Catalyst Search Matters Search Marketing Blog

The strategies and tactics behind successful paid search marketing campaigns have grown dramatically in their complexity over the past few years.  If you haven’t changed your approach, you could be losing potential customers and squandering your paid search marketing budget. Read this month’s interview with Catalyst Vice President of Paid Search, Tim Breen, to find out how get the most from your paid search campaign.

Q: How has paid search marketing changed?

Tim: One of the major changes in paid search marketing is how the search engines determine your ad position and cost per click.  It used to be easy to determine, but not anymore.  Advertisers can no longer count on having their ads in the top paid search positions based solely on their bids and click-through rates.  Today, all the major search engines use complex algorithms to determine the position of ads and the amount advertisers pay per click.  The algorithms evaluate several factors such as the quality of the landing page the ad leads to, the relevance of the keyphrase and ad to the search term, the display URL, bid amount, and more. The products of these algorithms are the keyphrase and ad Quality Scores.

Q: What is “Quality Score”?

Tim: Many search engines, including Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live, now assign Quality Scores to the keyphrases and ads in paid search campaigns to determine the position of an ad on a search result page and the cost per click for each keyphrase in the campaign.  The objective of the search engines is to rank the ads based on their relevance and the quality of the user experience when searchers click on the ad.  The quality score algorithms vary from search engine to search engine, but in general they are based on a variety of factors including the relevance of the keyphrase and the ad to the search term, the historical click-through rate of the ad, the display URL, the quality of the landing page, and other relevant factors. 

Q: Why is Quality Score so important?

Tim: Search engines are very concerned with user experience. Having the most relevant ads appear benefits everyone. Advertisers benefit by getting more highly qualified traffic in response to their ads. Search engines benefit because they only get paid when a user clicks on an ad. They don’t want to show an ad that’s not relevant and that’s not going to get a good click-through rate. And users benefit by having more relevant information returned to them.

Q: How can I improve my ads’ Quality Scores?

Tim: There are several steps you can take:

·      Carefully select the keyphrases in your campaign – a campaign that contains a high number of broad keyphrases will likely receive low click-through rates that will negatively impact your quality score.

·      Strategically group your keyphrases into campaigns and ad groups.  Poor performing keyphrases can drag down the overall quality score of other keyphrases in your ad group.  Assign broad keyphrases to their own ad groups.

·      Use negative keyphrases to prevent your ads from appearing for search terms that are not relevant to your product or service.  For example if you sell razors for shaving, you don’t want your ads to be displayed if someone searches for “razor scooter” or “Motorola Razor.”

·      Use phrase and exact match types for your keyphrases.  Broad or advanced match can cause your ads to be displayed to an untargeted audience which leads to low click-through rates.

·      Carefully select the landing pages for your ads. Avoid sending searchers directly to a page that requires them to enter personal information.  Make sure the landing page contains highly relevant information to the search term.

·      The display URL you select for your campaign can also affect your Quality Score.  If you have run campaigns in the past with a given URL, the click-through rate associated with those campaigns are now tied to that URL. If the historical campaigns received a high click-through rate, then it is advantageous to use that URL in future campaigns.

·      Use keyword insertion in your ad titles. Ads that contain the search term in the title are likely to generate higher click-through rates.

Q: How can I improve my landing pages?

Tim: Search engines want to be sure that the information mentioned in the ad is clearly displayed on the landing page to avoid destination disappointment. An example of this is an the ad that says, “Learn about a new drug for multiple sclerosis” but when you click on the ad it takes you to a page that describes symptoms of multiple sclerosis. The user will say, “Wait a minute, I was looking for new drug info, not a list of symptoms or questions to ask my doctor.”

You must take the user to a page that specifically talks about what you talked about in the ad. For example, if your ad says, “Save 10% in the next 30 days” you need to have a link directly to that special offer. With a campaign-specific landing page you’ll get better results, more conversions, a lower cost per click and ultimately a better ROI.

About Timothy Breen, Vice President of Search Marketing

Tim leads the account management and paid search engine marketing teams at Catalyst.  He has developed the business units into an industry leader that produces extraordinary results for our clients.  Tim brings more than 24 years of business development and marketing experience to Catalyst including twelve years of Internet marketing experience.