Is Quality Score the Most Important Search Metric? tagged: , , ,

Is Quality Score the Most Important Search Metric?

Posted by Kupr in Online Tools, ppc

I’ve just been reading an article in Search Engine Land by Josh Dreller, introducing a new search tool called SpeedPPC, who’s key selling point is focused on building out ad groups to maximise quality score.

SpeedPPC works by the user uploading a list of core keywords and also applying some keyword modifiers to produce a comprehensive keyword base. SpeedPPC will then create very small and tightly focused ad groups and will use something similar to dynamic keyword insertion to produce targeted ad copy, all of which is good best practice for creating a high Quality Score. SpeedPPC can even go a step further and has a tool that will insert keywords into the copy of the landing page to further improve keyword relevance and hence quality score.

So far so good, but I disagree with one particular comment in the article; “…in a world where Quality Score is the single most important factor to SEM…”. I would concede that Quality Score is one key factor for a paid search account but it is not the most important. For me, and probably most clients’, I would consider conversion rate/sales to be the most important metric within an account. Surely a PPC account is created to drive sales and increase revenue for an advertiser, not simply to acquire a good Quality Score. Of course a good Quality Score is important, as it will help reduce CPC prices and therefore increase the ROI of an account, but I think it can be easy to get misled into focusing all our efforts into this one aspect of managing a good search account.

For instance, if we look at Ad Text optimisation, there is a tendency to view a good creative as the one with the best click through rate (CTR). This is because we know, that along with other measures, a high CTR is crucial in achieving a good Quality Score. It is very common to see most ad groups set up to automatically show the ad text with the highest CTR more frequently. This is fine, and will most likely ensure you will increase the number of click throughs and visits to the advertisers site. However, what is the conversion rate from this traffic? It is relatively easy to create an ad text that will deliver a high CTR and therefore Quality Score, but what about writing an ad text that increases the number of sales and conversion rate?

For a long while many paid search technologies have only reported impressions, clicks and CTR for each ad text, but we are now seeing a number of tools that are tracking conversions as well, and on the back of that some even offer simple A/B testing. This is something I am pleased to see and let’s not forget the bigger picture here, and that our main brief is to increase sales and revenues for our client or business.

SpeedPPC also creates yet another tool an account manager has to login to and works in isolation to the other key metrics within a paid search account both of which do not help with improving time efficiency and optimisation.

I wish SpeedPPC the best of luck with their technology, but I think they are missing the main objective.