I recently read a book about Quality Score entitled Quality Score in High Resolution by Craig Danuloff. The book really shed light upon the different factors that influence Quality Score calculations. This made me realize that there are currently an endless number of amature and professional blog posts that have created a lot of confusion in this area. This confusion appears to have led account managers, amatures and experts, to the conclusion that Quality Score is the enemy; however, this is not the case.

Quality Score is Google‘s way of helping the good and punishing the bad. It serves as a motivation for advertisers to create well organized and honest PPC campaigns, ensuring that there is more to online auctions than just over bidding.

Look at it this way, Quality Score is Google‘s way of telling you whether or not you should be advertising under a specific keyword. If you feel that a keyword should not be receiving a low Quality Score and it is totally relevant to your campaign – and you are certain that you don‘t have any landing page penalties –  then it is most likely your campaign. By improving your ad texts, optimizing or switching your chosen landing page, upping the bids, or organizing your campaigns from scratch etc., you are well on the way to improving your initial Quality Scores.

There are many factors taken in the equation of Quality Score calculation and almost all of them are invisible. The only Quality Score metric that is visible to advertisers is the column we see in Google Adwords, which serves as more of a guideline than an actual rule – an approximation if you will. The “real“ Quality Score is calculated every time a user enters a search query that is identical to any one of the keywords within your keyword list.

Among factors that influence Quality Score calculations are ad rank, ad text quality score, account quality score, landing page quality score, and most importantly, relevance and click-through-rate.

According to Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google, these last two factors play the biggest role in Quality Score calculation. In other words, in order to achieve higher Quality Scores in your account, making you eligable for auctions that Google deems more likely to convert, you need to optimize your account towards small, tightly themed ad-groups that make your keyword selection within a specific ad-group match your ad-texts and landing page. This is a great tactic to boost your click-through-rates which in return increases your chances of conversion. This is of course assuming that your landing page fits Google‘s standards and if so, most importantly, the searchers needs.

The bottom line is that Quality Score ensures that you as a honest advertiser within the Google channels have an equal chance of success in the big league. Google wants to rule out those with foul intentions, giving the searchers the most relevant ads as possible. This should serve as a driving force for you to optimize your campaigns towards success, which will again increase your chances of conversion.

Remember

• Build tightly focused ad-groups with ad texts that match your keyword selection
• Instead of having 1 ad-group with 1000 keywords, try to break it down to 10 ad-groups with 100 keywords
• Choose a landing page that gives the searchers exactly what they expected from the ad text
  - Having said that, write ad texts that are straight to the point, limiting the risk of irrelevant clicks, and don‘t promise anything you can‘t deliver
• Take your time, building up a successful PPC campaign takes time, start with a strong core and slowly implement changes

Haukur Jarl Kristjánsson – Nordic eMarketing @haukurjarl

I was reading an interesting article the other day on why companies advertise their own brand items when they are already ranked no.1 for those items. It is during the course of my reading that I finally got some insight on whether paid search advertisements cannibalize traffic from their corresponding organic listings for the very same keywords.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the relationship between organic search and paid search is grossly misunderstood by SEO professionals. There are times when companies are on the top of both paid as well as organic listings and there really is a symbiosis between the two marketing channels. It is interesting to note that the click through rate of a top ranking organic listing can be increased if you have a corresponding sponsored advertisement placed on top of it or to its right. By showing up twice on the very same page, the top ranking does get twice the number of clicks it would get either for organic or for paid listings alone! Any eyebrows rising on negative synergy between the two would be null and void.

Truth is, organic and paid searches do interact. However, in most cases flawed attribution modelling misinterpret returns on investment by associating conversions or sales with the wrong Internet marketing program.

Whether PPC is cannibalizing organic searches can be answered by a simple illustration. In a multi-touch situation, a visitor may visit a website through an organic listing but may exit without amounting in any conversions (that is without buying anything). A few days later, the same visitor visits the same website through a paid listing. Only this time, he buys something too. If you assign 100% value to the transaction on the last click, paid listing or PPC would obviously get the credit. In an alternate scenario, where you attach the entire value to the first click where the visitor entered through a natural link, the organic listing gets all the credit for its heavy lifting.

Such attribution inaccuracies make PPC appear as if it cannibalizes or pulls searchers away from organic listings, which could have otherwise been clicked. A highly paid PPC creative declaring it to be the ‘official website’ is the best example that illustrates this thought.

Attributing a certain amount of the overall value to all touch points with greater importance to the first click will ideally create a win-win situation for both PPC and organic click, leaving neither to be overshadowed by the other.

The return on investment in the case of PPC is further magnified as the URLs in paid searches are tagged with tracking parameters, whether or not the user interacts with a paid listing in the buying cycle. The URLs in organic listings are not tagged since this is considered to be a bad SEO practice, which leads to content duplicity or PageRank dilution.

A lethal combination of high organic ranking, a very strong brand and very similar organic and paid listings differentiated from competitors pave the way for conflict and ‘cannibalism’.

So, what are the best practices that an SEO professional can implement?
- Get better idea of the actual ROI derived from organic search, at the keyword level.
- Ask your PPC counterpart to reduce his CPC on keywords that have high conversion rates and high paid cost by almost 60%, while still retaining the ad.
- Test calls-to-action displayed on the ‘official site’ of your paid search and measure the impact on the synergy.

These steps will not only help a company to optimize its ads and rebalance its paid search expenditure based on actual ROI where synergy is duly taken into account but also clear all doubts about PPC cannibalizing organic searches.

