I've been doing PPC since around 2000 when Google Adwords launched. Interestingly enough, the same time the data mining/collecting database coined as the Google Toolbar was also launched. So I have been responsible for millions of dollars and pound in spends on Google, keeping under Google's radar for many reasons.
I spent the best part of the last 72 hours doing some testing provoked by boredome and messing around with some free rebate cash from Google the other night. What I found was a little disturbing.
Google's recent Quality Score seems to be "hackable" from a very novice level. I'm wondering if this has been disovered anywhere else, but I have been unable to find any "real evidence" of this. So despite the potential repurcussions, I'm calling them out. I hope they prove me wrong because this may cause many of my past and current clients to ask some serious questions that I cannot answer...and I don't like to not be able to answer questions, that's why I'm a data miner, mathmatician, and have strived to become an expert in biometricss...I want conclusive answers...not theories, best guesses, unsubstantiated claims based on propaganda and heresay, or basic bullshit.
What I have observed in a large mix of PPC accounts (old, new, large, small, UK, US, great conversion rates and poor conversion rates, and many other variables) is that you can actually manipulate Google's PPC algo and get a Great Quality Score ranking every time you add a new keyword with the correct initial settings. Of course if you don't do it right, you can end up getting a Poor keyword level Quality Rating before you ever activate the campaign, adgroup or keyword , and this Quality Rating cannot be changed or adjusted to have google revisit the keyword and your bid and budget settings and change your Quality Grade...Why???
Think about what it takes to get a keyword ranking on PPC in the coveted top 3 positions that then become syndiacted across Google's "Partner Network" that includes AOL (6% conversions - average - 2x the industry average), Netscape, Ask, and many other popular search engines powered by Google. Answer? More money.
The more shocking part is that you can delete the keyword , the adgroup holding the keyword , or the entire campaign, but as soon as you create a new campaign, or an adgroup within an existing campaign, or just add the keyword into existing adgroup thinking that you'll get a fresh look from google and get the Good or Great Quality Rating the keyword Quality Rating comes back the same.
No matter if you enter the exact settings from the campaign awarded the Great Score (to keep thing equal I used duplicate budgets, existing conversion ratios and product/service offerings, as well as the exact same ads, adverts, landing pages and so on), the keyword word will carry the previous Quality Rating with it. It also works in reverse as well.
I did everything I mentioned above, but I adjust the minimum campaign level CPC default and the budget to the settings that got a Poor Quality rating on the other account, but that made no difference either. I take the account and keyword with the Great Quality rating and start altering every possible influencing factor; no keyword in the advert or URL, all of these test point to Stickyeyes.com home page whether it was the destination page or display URL. I moved the keyword into a terrible adgroup, changed adverts, changed landing page, I even cancelled the damn thing, logged out and activated an IP cloaker. I logged back into the account (which I had completely deleted at this point because I tried every other scenario) then uploaded a huge account with 15 campaigns, 150 adgroups and over 20,000 keyword's.
I picked one out randomly and added the keyword (oh, by the way, the keyword was 'mesothelioma attorney'), and set the budget to £5 and the minimum CPC default to 0.01 and the damn thing came back with the same Grade.
Then I went to an entirely different account that I had never introduced this keyword into, took the exact same huge account with everything being identical and loaded it into this fresh account setting the budget to £500 daily and £50 minimum CPC default and the Quality Rating was Poor I have a long list of tests that I want to see the results for, some are short term and others are potentially long term depending on whether Google revisits or runs it through an auto-editor the next day and if it restores the correct Quality Rating based on the new settings, or they come back eventually, but only with time and good ctr.
Landing page content is supposed to factor into the Quality Rating as well, Of course I used the same URL and landing page (Stickyeyes) for every test. But I imagine that is something that plays into the PCP algo as time passes and Google collects, stores and compares that information ( I.e Time in site, landing page bounce rates back into the search result and into another site within the same set of results, high conversions, etc.)
