Frederick Vallaeys

wan12017

later on when somebody searches and sees your ad, those recommendations will show up even if those +1′s were done from your website or the organic results. it’s a whole ecosystem that persists across all the different touch points you might have with that customer, whether it be through google or through your own website.
eric enge: you don’t want to lose sight of the end goal. the quality score is basically a tool to help you better get to that goal. the point you just made about the position normalization, is that you get to look at all the things together. i need to look at it in a holistic fashion so it can tell me where the opportunities are.
the key point here is that this is an average, and an average is never great which is why we also calculate a real time quality score internally. the average you see in the accounts is good for figuring out where you have an issue.

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real time quality score
eric enge: let’s say we have a keyword such as “tennis shoes.” how is real time quality score, both displayed and calculated?
full interview transcript
as your account ages and you start getting impressions and clicks on that keyword, we can build a specific picture of how you, an advertiser with those specific ad texts, will do on that keyword. if you are a good advertiser that knows how to write a compelling ad text for all the keywords, your quality score will certainly increase at that point and become much better. it also becomes your own quality score as opposed to that starting point system-wide average.
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.

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.
eric enge: similar to the +1 button, it’s something the eye notices and attracts a little bit of mind space.
frederick vallaeys: i recommend that you look holistically at your accounts. sort it on a keyword basis from lowest to highest quality score and apply some filter so you are not looking at anything that doesn’t have a lot of impressions yet.
hoo boy! i went through this interview to try and extract the most important points made, and i will do the best i can here. however, if you are a serious adwords professional, i’d suggest you read the entire interview from end to end.
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.

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.
eric enge: this personalization that we spoke about is a factor in real time quality score?


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.
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.
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.
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.
position normalization says that we have different expectations for ctr for the different ad positions.
it is mostly based on historical clickthrough rates of the keyword and ad text.
additional factors include landing page quality and load time of the page, but these are secondary factors.
quality score (qs) is based on data from exact match only. even if you bid on a broad match keyword, such as “cruises”, only exact matches with the keyword are used to determine the qs.
the published number is the aggregate for all instances of that keyword in your account.
when you first add keywords into an new account, google will show the system wide average for that keyword as your quality score.
if you have an existing account,converse pro star, and you add a new keyword, than the account history is a factor in the default quality score.
the real time system allows us, based on the additional data for this specific situation, to know this ad is not the best ad for that case, and to give preference to some of the other ads.
i think you hit the nail on the head with the statement that it (bidding higher) helps you build history faster in some cases.
it’s about building that volume, but not about anything else because there is position normalization. bidding up to a higher position and getting that higher ctr isn’t a guarantee of getting a better quality score in the long run.
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.
eric enge: are people clicking on those +1 buttons in the ads in any volume? i could see +1′ing a great article, but i’m not sure what the proclivity would be of people to +1 an ad.

then try to figure out if you could write better ad text for that keyword as it stands now or do you need to break that keyword into more specific variations, build new ad groups around that to create ad text that’s more compelling and maybe lead it to a landing page that’s also more specific.
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.
the role that the +1 button plays into the quality score
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.

eric enge: can keywords with a bad history have a negative impact on another keyword’s quality score?
keywords with few impressions and few clicks could in aggregate have a large number of impressions with a low ctr and this could hurt the account. keep in mind though that even if there is a negative impact on the account, this won’t matter as soon as we have enough data about how a keyword performs with a specific ad because we’d use that specific data for qs rather than the less specific account level data.
we think it’s a real positive for advertisers, because in the past we would aggregate and you would get clicks that maybe weren’t from the most qualified potential customers because we were looking at averages. now we can look at how they formulate the query and how that impacts their likeliness of being interested in this advertiser’s ads.
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 is a product evangelist for google adwords. in this role, he helps advertisers learn which google products can best solve their marketing needs. he also represents the needs of advertisers with the engineering and product management teams. his main product focus is on ads quality and bulk tools like the adwords editor and the adwords api.
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.
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 b