So you may have noticed that in some of your AdWord’s ad groups a column appeared called “Quality Score.” In the quality score column you will see that each of your keywords gets ranked either poor, ok, or great (also a minimum bid is named.) A “poor” quality score can result in lower ad placement, a higher minimum bid, and/or a paused keyword. To see why your keyword is assessed the way it is you scroll over the little magnifying glass next to the keyphrase and you will see a page that tells you if your ad is showing or not and why your keyword is “poor” for instance. Upon first investigation this tool appears very helpful for improving your account but you may notice over time the same thing that I did.

The quality score explanation for “poor” ranked keywords is the same for every “poor” keyword. For a “poor” ranked keyphrase Google explains, “Based on the keyword’s relevance to the associated ad text, CTR, historical keyword usage, and other performance factors.” So I decided to take on each one of these possible reasons that Google provides and I came to the same conclusion, we are at Google’s mercy. Even though we are at their mercy I still found this to be a good exercise in optimizing an AdWords account.

First I made sure the ad copy included the keyword that had a poor quality score, then I made sure the landing page spoke to the keyword in question, then I made sure the bid was high enough for a 1-3 placement which in theory should ensure my CTR is pretty good. After I made all these changes I still didn’t see my quality score increase so my other options were to create another ad group specifically for this term or delete the term entirely. I created a new ad group for this term and still obtained a “poor” quality score. Since this was a new ad group with no impressions yet I figured Google couldn’t be using the CTR as the reason for the low quality score, I then deduced it must be “historical keyword usage, and other performance factors” whatever that means. So even though I wasn’t able to improve the quality score I figured out that this was part of the process I’ve been using for years as a Pay Per Click specialist. Even though I wasn’t able to get the results I was looking for, I realized Google is telling us a little bit of how they rank ads and bids which in turn can help you in creating effective AdWords’ campaigns and tweak existing ones. I still hope that someday Google will offer more transparency into the Quality Score.

My current favorite TV show is Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, where Gordon drops into a failing restaurant for a week. It’s pretty much the same show every time, in both the British and the American versions. Gordon reorders the menu and the staff, swearing colorfully the whole time, and tries to set the restaurant on a path to customer satisfaction and financial stability. He does this by imposing focus on the team and menu.

It’s the same for websites. Focus is key. Focus on the customer, get rid of extraneous stuff that is in your and in their way, and let your staff keep a smaller and more focused website fresh.
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Recently Catherine Juon, the co-founder of Pure Visibility, asked me to create the “Venture Capitalist” description of search engine marketing that she could describe in three minutes. She thought that this would be a challenge, but honestly I think it’s a snap, because at the end of the day, Search Engine Marketing has much more in common with traditional marketing than many people initially believe. We describe SEM very simply. It entails:

• Defining your market of potential customers
• Making your message visible to that market
• Using your website to create visitors of value.

Here’s how it works… Read More

Ask.com, a second tier search engine, launches AskEraser that protects the privacy of the users searches on Ask.com. This new option located in the upper right hand corner of the search page, may very well make search engine marketing even more interesting. It erases your IP address, User ID, Session ID, and the complete query text. Which means that Ask is not sharing the information with web site analytics and the web site owner will never know if visitors are coming and converting from Ask.

But just how important is privacy to searchers?

It appears this experiment will prove how important privacy is to searchers. If this option is well utilized this will further change Ask.com’s brand to be the answer to “private searches” and perhaps other search engines will adopt the “eraser”. This will produce an interesting challenge for those who rely on analytics to determine how well their site performs on Ask.com. If they do not see visitors coming to their site and converting into sales leads from Ask.com they may continue to consider the search engine as second tier.

Sometimes the limits on a process or a trend is not technological, but the ability of organizations to change their fundamental thinking about how they make decisions. Companies that start this kind of thinking can succeed in ways that before were possible only when growing rapidly in a new market.

This is the essential message of Competing on Analytics. Like many books that come from the Accenture talent mill (Jeane Harris is a fellow at one of Accenture’s institutes), aspects of the book are maddeningly vague and glib, but I don’t disagree with this key assertion. In my experience in the mortgage, online publishing, and pharmaceutical industry, I found that the tools to do sophisticated analytics were in place and well established as a supported tool by their IT group, yet the companies had very different levels of sophistication in adopting them for strategic business-making decisions.
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I was recently in a meeting with the franchise advisory committee of a major child care company that was discussing how to reallocate funds for the second half of 2007. In an unsolicited straw poll nine of the ten participants, whose entire marketing experience up to that point had been with print media, suggested that their company cut print advertising by at least 60% and put it into online media. It was an amazing expression of how much the conventional wisdom on current advertising has changed. But where to put that online spend, and what skills are needed to make it work? Read More