What I am MOST anxious to establish is what effect these issues have on a MCC account. I have 12 gambling properties from 5 different companies, 5 debt consolidation companies, two moble phone companies with completely different metrics a demographics, in the same MCC account, two solicitor sites and that's just 1 MCC account. We have all sorts of other strategies that coule be affected by this.
I have already ran multiple tests, and I did them myself, so I know they were run correctly. But to be absolutely sure I ran them again, and then additional duplicate tests using different factors like US versus UK accounts, keeping everything exactly the same as the above conclusive testing, except lowering the budget on the adgroup ranked Great and testing them in a fresh account, keeping everything exactly the same as the above conclusive testing,except changing 1 variable like daily campaign budgets and minimun CPC default bids.
There are many scenarios that can play out here, but I'll just name the first one that comes to mind so I don't drag this out even further without doing proper testing;
Company A is a finance company with a £200 conversion goal for IVA and Consolidation Loan applications. They do refinance loans, but these are worth a fraction of the Iva's, and therefore not a priority to them.
Company B is a different finance company with a $125 maximum conversion goal for IVA and consolidation loans. They have a stable, well converting campaign, well under their conversion goal. They decide to partner with a broker that will pay them £350 for every cashed out refinance loan.
Both companies are managed by us and both are in the same MCC Account
1. Company A has a low-converting landing page for remortgages because they want Iva's and consolidations. Google ranked it as Poor and since their bids are low and the budget is limited and runs out by noon everyday, they spend more than they make and decide to pause or delete the keyword permanently.
2. Having made a great deal with the broker, Company B calls and advises me of the new offering so I create an adgroup. I do the research while creating the campaign in an external excel file or Adwords Editor with the correct budget and default minimum CPC bids and upload it. Google tagged this keyword in the individual account with the Poor rating because I had a lazy ppc manager create Company A's initial campaigns.in an excel file and rather than do the research prior to uploading, he thinks he's slick and sets them all to 0.01. So Company be will now need to pay a significantly higher amount to keep the keyword in the top 3 using position preference. But the budget need to be high enough to keep him there or the ad delivery will be slowed.
After all, once the key words are in the account you can go into the ad diagnostics tool within Adword Tools and search each of them individually and google will show which ones are not showing, and tell you why. Interstingly enough it always either the Quality Score isn't high enough or the bid isn't high enough.
Hmmm Google, why not automatically change it for me, highlight it, and give ME the option to okay it or drop it?
I'll tell you why, because a Poor Quality score will require a higher bid long term to get better positions so that the conversions happen at a significantly higher bid, and you'll get this as long as it takes me to buy my way to the Great Grade. My CPC may come down and keep me in the position I had to buy my way back into because although I set my account up perfectly to get a Great Grade, your ppc algo said "hey wait a minute, we like that bid, but that budget will run out by noon. We need our money so despite all thing being the same, we'll drop his Quality Rating and slowly milk the money out of him while he tries to get a better quality score. Well hell yes I'm going to raise the bid. My keyword i with all the exact same element that I set up back in the US 2 days ago on a UK-only campaign converted fantastic at #3. Okay so I spend a few days babysitting this one keyword because I know it creates 30% of my online sales! Okay so Google say to either raise my bid or improve the quality right? That's odd because I set everything up exactly as I did in the US 2 days ago, except that I was in the US and could afford twice as much. Shoot they even told me it was Great. I think I'll call my wife up at home and have her add the EXACT SAME keyword AND IDENTICAL CAMPAIGN SETUP, ADTEXT and even the LANDING PAGE IS EXACTLY THE SAME....but i think I'll try setting the budget to what I did in the US and see what Quality Rating it gives me.....Hmmm, that's weird, that one says Great too?!?!? I'm confused. Let me see what Google says. I thought I followed the instructions to a tee.
Here it is, its in your Adwords Help Center (Damn Yanks, its spelled Centre!) Glad I'm from Ohio
Google AdWords
AdWords Help US help YOU spend more money!
