Reuben Yau

Since the recent Quality Score updates have been put in place a lot of people are seeing keywords being marked as inactive for search with a message: “increase quality or bid $X to activate” The costs to activate the keyword vary but can easily be $1, $5 or $10 per click. These costs are just not feasible for most advertisers, but getting these keywords back online is important.

Here’s my 5 step process for getting those keywords active again at the same or almost the same cost.

1) Delete the affected inactive keyword from the Ad Group.

2) Create a new Ad Group and name it something relevant to the keyword you’re working with.

3) Create a new ad which specifically targets that keyword. If you can include it in the title and description, great! If not, at least the title should be good enough. Make sure that the destination page also has that keyword present on the page if possible. If it’s an important enough keyword think about creating a dedicated landing page.

4) Add this keyword and only very close variants to the new Ad Group. For example, if the keyword you’re working with is red widget, only add phrases like red widget and red widgets. We want to keep this as focussed as possible for now, we can always add other variants later. Also be sure to add the necessary negative keywords.

5) Set the CPC way above what you’d normally bid and let it gain a few clicks, then you can back it down to the usual cost. This will give it some history and help get it established.

If your account is poorly structured, you may have a lot of inactive keywords. If this is the case, perhaps this would be a good time to hire a pay per click consultant to help you restructure the account. They should also be able to help you with writing the ad copy, analyzing the destination page and help with conversion analysis.

I’m very glad this Pay Per Action (PPA) beta test is now available and it’s definitely a smart move by Google to fill in the gap of their advertiser base. It will be running on the US content network only initially with limited ad formats, but I’m sure that will expand and grow as more advertisers sign up and publishers request more formats.

The Problem With Current Content Targeting
Many advertisers turn off content targeting (I hate that it’s turned on by default when you create a campaign) because they get poor performance and high clicks costs. It makes it doubly hard when a new or inexperienced AdWords customer wants to try the content network because it very often requires a different strategy to make it successful and when the first taste of results is sour, it’s tough to lure them back in to try it again.

Reacquiring Advertisers
PPA will provide another advertising option for those AdWords clients who opted out due to poor returns and high costs. This will be on their financial terms and is much easier for them to justify and track.

Gaining New Advertisers
There are still many companies who do not and will not trust CPC advertising, or Google’s click fraud protection, due to the huge discrepancies in reported click fraud which runs anywhere from 2% to 20%, and especially when just a year ago Google was involved in a class action lawsuit where they agreed to pay $90M settlement.

Many have misconceived ideas and notions of how CPC advertising works and will not be swayed, regardless of the numbers presented to them. For these business owners, Pay Per Action is going to be much easier for them to digest and they’ll be much more willing to give it a try. Unfortunately, these are the type of people that will really need a helping hand, since they will typically be the most inexperienced at online marketing. The biggest incentives for them will be the lack of financial commitment and easy of applying their business model.

It’s A Double Sell
One of the other issues that PPA advertisers will face is the double sell. They will obviously have to craft ads in various formats with great marketing messages to appeal to the end consumer, but they will also need to ensure that they write appealing descriptions and have a website which appears to convert well enough to have publishers run their ads.

Bye Bye MFA
If this ends up replacing the current CPC model, it will virtually eliminate Made For AdSense (MFA) websites and click fraud because the payback is on the completion of an action (newsletter signup, lead, sale etc). This is a huge step forwards and while many part time webmasters will boo and hiss at this, it will appease the more important audience, the advertisers themselves, ie the source of the revenue. This could also have performance and storage implications for crawling and the indexing processes.

Unfortunately since a lot of Google’s revenue comes from content network CPC ads, they’re going to be extremely cautious at making this type of move.

The Poor Publisher
A lot of publishers will not like this model and will probably stay away from it. Their belief is that simply displaying the ads is providing value and they would like some compensation. While that’s a fair statement in itself, the MFA sites abuse this and tarnish the reputation of good, trustworthy publishers.

In a PPA or CPA model, the advertiser/vendor relationship is self regulating. If a publisher does not see good returns, they will simply swap out the ads.

Competing With Affiliate Networks
The PPA model, (a.k.a. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)) is competing with the affiliate networks like Commission Junction, and they’re not going to like it at all. With Google’s offering, there’s no monthly service fee, which is much friendlier to the vendor. According to Andy Beal’s post where he questioned Rob Kniaz, product manager for Google’s advertising products, Kniaz did not feel that this was direct competition. Although they may not intend that to to be so, the similarities are striking.

More Coverage
Official Google Announcement: Pay-per-action beta test
SEORefugee: Overcoming Objections for Google’s Pay-Per-Action
SearchEngineLand: Google Launches Pay Per Action Ads
Barrons: Google Launches “Pay-Per-Action” Ad Beta

Announced today, by the Inside AdWords crew:

Today, we began rolling out improvements to the Quality Score algorithm, which will update the Quality Score for keywords in your account over the next 3 to 4 days.

The goal is to improve the quality of the ads, which is great and I applaud their efforts to try and combat arbitrage and low quality ads, unfortunately, I’ve uncovered another side to the story of the AdWords system which isn’t so great.

The main factors in calculating quality score are click through rate, the relevance of the ad and landing page, but there are many other minor factors at play, which are not disclosed. After talking to my rep the other day, one issue which I’m not happy about at all, is the fact that a quality score is applied to the keyword, but not per account, but just the keyword itself. All advertisers are then subject to this generic keyword level quality score.

