It must be a beautiful thing for the folks at Google when they write an algorithm that accomplishes the dual objectives of increasing revenue and creating a better search experience. Based on these criteria, the Adwords Quality Score algorithm is brilliant. In order for a pay per click (PPC) advertiser to obtain a high Quality Score from Google, they must: 1) write PPC ad text that garners a high click thru rate, thus resulting in lots of spending flowing to Google; and 2) the advertiser must create a quality experience for the Google referred visitor.

BACKGROUND ON GOOGLE ADWORDS QUALITY SCORE

Google's description of Quality Score is as follows, "The AdWords system calculates a 'Quality Score' for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user's search query. A keyword's Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC)".  They have also published a Web page with tips on how to improve your Quality Score. The following are tips related specifically to user experience:

• Create highly specific ad groups
• Choose relevant keywords and placements
• Create simple, enticing ads
• Point users to the right landing page
• Keep the user experience in mind

While the promise of lower CPC's for high Quality Scores was a strong motivator for PPC advertisers to follow Google "tips for success", a posting to the Google Adwords Blog on October 30, 2008 stating that in order to appear above the search results, pay per click ads must meet a certain quality score threshold, really focused attention upon improving Quality Scores.

OPTIMIZING FOR THE GOOGLE QUALITY SCORE ALGORITHM

Ad Groups

Create tightly focus ad groups. Ensure than the keywords terms are directly related to each other.  An ad group should center on a single product or service. Write ads that pertain directly to the keyword terms within the ad group. Google recommends that "if you sell mp3 players, and you've organized your campaigns by brand, create multiple ad groups based on the models of each brand". 

Keyword Terms

Review your list of keyword terms. Consider eliminating terms with low click through rates, low quality scores, and high costs of conversion. Low click through rates and/or high costs of conversion can both be indicators of a poor quality of experience. There seems to be some evidence that pruning low quality score terms may provide a boost to the remaining terms. 

PPC Text Ads

Improving your paid per click ad click through rates is the most effective method of increasing your quality score. The historical “click through” rate for a keyword term or phrase is the most heavily weighted factor in Quality Scores. This certainly makes sense if one assumes the maximizing revenue is a key goal of Google’s Adwords program. While providing accurately targeted relevant results leads to repeat visits from Google’s users, placing ads in prominent positions that are likely to draw attention away from the organic results instantly optimizes revenue.  

Continually test new PPC ads. Work hard at coming up with new text that produce higher click through rates. In particular, if your PPC ad appears on the top of the page above the organic results focus attention on tests of the headline. The headline in  PPC ads at the top of the page garners  four times as much gaze time as the description. (However, for ads on the right hand side of the page, the longer text description receives slightly more gaze time than the headline. Additional details are available by visiting User Centric's eye tracking study of PPC ads).

Landing Pages

Creating landing pages that are extremely relevant to specific terms being bid upon by a PPC advertiser meets the objective of pointing users to the right landing page.  Usability and Search Engine Marketing guidelines agree that page content should be narrowly focused.  In web usability, the concept of “information foraging” predicts that search engine users just want a “snack” when they visit your site.  They want a specific answer to a specific question and they want it quickly.  You make visitors happy when you give them a narrowly focused nugget of information.  The concept of Quality Score from Google rewards narrowly focused page content.  You achieve a high Quality Score for your landing page when there is a one-to-one match between the content of your page and the search terms used.  A high Quality Score leads to higher on page positions for your Adwords spending. 

Please be aware making minor changes to web pages to make them more relevant to the term being purchased simply to improve Google Ad Quality Scores is unlikely to be a successful tactic. The search engines are already utilizing semantic indexing to discern related words and do not need to be spoon feed the exact term.  Further, a focus solely on relevance may overlook the fact that Google’s guidelines also calls for “original” content. The guideline specifically mentions “unique content that can’t be found on another site”.  The critical questions to ask in determining if creating landing pages focused on relevance will pay out the effort required are: 1) will doing so move the needle on conversion rates; and 2) are the changes likely to be significant enough that the search engine algorithm may rate the new page as being more relevant to the search term. In hindsight, it seems almost amusing that back in the fourth quarter of 2008 numerous self proclaimed PPC experts were recommending crafting unique pages for practically everyone of your search terms.