Change Language:
Google Help Spend My Money! > AdWords Help Can Show You the Quickest Way To Blow Through Your Budget > About AdWords - How a 90 Million Dollar Payout Made a Company Billions! (in the 3 months that followed)) > Glossary of Smoke and Mirror Terms Like "Quality Score"
Quality Score for Google and were throwing in the search network to really confuse you
Quality Score for Google has also been discovered to be a confusing acronym, that when properly decifered by the team of Google Founders Sergey and Larry actu7ally refers to whenone of the pair lost his (cough, cough,Virginity) . Neither will fess up, and even after splitting into seprate rooms, each filled to the ankles with
Kettle Corn and M&M's.
The components of Quality Score vary depending on whether your convinced in your mind that its real
* Quality Score for minimum bid is determined by a keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google, the relevance of the keyword to its ad group, your landing page quality, your account's historical performance, and other relevance factors. If these aren't present, were just going to throw shit randomly out to suck each precious advertising dollar that you have.
* Quality Score for position is something the guys seem intent on speaking of all the time, but always in a whisper, All i have been able to make out were the words, hands and knees.
Note that Quality Score is calculated separately for the content network because if we added the extra revenue that it generates to our normal revenue, our calculators would explode. Plus our accountant (Vito and Big Louie) created that cushion to slowly absorb the 90 million dollar payout in 2005 that we weren't allowed to pass to our new stockholders by going public. WE define our definition of Quality Score as we see it, we own the company, we could buys and sells you 10,000 times biiaatches.
Google, Google Partners and its employees and affiliates take no responsibility for the lack of information or made up definition (hey it sounded good at the time) provided by Girl Scout Troup 8059 - Silicone Valley. The information was available in many obscure 3rd party search engines before too many people started reading it and asking really hard questions.
AdWords Help Center
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Google Help > AdWords Help > About AdWords > Glossary
Quality Score for Google and the search network
Quality Score for Google and the search network is a dynamic metric assigned to each of your keywords. It's calculated using a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad group and to a user's search query. The higher a keyword's Quality Score, the lower its minimum bid and the better its ad position.
The components of Quality Score vary depending on whether it's calculating minimum bid or ad position:
* Quality Score for minimum bid is determined by a keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google [Hmmm that's weird. I haven't activated it to establish any kid of CTR yet], the relevance of the keyword to its ad group [I ran the test across mutiple Adwords campaign using terms like mesothelioma in a 3 year old campaign for credit cards, and another for beds, a third that had many different unrelated ecommerce products, and one for adsl service, I created IDENTICAL adgroups with everything the same as the rest. I then opened all 4 account across two screens and tested different daily budgets from £5 to £5000 and minimum CPC default bids from 0.01 to £50 (which also had 4 other high cost terms related to legal issues like divorce and personal injury with the same results] , your landing page quality [I pointed out above that all my tests were run using Stickyeyes home page as the destination URL as well as the display text], your account's historical performance [they are brand new and have to history, except that you didn't like my minimum CPC default bid so you said it was a Poor Quality Ad, I even bowed to your Google Godlikeness and deleted that terrible terrible old ad and did everything you suggested; I raised my minimum CPC default bid for the entire adgroup just to get my top performer to actually show up, and you warned me the ad delivery would be slowed GoogleGod, yes you did, yessiree. I don't know why it didn't sink in. In the past you told me when I was creating the account by hitting the suggested budget in campaign settings ( of course I only want it on this ONE keyword . All 20+ reps over the years have told me to just create its own little campaign. I did that, but your saying its Poor Quality. How much more, and for how long will I have to pay for my mistake during the initial setup to get a Great quality score? submitted the most I could afford, in a little note below my adgroup taht suggestion 'optimisation suggestions' , when I used your tool to find out why my ad wasn't showing, for the adgroup, and other relevance factors.
* Quality Score for ad position is determined by a keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google, the relevance of the keyword and ad to the search term, your account's historical performance, and other relevance factors.
Note that Quality Score is calculated separately for the content network. Learn more about Quality Score.
