A few weeks ago, Google clarified one of the many mysteries of the role landing pages play in the calculation of quality score, with the announcement that site quality policy violations would now be reported via a new message in the status column in the AdWords keywords report.
Google wants anyone who clicks on a paid search ad to be treated well before and after their click. Anything which they believe could reduce the quality of that experience is considered grounds for lowering your quality score. By doing this they hope to reduce the number of people who see your ads, the prominence they achieve on result pages, and make a few bucks by charging you a ‘bad advertiser’ tax.
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I’ve been at SMX Advanced in London for the last few days, in part talking about quality score. The one recurring question I heard was about the best way to scale a new account in a way that would maximize quality score.
The worst way to do it, which seems to be the default method, is to just drop thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of keywords into new accounts and just turn them on. This generally produces really poor results, and may create damage to the account from which it might never recover.
The reason why you don’t want to do this will be clear after we discuss the right way to build and scale a new account.
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Steve Baker at epiphany put up a very interesting post this week, in which he analyzed some quality score data to try and answer three questions:
- How high is a high click through rate?
- What is a decent click through rate for a given position?
- How do you know if your Quality Score is being dragged down by the Account Quality Score or your adverts?
These are things we’d all like to know, and his results are interesting, but I have some concerns about whether or not they really answer any of these questions in any way we can rely on. To be clear, I’m not sure – so I’m posting my thoughts here to hopefully further the discussion.
If you haven’t please go read his entire post.
There three thing that concern me about the methodology and the conclusions:
- A mistake concerning the idea that ‘quality score is only calculated on Exact Match’.
- The assumption that ‘visible quality score’ is quality score.
- The treatment of the relationship between quality score and bids and position.
