eric enge: similar to the +1 button, it’s something the eye notices and attracts a little bit of mind space.

this provides a better user experience because users aren’t seeing an ad for caribbean cruises just because it happens to have a high overall quality score.

a specific example to look at is site links, which is probably the easiest of the new ad formats to implement because it’s literally going into your campaign and putting in up to ten links associated to each of your campaigns. we’ve seen these drive increases in ctr anywhere between 17% (search) to 30% (mobile). these are fantastic increases in ctr simply by showing more information that’s useful to users.

eric enge: one of our clients is using the seller rating ad extensions. that’s kind of a corollary, this whole business of including reviews and ratings into the whole process.

eric enge: we did talk about position normalization earlier, but is there an argument in some situations for bidding higher? to drive history faster, or do things to try to help the quality score go up?

eric enge: correspondingly, if you have someone in california typing that, you might actually show a hawaii cruise ad rather than a caribbean cruise ad.

frederick vallaeys: exactly. you look at them in combination, and the more important thing to look at in your account is the return on investments you’ve received from those ads. the quality score is a number we put in there to help you figure out where it is you could perform better and possibly decrease your cost and increase your position by having more relevance. if that is driving roi, then that’s the only thing that matters to advertisers.

eric enge: right, because presumably the position normalization is adjusted on a keyword basis. position normalization for market expectations on one keyword might be different than the expectations on another keyword.

frederick vallaeys: in the absence of specific data about how a keyword performs with a specific ad, we rely on system wide data and account-level data. if an account has a set of keywords that in aggregate have a low qs, this can have a negative impact. zero impression keywords do not matter because those contribute no ctr data.

typically, when you do that, you increase your relevance because you are now taking more specific keywords and building ad text specifically for those which help you boost up your click through rate.

the quality score is only based on data from results on exact match. that means the keyword the user types in has to be exactly the same as the keyword chosen by the advertiser. there has to be an exact match between those two regardless of which match type the advertiser selected. also, we only use data from google.com, not display network traffic or traffic from our search partners.

you’ve told that user “hey, by the way you might not have realized it, but we also do car rentals.” the second thing is the user goes directly to that page for the thing they were looking for. now you can take them to a page where, instead of cluttering it with the things they weren’t looking for, you actually put special offers and pitch the product they were looking for.

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instead of a eight out of ten, the real time quality score might be a five out of ten telling us this ad is not a great ad for this query. this will affect the ad rank and, in some cases, the ad doesn’t show.

frederick vallaeys: exactly.

frederick vallaeys: yes, you are spot on with that. we call it position normalization, and it’s exactly as you described. having a certain ctr, say 25%, could be a really good thing if we were expecting you to get 15% in the position that you were in. your quality score could go up. many advertisers look at the ctr in their accounts and try to judge everything on that. however, it’s important to look at both the ctr number as well as the quality score number in your account.

+1 is essentially bringing social to the moment of relevance. if a user sees that five of his buddies have booked the same vacation or done business with the same cruise line that’s a pretty strong endorsement and that user is more likely to also click on the ad, check it out, and buy from them. if you as an advertiser can build that following of +1 clicks and get people to endorse you that should be positive for you. if that seems to be a useful thing to use in terms of quality score, we absolutely could start thinking about integrating that.

the main thing you will get from this interview is that the quality score you see in your google adwords account differs significantly from the real time quality score that google uses to determine how your ad ranks. there is definitely a strong correlation, so quality score is a useful metric, but an understanding of real time quality score can give you an extra edge in understanding what it is you need to do to make your optimization efforts as successful as possible.

eric enge: i saw what apple did with site links. they show their current hot offers. it’s a very, very smart way to use that feature.

i would say a thousand impressions and up. that’s the baseline where you would start looking at it, and then do a secondary sort on that. look at which ones have the highest volume and not a great quality score. go after the high volume first even if it’s not necessarily the absolute lowest quality score, but it’s still in that bucket where the quality score is not quite where you want it to be, and start optimizing on those.

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frederick vallaeys: the qs is at a keyword-ad level. so the way you structure ad groups plays a large role in determining qs. however there is no ad group or campaign qs component. i.e. if you took the same keyword and ad and moved it to a different ad group or campaign, the quality score would remain the same.

with the real time system we see that the user typed in the word “alaskan” in addition to “discount cruises.” this is probably not the best time to show the ad, and it prevents the advertiser from showing an ad that’s unlikely to lead to a sale. this provides a better user experience because users aren’t seeing an ad for caribbean cruises just because it happens to have a high overall quality score.

quality score is the number you see in your google adwords account. it is a number between 1 and 10, where 1 is a horrible score, and 10 is an awesome score. some key points about quality score are:

frederick vallaeys: the quality score is google’s way of ensuring that we show the most relevant ads to our users, and we deliver high quality leads to advertisers buying the clicks from us. the quality score obviously factors into the ad rank together with the advertiser’s bid.

eric enge: that eliminates any possibility that you could fool the position normalization algorithm with the bids. the only thing you gain is that you can accelerate the development of your own history.

i would like to note that when we talk about personalization it’s actually on a anonymous basis. it means we know what a certain cookie is doing, but we don’t know what a certain person is doing. we know that cookie id 1234 searched for rome before they searched for hotels, but we don’t know that the cookie is frederick vallaeys.

another example i like to use is “discount cruises.” if someone looks for discount cruises, it’s not ambiguous in terms of what they are looking for, but it could be ambiguous in terms of the destination they are looking for.

i think you hit the nail on the head with the statement that it (bidding higher) helps you build history faster in some cases.

if you as an advertiser pick that relatively generic keyword, we can find a subset of queries that do well for what it is you are selling.

you can also answer with a map. if it’s a local search you can enhance with product prices and images if it was a product search. if it was a search for a new movie then it might make sense to show the trailer right there. positive seller ratings and reviews are a good thing to surface because it helps build trust and brings in those clicks that an advertiser was looking for.

frederick vallaeys: exactly, and a simple technique is to look at which of your keywords have a sub-bar quality score; and that could be any number. that could be the lowest ones in your accounts or it could be literally at a one level or a two level. then you can look at your search query report.

that’s it for the summary points. however, in the body of the interview there is much more, including frederick’s recommended process for optimizing your qs and rtqs, lots of examples, and why bidding your keywords high when you first launch them is a smart thing to do.

position normalization says that we have different expectations for ctr for the different ad positions.

for the real time quality score we calculate at the exact moment a user did the search and take into account what these variations are. if you sell expensive tennis shoes, and someone did a query for discount tennis shoes, we would show your ad and maybe that ad had an eight out of ten quality score. it’s a mismatch to what that specific user was looking for because they weren’t looking for expensive tennis shoes. in that case it would not be the best ad to show.

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