Was this information helpful? Yes, now i understand how you thought this whole thing through so well. Don't force the minimum adgroup default CPC to give me the best possible chance at making this campaign successful and give me the option to keep it there, or maybe play with day parting or any of the other money sucking settings that replace the good ones like shadow bidding and gap bidding. Beside the only one that helps is me. Ah, it did feel good though when you said your were putting new enhancements in place to help defend us from those evil doer's that learned how to use advanced bidding tools to keep our costs down. What do you think Sergy and Larry? Huh? Hide the bids and add an option where I can blindly have you increase my bids 200% higher during my peak times? welllll, oookkaakyyy, but I need you guys to keep a close eye on the traffic your sending me and where your posting my ads. You made me increase my budget so my ad delivery doesn't slow and take another month to get a Good Quality Score so I can pay a couple pence/cents less per click for my top 3 listing. The last time that happened I went into the office the next morning and all my money was spent, and I didn't get one sale. You don't remember? My rep told me that you had things in place to prevent that from happening, but GaryTheScubaGuy has been documenting rampant click fraud through his log files froyears. Heck he gets several thousand back from you an a regular basis. I spent a couple days going through 3gb of raw data and found the same IP's in clusters, big clusters. You didn't see that? Oh yea, my rep-of-the-month said you had caught them before you took billed my card every even numbered day. Ok, well I spend a million pounds/dollars/yen/euros every month with your company. How about you send me a basic list of IP's that you sent, and highlight the ones that you had already given me credit for prior to my call last Monday when you said you'd look into it and get back to me. Yeah all I need is something to assure me that you value my businees and are truly concerned and committed to prevent the theft of my money. Oh wait, you're just an unknowing enabler to those adsense publishers and the companies I have read about that employ rooms full of people just for the purpose of helping my nasty competitors attack my advertising budget so they can be in the top 3 and in your exceptional network of enablers like AOL, Netscape, EarthLink, Compuserve, Shopping.com. At&T, ASK.com. About, Lycos, and the many others,
Oh and I even found a place to pay extra for clicks on my adsense ads over at ebay. So all I do is pay around £1.50 or $3.00 extra and I can get an extra 1000 clicks on my adwords ads? Heck this is even a better deal; 10,000 Adsense clicks for just £14.99! Do you have a package that will send traffic too? Send me some AOL traffic, I hear their users buy twice as much as the average ecommerce sites. Is this part of the network you get me in if I pay enough to stay in the top 3 Adword positions?? Don't worry, I'll keep my minimum CPC's up to where you feel your making enough money and hopefully one day I'll get a better quality score so I can save a little money. Hey maybe one day I'll get to where I would have been if I had read your instructions on how to set up a campaign without permanently affixing a Poor Quality Score (no, that's not a link) to my keyword because I wasn't able to spend what you told me to ....oh wait. You never really did tell me how to do that when you implemented that cool Quality Score. No worries, I'm sure it just slipped your minds. But hey, at least you prevented those darn thieves from bid gapping me. Wonder where they are today? I'm sorry, maybe these guys over at ebay will give my wife a work from home job like the ones I found using your search engine. Let's give it a quick try here --- Hey!! you guys are as good as you've always said you were good, you found me 1,560,000 results!! Are these guys part of your content network? C'mon you can tell me!! Well I'll have to give them a call, then with the extra cash I could possibly afford your fee for a good quality score so can eventually pay less and then she wouldn't have keep working just to make up for my lack of attentiveness the 11 times you told me to spend more money. Hey look!, my adwords account has another message from you about slowed ad delivery because of a limited budget. Dang it, I put it up to what you said. Oh I Know, your ebay network probably got my Paypal payment. I can't wait for the sales to come rolling in!! You know it just warms me up inside to see three major companies like Google, Paypal and ebay working together so nicely. It reminds me of a crime syndicate, only legal...kinda. Oh ha ha ha, I forgot you guys MADE the rules, Great forward thinking! At least you are slapping the wrist and teaching the real criminals that you won't stand for their shenanigans and criminal conduct. And for you to take your sincerity to the next level by voluntarily offering 90 million dollars from the meager 6.14 billion you made in 95. That was a great business move on your part.
