How to save money with AdWords
I appreciate that I might be a little out of season with this observation, but you can tell a lot about a person by which type of Quality Street they reach for first.
If it’s a strawberry cream, then they’ve got correctly functioning taste buds. If it’s the orange cream, then they were too laid back and missed out on the strawberry creams. If it’s a toffee penny then they’re a risk taker and if it’s the coconut éclair (the one in the blue wrapper) then they’re a psychopath.
Unfortunately, this isn’t an article on the psychology of Quality Street; it’s actually about a different type of Quality…
If you’re already running an AdWords campaign or two it can’t have escaped your notice that every one of your keywords has been given a score out of 10 by Google – This is known as the Quality Score (QS to us AdWords geeks).
This score is given to each one of your keywords in your AdWords account when your campaign goes live. Basically, Google assesses how relevant the keyword, ad headline, ad copy, display URL and landing page are to the original search query.
Notice that the word “relevant” has appeared in every one of my Circular articles so far this year – and there’s a reason for that!
If Google likes your relevancy then you’ll get a score for starters of around 5 to 7 out of 10. The ultimate goal, of course, just like in Strictly, is to get 10 out of 10.
Once Google has given you a starter score it leaves the rest up to the visitor to your landing page – do they give their experience a thumbs up or a thumbs down?
They’ll give you a thumbs up if they find compelling and engaging content on your site, visit a few pages and, hopefully, provide you with their details in the form that you have carefully designed to capture them.
This is known as education based marketing – educate your visitor, provide them with value and then ask them for their details so that you can keep the conversation going off line. Google likes this and so your quality score will go up.
On the other hand if you get the thumbs down from your landing page visitor, then this means that they disagree with Google’s initial assessment of your relevancy and they demonstrate this by leaving almost as soon as they have arrived (a “bounce” in Google speak). This will make Google lower your Quality Score.
If you have keywords in your campaign with Quality Scores of 4 or less then stop reading this right now and go and pause those keywords – this article can wait. You see, Google has a reward and penalty system when it comes to QS. If you have a QS of 10 then the price you pay per click is discounted by 50%. On the other hand, if you have a QS of only 1 then you pay a 400% penalty (yes, a 400% penalty!).
That’s why a really good QS is so important – it’s linked to how much you have to pay when someone clicks on your ad.
How does that work, I hear you ask? Well there’s a simple equation that Google uses to decide where on the search results page your ad should go – the top position, position 2, position 3, position 4 etc. By the way, if you can’t manage to get into position 4 as a minimum then stop your campaign and work out what the issue is.
You see, with Google Ads, if it was simply about the highest bid then the guy with the fattest wallet would win – even if his keywords, ads and landing page experience were poor (no relevancy). Google levels the playing field by cleverly bringing the Quality Score into the equation so that your ad position (called ad rank) is defined by the equation:
Ad Rank = Bid x Quality Score
(In reality the equation is much more complex but that’s all we as advertisers need to care about).
So, here’s an example – let’s assume your competitor has a quality score of 5 (i.e. he doesn’t have the benefit of being able to read my article every month, after all!) and he bids £1 per click, then his Ad Rank score is 1 (bid) x 5 (QS) = 5.
Now, you come along and you’ve done a great job creating a high degree of relevancy between the original search query, the keyword, the ad and the highly optimised landing page (well, you read last month’s article, didn’t you?) and we have a QS of 10 (out of 10) then if we bid only 51p (i.e. almost half of our competitor’s bid) then our ad rank score equation looks like this: 0.51 (bid) x 10 (QS) = 5.1 – so we have trumped their Ad Rank score and as a result we appear higher on the search results page for a lot less money. Are you now convinced why it’s worthwhile working on relevancy to increase your QS? The higher you are on the results page the more clicks you’ll get for much less cost.
The lesson does not end there, though. AdWords is nothing if it’s not dynamic; things change all the time (Google made over 400 changes to AdWords in 2014) and so, of course, the Ad Rank equation has changed. This time it’s in order to encourage the use of landing pages embedded into authoritative web sites which consist of seven or more pages. This is another example of education based marketing.
The idea being that you provide your landing page visitor with the opportunity to look around the rest of your site, allowing them to form the opinion that you are, indeed, an authority in your field. I know that this flies in the face of a lot of landing page marketing where there is a single page and an opt-in form – but Google deems this not to be as good a search experience…
…and remember, Google’s stated intention is to provide the best search engine experience in the galaxy.
Speaking of the galaxy – I couldn’t finish without acknowledging the death of Leonard Nimoy, the actor who played half human, half Vulcan, Mr Spock in Star Trek. Those of us who are old enough to remember seeing the very first series of Star Trek still have a soft spot for the highly logical (yet underneath intensely emotional) Mr Spock.
Live long and prosper…