Haukur Jarl – PPC Nordic eMarketing

If you’re only targeting certain countries in Eastern Europe and Asia this might come as a great news, you can create a longer text ad in Google now. These longer text ads are supported when targeting countries like Russia, Japan and China.

• Azerbaijan
• Belarus
• Kazakhstan
• Kyrgyzstan
• South Korea
• Tajikistan
• Turkmenistan
• Ukraine
• Uzbekistan

Longer text ads can contain up to 30 characters in the title and 76 characters in the rest of the ad text. For the display URL, standard character limits still apply.

You can create a longer text ad from the Ads tab if if you target only locations listed above.

The Nordic eMarketing team recently launched a new Pay Per Click campaign for the family-owned Icelandic car rental agency, Glacier Car Rental; which has already proven to be a huge success for both parties.

“We had to make those travelling to Iceland aware of us, instantly. And with Nordic eMarketing, this is exactly what happened,” said Hallfreður Emilsson, Co-owner and Marketing Manager at Glacier Car Rental.

Through Google Adwords, Glacier was able to penetrate the online marketing space within several hours, “Google boosted orders through our website by over 90%, and there is still visible growth,” commented Hallferður.

“We are really happy with the results of this campaign,” explained Haukur Jarl Kristjánsson, Project Manager and PPC Specialist at Nordic eMarketing. “Especially because this is a small, local car rental agency with very personal services, and does not have the power of the big brands behind it.”

Click on the following link to see this PPC  case study on successfull PPC campaigns and to view other successful PPC campaigns with Google AdWords click here

Twitter social networking and blogging messages are known as tweets messages.  These tweets posts are text based statements consisting of up to 140 characters, displaying related searches on Twitter.

Twitter users are twitting on news, education, political campaigns and simple daily things one wants to share with others. Twitter usage is on the rise with around 74.000.000 users in January 2010 worldwide; a sharp 8% rise from December 2009.

Just saw Paulo from Microsoft do a great presentation on the MSN PPC tool, the tool as before intergrades beutifully into Excel 2007 (not 2010 beta) and in minutes he gathered over 1000 very valuable keywords regarding flowers. Fantastic tool that can be found at letsearchmakeyousmarter.com (Microsoft Advertising Intelligence). Speaking at this session beside me are:

Thomas Bindl, SES Advisory Board & Founder & CEO, Refined Labs GmbH
Constance “Connie” Stack, VP, Sales & Marketing, WordStream
Paulo Maranhao, Search Media Strategist, Microsoft

The session was firmly moderated by Andrew Goodman, SES Advisory Board & Principal, Page Zero Media.

for more information on SES London goto their page

Next stop Search Engine Strategies New York

Air France Google Trends

One of the most dynamic ways of communicating to the masses ASAP is through Google PPC, a great sample of that is the crash of the Air France Airbus plane flying from Brazil to France. The plane goes down after 300 KM and news start to spread.

As a part of an PR crisis strategy Air France should have gone out and paid for customized message for their brand search, dealing with questions like; Is it safe to fly with Air France’ and/or How can I find information about the crash?

Using the same method, Airbus could have dealt with people frighten to fly with Airbus planes, answering questions like is flying with Airbus planes save?

As one of those that fly frequantly but are not comfortable flying I was one of the first looking for anwers like the above and I do belive that I was not the only person. Check Google Trends http://www.google.com/trends?q=air+france&ctab=0&geo=all&date=mtd&sort=0 to back my case.

We recently worked for a client that wanted us to do a PPC campaign at Google for 3000 pounds, thee campaigns with several ad groups and run it for three or four weeks . The problem was that the campaign was actually not the three campaigns and couple of ad groups, this was four campaigns and some 20 ad groups with all its related keyword clusters.

The problem was that relaying this information to our client was tough, first they did not understand the competitive nature of the words / Phrases they where after and secondly there was even less understanding that to run and maintain campaigns like this takes management and refining. They thing that we needed to relay to our client was that even though in the “brick to mortar” world this seamed rather straight forward it was not online and what they felt where their competitors did not echo online. Little like Blue Lagoon the spa here in Iceland.

Their main competition in branded search in a movie shot in the 80’s staring Brook Shields. In this case we ended up stopping the campaign because the 3k just did not cut it and that spend was by far not cutting it, having the impact needed. The moral of this post? It’s Important not just to open a PPC campaign, you need to make sure that you are managing clients expectations and be sure that he or she understands what to expect.

A recent study IndexTools has reinforced Microsoft’s claim that their paid search product converts much better than Google’s across a broad range of search verticals. The study was not a small one either, covering over 15 Million visitors from paid search, Indextools found that Microsoft Adcenter adverts converted into sales around 20% better than Google’s AdWords product.

There is a great article on this at Dixons Jones Receptional News Site.

You can also read about the Paid Search Study at the Visual Revenue site.

Back from New York where I did a session called Managing PPC for Multiple Clients. The case was to help agencies or consultants in trying to juggle multiple clients and projects and I feel that we managed quite well. With a good line-up of speakers and a great moderator the session hit it’s mark, moderator David Szetela, CEO of Clix Marketing and speakers included me in behalf of Nordic eMarketing, Gregg Galletta, Director of Sales, IndustryBrains, Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster and Ken Yarmosh, Director of Search Technology for Clickable.

Exchanged a bottle of local vodka/schnapps with Matt Van Wagner who brought me a bottle of a very fine Vodka and instead a bottle of 8 year old Brennivin (Black Death). The highlight for me how ever was that my wife saw me speak for the first time.