyword level.

• The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on the Google domain
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
• The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• The quality of your landing page
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
• Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
• Other relevance factors

Notice “other relevance factors”? That means that we’ll never really know everything that Google wants in order to assign a high quality score. However, we can still make improvements based on what we do know about the calculations. In the next four blog posts, I’m going to go over the different levels at which quality score is calculated, and what you can do at each level in order to improve it. Here’s what I’ll cover, and when I’ll cover it:

This week (11/28/11): Quality score at the account level
12/5/11: Quality score at the campaign and ad group level
12/12/11: Quality score at the ad and keyword level
12/19/11: Quality score in display network campaigns

So without further ado, here are some tips on how to improve quality score at the account level.

Account Level

To start our analysis of account-level quality score factors, allow me to direct your attention to what may be the most crucial overall factor in determining quality score:

“Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account.”

So even though Google doesn’t have a handy little stat at the account level like it does at the keyword level, your entire account does have a unified quality score, of a sort: your combined account history. Did you let your cousin’s cousin (who’s real good with computers) set up your AdWords account, only to see it crash and burn? Even if you paused those crappy campaigns and started anew, it’s still going to drag down your account quality score. No one really knows how long it takes to overcome a bad account quality score, but you’re probably looking at a few months minimum. It’s much better to have a solid quality score plan in place before you start an account, since it’s much easier to start with a good baseline rather than pull an account up from a quality score nosedive.

So what can you do? Basically, you don’t screw up in the first place. Have a plan in mind for how you’re going to structure your campaigns and ad groups before you even touch that brand new account. Draw out a tree structure covering your campaigns, and the ad groups you’ll have within them. Separate campaigns and ad groups by product lines, target audience, or customer intent. Keep each campaign and ad group small, manageable, and tightly relevant to the other components within them (more on this next week).

And if you’re already dealing with an account with a bad history…good luck. I wish I could say there was an easy fix, but at this level there’s not. The only thing that can solve a bad account history is a good account history, and that takes a long time to create. If you’re short on time, then you could just shut down your account and start a new one in order to start your quality score calculations fresh. But, this could get a little tricky – Google really, really doesn’t like you doing this, and if they find you using the same domain, billing address, or credit card for a duplicate AdWords account, you might get shut down. This is getting into some black/grey hat PPC stuff that I don’t really condone, but I will say this: I’ve seen it work before.

That’s it for this week. Stay tuned next week, when I’ll cover improving quality scores at the campaign and ad group level.