If you’ve been running Google ads for a while, you know that Quality is vital. And your Quality Score (QS) depends heavily on your click thru rates (CTR) & to some extent on your Landing Pages.
BUT – do you realise just how much is dependent on how much Google trusts you?
Here’s a real life example:
Background: Brand new client – ads have been running for a week now. Client is a fairly new business with no established brand.
Network: Google Search only, running in just 1 Australian State (for the campaign we’re looking at here)
Budget: reasonable, but not huge until we’ve got numbers to prove it’s positive ROI (about $150/day for now)
Quality Scores: Excellent! 6 out of 264 keywords have a QS of 7, 50/264 = 8, 175 have QS of 9 & 33 have QS-10 (there are no brand names in this campaign)
Bids: most are higher than we’d normally go for as client wants to be in position 1 when possible (yeah – you get that now & then), but with the margin they’re making it actually does make sense!
CTR%: off the chart! Nevermind the keywords, 29 out of 39 AdGroups have a CTR over 5%, 11 groups are over 10%. This is a targeted campaign!
Results: over 600 clicks at about $1.30 each & a stunning number of conversions (sales, not forms completed)
So what’s the problem?
And yet with all this – great quality, high bids, huge click thru rates & a good conversion rate
The Impression Share lost to Rank is still averaging 30-40% most days! Why?
Well most likely it’s due to the lack of trust Google has in a brand new advertiser with a fairly new site (1 year, PR2). Despite some truly stellar results, this account is still only a week old & therefore Google wants to roll out the ads over time, so that it can be sure the ads & the landing page offer a great user experience.
What is Impression Share?
Simply your share of the available impressions on a daily basis. so if there were 100 possible impressions available (100 people searched for one of your keywords) & your ads showd 56 times, yep – you’d have a 56% impression share.
You can lose Impression Share (IS) in two ways. Either your budget isn’t high enough, or your AdRank isn’t high enough.
Budget is obvious – if you can only afford to spend $100/day, then Google will slow your ads to match that as closely as possible.
AdRank is a little harder to understand – for now all you need to know is that your bid & your QS determine your rank. So shouldn’t a high bid & high QS mean you’ll show on page 1 all day long???? No.
History Matters.
Don’ think that because you set a high budget, or a high Maximum CPC that your ads are necessarily going to show on Google. Google doesn’t work as many people think – with the big bidders automatically showing their ads at the top of the page… it’s all about Quality.
So if there’s an established advertiser in position 4 – who’s been there for ages & is trusted by google… then that advertiser isn’t going to get forced off the page just because some big fish swim into town & start bidding high.
Instead Google will only show ads from some of those big fish & continue to show ads from the trusted, long-term advertisers in their usual spots.
In a way Google is protecting the long-term advertisers, but it’s also protecting it’s users from the newer, unknown advertisers – that it doesn’t yet trust.
And of course trust is built up over time, so the history of your account is now a huge factor.
So what can you do?
In a word: patience! Have some patience with your new accounts – don’t expect to go straight to the position you want & then stay there all day.
It takes time to build up that trust with Google.
Concentrate on getting an excellent quality score for all your keywords & writing great Ads to get high CTR (don’t worry about the ad position so much as making sure the copy is great)
Delete keywords that don’t help you (QS of 6 or lower) & try to think of more keywords that would be highly relevant to your product/service
And above all – keep testing!
