Most advertisers have no idea how to work with Google’s PPC Quality Score algorithim.  As a veteran, somewhat sophisticated PPC expert, I even surprise myself with the secrets I continue to uncover.

One thing I can scream from the mountaintop with utter confidence is that short term thinking and action can trash your PPC marketing efforts on Google (and now a Panamized Yahoo) in a hurry.  Let me give you quick example of how to use the Google quality score index to your advantage, and how treating it like a now fading memory of the ultra-transparent Overture system can bite you in the ass:

With the holidays fast approaching, I took one of our gift oriented merchants and used the Quality Score to cement them into the first position on an exhaustive list of their most important keywords.  I bid the hell out of those terms in October and November while testing copy and maximizing CTR. What resulted was fascinating:  No matter how much our competitors bid on those terms in their holiday push, our client remained number 1.  And the best part was that they had number 1 at a lower cost than when I started the experiment.  Take the other side of the coin: 

As many advertisers chose to OVER FOCUS on keyword level ROI, their bids are constantly changing via their PPC managers or their rule based PPC bid management software. They think they are being clever but as those bids go up and down, their quality score suffers. Now comes the time for top level holiday conversions and a little flexibility on their part as to CPA and ROAS.  Too bad the short term thinking left them with a low quality score and the inability to make up for lost time.  Now they are paying a premium for a lower position and they will never know how good things could have been.  

The moral of the story is that a short term dedication to keyword level ROI can actually harm your SEM efforts.  As the engines become more sophisticated in their ad delivery. you need to think globally about your efforts and understand that a dollar saved now can be thousands of dollars wasted later. With the enrty of Yahoo into the quality score landscape, you can simply no longer afford to think short term about your paid search strategies.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 at 1:51 pm and is filed under search-engine marketing, affiliate marketing, internet marketing, marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.