What this means is that if you have a great campaign with high click through rates, perfectly relevant ads and are seen as an authority of a topic, your minimum bid may increase because the keyword quality score overall was dragged down by arbitrage, junk sites and other accounts which, perhaps through inexperience, are bidding on the wrong keywords.

Let me reword that slightly different – your minimum bids may be raised based on the actions of other accounts, which are totally beyond your control.

This is absolutely horrendous!

The end result is that good performing accounts are effectively penalized and in one of my cases, the minimum bid was raised to a level, where there are NO advertisers willing to bid for that term, and it wasn’t one of those $1, $5 or $10 minimum bid raises either.

It seems Google has shot themselves in the foot on this issue and I know there are going to a lot of similar complaints with this new quality score system.

It doesn’t matter how much Google stresses the quality aspect of this update, advertisers are only going to see the issue that affects them the most, how much it’s going to raise their prices.

Superpages.com is also changing from a bid only tactic to a system which will take into account “many facets of your campaign”. I have yet to use the new system, but I have several accounts which do, so it’s just a matter of time before I get my hands on it.

Just a quick post, since I have to run off to a meeting.

Edit (2/21/2007): I had forgotten that Superpages.com was spun off from Verizon last fall – thanks to Idearc for contacting me – I’ve amended the title of the post.

Since many people are experiencing today’s “quality score bug” as reported in Search Engine Land and on SEORefugee, I decided to run a daily keyword performance report for the period: month to date on some accounts. I noticed that some keywords were marked as inactive for search with minimum bids being raised to $1, $5 or $10 per click. The csv report also showed multiple rows of data for these keywords, with some rows starting at 2/1/2007.

After checking with my AdWords rep, it was confirmed that no matter how many rows are displayed for a specific keyword, the minimum bid is always set to the current value of when the report was run. In other words, the report data for the minimum bid column is only accurate for the current date, ignore previous dates as it all shows the same value.

The rep also confirmed that this is a widespread problem and that it’s their top priority to fix. It should be fixed within the next day or so. Fortunately for the accounts I looked at, the keywords that were affected have very little search/click volume so the impact was fairly minimal. For one account that has approx 2,000 keywords active at any one time, only a handful were affected.

For now, I recommend sitting it out and waiting for the bug fix before trying to reorganize your account.

The Google Inside AdWords blog just announced some more changes to the Quality Score which are going to be quite interesting. The first is going to be an improvement on Transparency – in other words, giving advertisers more information about the inner workings. In this case they’ll be providing indications on Quality Score at the keyword level, indicating whether it’s: Great, OK, or Poor. The other change is also providing the minimum bid for each keyword.

Looking at what has happened in the past I think it’s going to have a big impact on many AdWords customers. Smaller accounts with just a couple of campaigns will need to restructure their Ad Groups and be even more granular in grouping keywords together. While the same is also true for bigger accounts, they will also need to watch those big costly keywords very carefully. Those expensive 1 or 2 word phrases could be getting a whole lot more expensive.

For certain niche advertisers, where their strategy is not to get the highest CTR, may also suffer and see minimum bids rise, although they may not be too badly affected since they’re typically not near the bottom of the bid range anyway.

Google recommends implementing the Quality Score column, which although is not available right now, could mean using the new “customize columns” feature in the Campaign/Ad Group management tabs. This will allow you to monitor any minimum bid changes.

I hesitantly welcome this change – I’m sure Google is hoping this will get rid of a lot of PPC ads going to YPN sites, I just hope they don’t affect the “real” companies’ accounts.

One thing I know for sure, I’ll be doing a lot of monitoring/adjusting/optimizing again in the next few weeks.

Andy Beal and Search Engine Land also wrote about this issue.

I was looking at a couple of accounts that were converted in December 2006 and something caught my eye. The daily spending performance report is not showing the correct amount in the Account Daily Spending Limit column. It currently shows the right amount up to the day the account was converted, then $0 after that. After a short call to the nice people at Yahoo, they confirmed that there’s a bug in the display on this report. The account is functioning correctly, the values just aren’t showing on the report.

My mailbox was flooded with a bunch of emails from Yahoo over the holidays. In the next week or so, a bunch of accounts will automatically be upgraded to the new Panama system. If you do not have an online marketing consultant managing this for you, don’t fear; you really don’t have much to worry about. If you don’t get to it right away, the ads will still show and you’ll still get traffic. The only real disadvantage is that you won’t be able to use the new keyword tool, geotargeting or other cool features straight away.

The upgrade notification email mentions that the upgrade may take up to 8 hours to complete, well for most accounts, which have a few hundred keywords, it’ll be literally minutes. Once the upgrade is complete you’ll get another email with the new login URL, which doesn’t use a login capture (hurray for roboform users!).

Good luck with the upgrade, I’m sure you’ll love the new interface and features.

Lee Odden from TopRank interviewed John Slade from Yahoo about the new Panama
PPC platform (read the interview). He gives us some insights into its current capabilities and what lies ahead. Specifically he mentions geo, demographic and behavior targeting, Panama’s handling of rich media, goal tracking and campaign management features as well as opening up its distribution to other broadcast media such as TV.

While I’ve gotten my feet wet with Panama, I’m certainly looking into playing with some of these features when they become available.

Webpronews also interviewed John at Pubcon this year.

When writing ads, I always check, doublecheck and triple check the ad copy. The worst thing I could do as a consultant for another company would be to put a spelling mistake into their ad. It could possibly tarnish their reputation or push users in the wrong direction. So while checking up on some spam email I found this Yahoo ad.