An effort we launched at User Centric in an effort to improve both user experience and Quality Score yielded an interesting learning. The terms "usability testing" and "website usability testing" both convert well for us. Originally, visitors clicking on either term were delivering visitors to our "usability testing" page. A new page was created specifically focused on "Website usability testing". A close examination of these two pages will reveal that the minor changes that were introduced make the new page it more relevant to a search for Website usability testing. We have been rewarded for providing a more relevant experience with an increase in visitor conversion rate. However, the new page did not lead to a higher quality score. Thus, this seems to indicate that the critical questions to ask in determining if creating landing pages focused on relevance will pay out the effort required are: 1) will doing so move the needle on conversion rates; and 2) are the changes likely to be significant enough that the search engine algorithm may rate the new page as being more relevant to the search term.

In another test, User Centric created a PPC ad campaign with bids on the names of our senior consultants. The ads all deliver visitors to The Team page which lists our consultants by name. There has been a direct correlation between the placement on the page of the consultant's name and the Quality Score for the terms using their names as the keyword. The higher up on the page, the higher the Quality Score.

Redundant Content Issues

There are a couple of caveats in regard to creating landing pages focused solely on Adwords term relevant content:

1) Google's tips for Quality Score success seem to somewhat contradict their guidelines for webmasters. Google advises webmasters to avoid redundant content.  They state that if you have many pages that are similar, consider expanding each page or consolidating the pages into one.  Highly redundant content will reduce the ranking of your site.  The Web usability literature also suggests that user experience is weakened by separating highly related information. 

2) A potential drawback of creating landing pages for specific terms is that it can create problems in developing navigation that allows visitors to navigate back to their original landing page and / or to bookmark the landing page without cluttering up a site’s linking structure. Providing navigation that allows visitors to easily return to previously visited pages is an important guideline of website usability. It is normally considered important for a user to receive a consistent experience.  If a user visits a page on Day 1, and then comes back to the site on Day 5, optimally the visitor receives the same web page experience on both days. The easiest way to overcome this issue is to use a Web page multi-variate testing tool, such as Google's Website Optimizer. Another way to avoid cluttering up the navigation of a site that has numerous landing pages is to use cookies and dynamic page insertion to serve a page that looks to a visitor to be identical to the page they originally landed upon, yet is actually being dynamically served based on the visitors’ original landing page. In the case of User Centric, we set a cookie when a visitor lands on either the Usability Testing page or the Website Usability Testing page, indicating which page has been initially served. Then in the future, if the visitor clicks on a link to “usability testing” from any page on our Web site they are dynamically served their original landing page.  The logic is that when a visitor clicks on a link to the “usability testing” page, the cookie is checked, and if the cookie exists, the previous page (identified by the cookie) is served.  If no cookie exists, the static “usability testing“  page is served and the cookie is then set to that page. 

The User Centric solution is far from perfect, but it does satisfy the objective of having a landing page that is  relevant to visitor's search term, while basically complying with usability guidelines. If the visitor has disabled or deleted cookies, or is on a different computer, then this technique does not work. Also, if they are attempting to return to the “website usability testing” page it may not be intuitive that this page is viewed by clicking on the “usability testing” link. 

CONCLUSION

Enhancing the user experience for Google searchers that view and click on your PPC ads is likely to provide dual benefits 1) your keywords will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click; and 2) your conversion rate may improve, reducing the cost per conversion and increasing the return on advertising spend. However, do not expend a great deal of effort on  “gaming” the relevance factor as changing just a few words will not have much impact on Quality Scores. A better use of resources is to work at improving the user experience and upon increasing the click thru rate for PPC ads.