Regards

Sam – I am glad you were able to learn something new here

Gab – the idea of using PPC for branding is definitely good. Now, if you can get a high clickthrough rate and the keywords are on the landing page, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work.

Justin – I am not sure I understand your question. If I understand correctly, I think that if you click on the names of the commenters you can get to their websites/blogs

Anyways
1) Great article. Sphunn
2) Dave, sweet tip on the adsense integration.
3) How about running up campaigns that just aim to build mindshare/RSS. You can include many usually negative KWs like free and gets lots of exposure and clicks (plus time spent on site; few bounces). Idea being to boost account QS and reduce CPC elsewhere. What do you think?

On a related note, Dave, that’s an excellent tip on using Adsense to check how G sees it.

Lastly, regarding AdWords account QS being more important, what do you think of buying ads just to build mindshare and QS? Then, visitors will click, spend a while reading your great material, and perhaps add their own comments. Bottom line, you can get more clicks, targeting needn’t be as precise … The question I’m asking is bottom line, will the mindshare/improved QS save enough money elsewhere in the account to make the spend worth it?

Great post and well timed for me personally as well. Been trying to improve the quality score based on some feedback at the conference in Stockholm and there’s some new little titbits here that weren’t given out there. Definitely interesting!!

Cheers,

Sam

Great post!

I’m a Japanese webmaster and a newbie of PPC.
I know split testing is important on both ads and landing page.

I have a question about the way of the testing.
Which is better to creae two ads that are totally different from one another or that are silghtly different?(i.e. just one word in heading)

Thank you very much.

I am glad to hear you are getting serious on paid search

The first thing you need to do is to enable the column that displays the quality scores. The values are Poor, Ok and Great.

Create relevant ads and as much landing content as you can and check your quality score rating. Tweak/add content and ads until you get it to Great.

When you start the campaign you can start with low CPC bids, but your prices will change depending on the rating the landing page bot gives you, and the click-through rate of your ads. Don’t forget about using highly targeted and enticing ads.

The quality is more biased to the CTR and the relevance of the ad and landing page. High quality ads end up paying less.

As Dave says your account historical performance is another important consideration, but I assume you are starting out so this is not a concern.

I am working on a price comparison site on which I plan to use PPC for the first time (and ranksense) and have a couple of questions.

Firstly, how much relevant content do I need, most of the page content will be comparison tables which will exactly relate to the search term. I was planning a sentence or two before the tables, and a paragraph afterwards.

Secondly, how quickly can you bring the CPC down using these methods / how often should I try dropping the CPC?

Thirdly, is quality in any way dependant on volume of advertising (budget) or is it more biased toward CTR?

Another little tip I found helpful is to briefly place an adsense unit in the landing page. If the ads match the content and matches your competitors, you’re in pretty good shape.

Another great idea. Thanks for sharing!

I forgot to talk about historical performance of the account. Thanks for bringing that up!

You blog has a lot of great content. I will make sure to check it more often.

Have a nice weekend

Another little tip I found helpful is to briefly place an adsense unit in the landing page. If the ads match the content and matches your competitors, you’re in pretty good shape.

I think however that the second QS update a few months after its inception put more weight on account history. A lot more.

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=47884

I do not think the quality score bot takes uniqueness of content too seriously as long as the content is not from another source.

That is the point I am trying to make.

I’ve read some guys that have a landing page package that they use unmodified for all the PPC projects. I thought Google didn’t pay too much attention to duplicity but here is a direct quote:

Originality:

* Feature unique content that can’t be found on another site.
* Provide substantial information. If your ad does link to a page consisting mostly of ads or general search results (such as a directory or catalog page), provide additional, unique content.

They are experts at detecting duplicate content and near duplicate content, so I think is natural for them to incorporate this in the landing page checker bot.

I agree with your tip about blocking robots from the PPC landing pages. Thanks for bringing that up!

One thing I would like to point out…most links that you reference are ALL in the Google support files. I see a lot of people complaining about getting “slapped” and getting “unfair treatment” when most of the answers are right there in the documentation.

One point that I do not agree with is: “Avoid duplicate content on your landing pages and include enough original text, not just banners and forms.”

I think you SHOULD be excluding your PPC landing pages completely anyway and having duplicate content when split testing without a multi variant tool is inevitable. I do not think the quality score bot takes uniqueness of content too seriously as long as the content is not from another source.

Again, great article. Hopefully we’ll get to say hello and talk Quality Score (Sad I know!) at PubCon.