Comments on: Demystifying Google Quality Score & the Click Thru Rate Factor

By: StevenH

StevenH — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 23:09:49 +0000

So, what you are saying is that Google will be effectively taking ad management out of the equation then? Wouldn’t this be counter to their business model? What happens to the GAPs and GACs?

By: Matt

Matt — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 22:42:14 +0000

Agreed. Surprised it hasn’t happened any sooner.

Although, they are already testing a way to make it much easier. Advertisers will just fill out information about their business/industry, and Google will take care of the rest.

It’s in some kind of alpha testing right now I believe. Don’t know if it’ll ever make it fully through, but it sounds right. The advertiser wouldn’t need to know anything about keywords and pay-per-click.

Matt

By: Wiesner Vos

Wiesner Vos — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 13:12:11 +0000

A very insightful post. We have also analyzed the relationship between quality score and CTR for a range of clients across a range of PPC markets around the world. It is indeed clear that CTR is the most important driver of QS. In our analysis we also illustrate how a quality score is assigned based on the the CTR relative to the position a keyword is in. You can then establish a benchmark CTR per position for achieving a given quality score. For example a CTR of 12% may be required to achieve a QS of 10 in position 1, while a CTR of 5% may be enough to achieve the same QS in position 3. We show that this can differ dramatically in different PPC markets. See our blog below for details

http://www.clicks2customers.com/c2cblog

By: Sherry

Sherry — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:27:40 +0000

The complexity of running PPC campaigns and the amount of money involved makes it prohibitive for smaller website owners to really find that sweet spot in advertising. I wish they made the whole system easier.

By: StevenH

StevenH — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 04:24:20 +0000

Just for clarification upon review. You can have a high CTR and get a good QS, however paying the highest bid per keyword will assure a high QS which is fine if you’re playing in a lower priced sandbox. In the above case, $35 per click is unrealistic which is what the insurance terms click levels are at right now.

By: StevenH

StevenH — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 04:12:39 +0000

A higher QS is only acheived through, yet not entirely dependant on, CTR. I used to think that visible URL, actual URL, keywords in copy, landing page content and so on were primary factors. That is until I took on a car insurance agency as a client… Silly me! My issue with CTR is that “the” defining benchmark for CPC becomes horribly overweighted when you play against not only 4-600 other competitors, but also when the top players of those 4-600 have deep deep pockets.

Click through rates plummet as competition rises. Google will counter that CTR+CPC=QS and that its averaged across the advertising stream making it a level playing field. This simply isn’t the case. Google is protecting their interests in maintaining relations with companies such as Progressive, eSurance, Geico…etc who routinely spend $1-200,000 each day (and at a loss in return) simply to own the market. We tried several times on clean accounts with different split tests, landing page variations, exact match, phrase match, broad match to no avail. The best we could do was .28% CTR and scores fell to 2s. I manage many campaigns and have quite a few QS9-10s for both phrases and singular keywords.

I can only imagine what doctors, lawyers, banking and financial, legal and healthcare companies must be paying (at a loss) per click to remain at the top of the hill in adwords. IMHO some aspects of adwords straddle the line between fair and rigged, and is certainly exploited by the big players.

By: Terry Whalen

Terry Whalen — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:36:10 +0000

Brian,

Great article – very well written. Surprised at some of the comments. There certainly are some keywords for which no advertiser on earth will ever achieve a high QS (due to user intent that is all over the map for certain keywords, including 1-word keywords). But, some of those keywords turn out to yield conversions at or below a target ROI or CPA for some of our clients, so we keep running them.

QS can be a good proxy to look for any red flags in terms of ad group structure and matching ads to ad groups, but at the end of the day if you manage ppc campaigns the way they should be managed, QS pretty much takes care of itself and shouldn’t be a daily concern.

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 22:10:53 +0000

Google quality score is probably one of the most important metrics in adwords and also the most difficult to grasp since Google never reveals the algorithm behind it. One can get slapped with low quality score without even knowing why.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 13:28:04 +0000

Let’s all test it out. Let’s all grab a larger spending AdWords account. Download the last 30 days of data/updating min & first page bids via AdWords Editor. Create a custom view to grab the top 100 keywords by clicks, copy/paste into excel – then let’s observe the relationship between quality score, CPC & CTR.

If anyone is game, write a follow up post/request for anonymous data.

Cheers,

Jeff

By: James

James — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 21:08:23 +0000

QS is not purely about CTR…rob spears is right…keyword density and relevancy of the landing page is the biggest factor in determining QS.

My ads have low search volume and a CTR of less than 2% yet most are QS9.