It’s pretty well known that the 4 main categories of quality score elements that you can control are:
- Keywords
- Ad copy
- Account Structure
- Landing pages
Volumes of information have been written about each one of these topics. But many people are not aware that there are other factors to your quality score that you have little to no control over at all.
1. First of all, the niche you are in affects your quality score. By just entering the niches, certain factors are applied to your score at the account level.
2. Your business model affects your quality score. Adwords looks at the way you are driving leads to a landing page and assigns a business model rating to your account. If they think your business model is based on affiliate sales they probably have a rating that dings your whole account.
3. Lastly, your competitors afffect YOUR quality score. This is probably the most frustrating thing to learn, but yes the competitors around you affect the score in your account in a negative way. Is this fair? I don’t think so, but that’s how Adwords rolls.
source: Adwords employees
Hi Chad,
How exactly would competitors affect your quality score?
The way I understand it: say there are 10 advertisers for a certain keyword, and all have poor QS on their accounts and high bids. There is a good probability when you use that keyword you will be doing the same thing, which they factor into YOUR score.
Yes googles hidden factors make advertising very difficult… I am wondering if at some point the FTC will jump and say it is trating some customers unfair etc… Not sure they ever would but i know G has been getting a lot of bad press for how they rate advertisers charge them more for “no apparent reason” etc..
Plus you left off the human factor of when they manually check you site.
It’s interesting; I buy everything you’re saying, Chad, because you obviously have some good contacts there I’m sure!
But it seems to me there must be exceptions to the “rules of thumb” you posted.. i.e., I can think of a number of sites in a few different niches that are just cleaning up with AdWords… consistent 4 figure/daily profit…and they have virtually NO inbound links (i.e., the only way they’re getting leads/traffic is through PPC)…not only that, they have virtually ZERO content on these domains…just a few LP’s they split test with (that are themselves obviously just “doorway” pages leading to the aff product).
I wonder why these sites aren’t getting dinged… I can only guess it’s because they either:
1) Have spent a certain amount of ad spend cumulative in their account.
2) Have had an active account for X number of months/years.
…or perhaps some sort of combination between the two… But you’re definitely right that there is much more to QS than the things which we can control…and that’s just the way it is.
Would those “number of sites in a few different niches” be yours?
Everyone I have talked to completely denies that past spend influences QS, but I wouldn’t be surprised if its factored in.
Ehh, I just read my comment again and I suppose the way I wrote it makes it sounds like those sites could be mine… To be completely honest with you, no — I wish! (on my way, but not quite at that level yet
Somewhat related to your post is the one on Geordie’s blog from a few days ago (covering the recent NYTimes story on “ad quality”)..Highly recommend you and everyone else check it out. It also spurred me to read some archived interviews online with Nick Fox and company… between these interviews, Geordie’s explanation, and this post here, I think I’ve learned a bit more about QS this past week than I knew before.
Time to keep learning…
- Dave
talking about the business model, don’t you think that’s a little exaggerated. 70% of the sites have no business model(beside advertising) – so only service providers and ecommerce sites should be advertised through adwords?
@Dave
Could you give some names of the niches your talking about. I would like to research them. If not, I understand that too.
I’m still failing to see why g would penalize sites that are obvious affiliates if they want a “better web”. Sure, lame landing pages whose only goal is a click to the offer page doesn’t add much to their goal for users but in many cases, affiliates are the ONLY ones adding value to the equation – the merchant themselves are too busy running the business and they in essence, farm out all the creative positioning of the product to the affiliates.
Hope they’re taking that into consideration (that affiliate doesn’t = evil). In my cases, everything has been cool but it’s hard to tell sometimes whether I’m lucky or trusted by “the machine”.
I’ve to agree with Matt. If it was the case that Google penalized every affiliate landing page or site, then a lot of us wouldn’t be in this business.