I was excited when you started gettin busy on click fraud this past February giving us the opportunity to Meet the Click Fraud Team. I gotta meet Julian some day. I found Sarah. the author of the article she wote on Julian - (sorry) The Click Fraud Team, but she is in your Inside Adwords crew. I thought they were called 'damage control"? Anyhoo, tell Julian thanks for doing such a great job, but he's probably on vacation having no work to keep him busy.
I am a llitle curios about why you called them the "Click Fraud" Team though. Matt said in this post on his blog just last year that you said ,"Google prefers the term invalid clicks to click fraud" on page 17 of Dr. Tuzhilin document discussing invalid clicks
I have been asked to evaluate Google's invalid click detection efforts and to conclude whether these efforts are reasonable or not. As a part of this evaluation, I have visited Google's campus three times, examined various internal documents, interviewed several Google's employees, have seen different demos of their invalid click inspection system, and examined internal reports and charts showing various aspects of performance of Google's invalid click detection system.
But I wasn't sure about the truth behind this rumour I heard. I mean even Matt Cutts put this disclaimer on his blog above an excerpt from Dr. Tuzhilin's independent and unbiased report he wrote up after spending the day at the Googleplex , "The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer." And if matt says says so you'd better listen. Proof and More Proof.
It's such a shame, before getting appointed the Official Spam Buster at Google years and years ago, Matt used to be such a nice young man. Even when he turned into a paper doll and a little supermatt, he still had that boyish grin. Rumours flowed like wild fire after this photo was realesed after a Chippendales show in a seedy club in Silicon Valley. We first started seeing the change come on when he went after Aaron Wall as seen here. If get up real close you'll see that Matt's power was just starting to blossom. Look closer. You can clearly see Aaron starting to fade under Matt Spam Bustin PowerClaw. Dang Matt, its just one book. And here Matt show his LA Crips gang sign. Wish he were around so I could get him to explain a few things that are confusing me. Last I heard he was holed up inside one of the wings at the GooglePlex. Thousands of Cuttlet's are shown here outsite the Plex.
So I decided to go to THE source for definitions after I tried to follow your instructions and could
Yes No
Now I can understand that you want to in your own confusing way that either my daily budget and/or my minimum CPC isn't quite enough for you to split your stocks at the end of the next fiscal year,
Here are just a few more tests I ran after 10 straight hours of testing, no sleep, and 20 minutes to get ready for work; (yeah, I was late)
I'll attach the unfinished brief that I will be distributing to my internal people,and I will probably send it over to DevShed and SEOChat once I do additional testing to test the ranking positions and cost of duplicate keyword across individual accounts, that are rate the 3 different ways (Poor , Good, and Great) as well as how long it takes each duplicate keyword with different Grades to gain the Good and then the Great Quality Rating back, and any additional costs that the lower Grades experienced in that time frame. and as I haven't submitted an article in months, but than they haven't payed me for any either. -
Google says account, campaign and adgroup performance does not affect Quality scores. I have found that they do when I attempt to create a completely new campaign, adgroup or keyword within a non-spending and low converting (when it was spending) account. I'm not exactly sure (but I will be after additional testing) why this occurs, but it absolutely does.
A few things that have stood out in this testing, but not entierly 100% conclusive;
Account quality score is an overall Grade of all the keyword quality scores in your account. These quality scores aren't averaged, they are weighted by impressions and clicks, and then averaged. Of course this is AFTER you account has performance data to measure, and not visibly or accurately measured during the new account setup.
Initial account setup settings are the only thing I have seen affecting individual keyword Quality Score that has no historical data to base the score on. So if the overall Quality Score of an account is factored into the account Quality Score based on the individual Quality Score at the key word level, (of which neither have historical data to base its formula on) and the initial account settings affect the Quality Score of individual keywords, then incorrect account settings during the initial setup can affect the overall Quality Score, and further the placement and cost of a keyword. Further, the initial overall account Quality Score can affect not only cost and placement of each individual key word, but require an inflated strategy and budget over time to improve lower Quaity Scores at the key word and account level up the Good or Great Quality level, so that positions are high and cost is low.
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