SECOND SIGHTING

The apostrophe is handled differently by Google, Yahoo! & Microsoft when showing your PPC ads. It’s not something thats really mentioned in any of the help documentation but i’ve had problems with it, so hopefully this quick tip will be of help to some people. Lets say you want to add a keyphrase including a word that should have an apostrophe e.g. the word can’t. Here is how it will be handled by:

• Google & Microsoft - you must add the apostrophe to show for searches with an apostrophe, and leave it out to show for searches without one.
• Yahoo! - you must add the apostrophe otherwise your ad will not show at all. It will then show for searches with or without an apostrophe.

In short, who bids highest wins, which is of course how it’s always going to be - for Google, Yahoo! & everybody else. But here’s how the process works in detail. Firstly, we know that Quality Score is used in two stages when showing your ads on the search network. Google themselves say:

“The formula behind Quality Score varies depending on whether it is calculating minimum bids or assigning ad position.”

Stage 1 - The Minimum Bid

This stage is used to calculate the keywords Quality Score, which Google shows to you at least in part via the keywords minimum bid. Google mostly uses keyword CTR, keyword relevance to its ad group & your landing page to calculate this Quality Score.

Stage 2- Ad Position

Ad Quality Score is used to determine an ads position on the page. The ad Quality Score is very heavily influenced by maximum CPC compared to CTR & other factors. Unless your keyword has been given a really good Quality Score, then if you want to be in #1 position you pretty much have to bid yourself there. The result is that ads are ranked mostly in order of maximum CPC, with perhaps one or two positions on a page changing due to the effects of keyword Quality Score.

The Result? To Rank #1 You Have to Bid #1

You might have an amazing keyword Quality Score, but you’re still not going to get the traffic unless you bid high. You may only ever get charged £5 a click on a keyword with a maximum CPC of £10, but you still have to put in that £10 bid to stay in your position. Try it yourself, find a keyword that has a really good Quality Score (signified by a low minimum bid) and an average CPC quite a bit lower than your maximum. Drop the maximum bid so its somewhere between the average CPC and what it’s currently set to. Theres a very good chance that even though you pay exactly the same for a click, your ads position will drop.

Google Wins Every Time

Google profits in so many ways from doing things like this. Think about it:

• The onus is always on the advertiser to do all the work. Want to rank higher? Then bid higher. Want to pay less per click? Optimize your ad.
• Higher bids are encouraged by Google, both explicitly & implicitly by scenarios such as the one described above. Higher bids of course means more money for Google.
• Google only charges a proportion of each advertisers bid. Google not making enough money? Tweak the formula so it relies even more on CPC, and take a bigger chunk of the bid. More money in an instant, without needing to wait for the advertisers to do anything.
• There is enough emphasis on keyword Quality Score to keep advertisers optimizing their ads, thus constantly improving the quality of ads on Google. Google gets a better advertising network thanks to other peoples hard work.

In my opinion this is something Yahoo! and Microsoft still don’t fully understand, and one of the reasons why Google is way ahead of them in the advertising world.

One of Yahoo’s search partners just destroyed another of my good PPC keywords. And i’m in the UK so I can’t even use the new domain blocking feature to solve the problem. Take a look at the Google Analytics screenshot below and you’ll see how a particular site sent me 87 visits in 5 days. Those 87 visits cost me £135~ ($284) with a bounce rate of 88% and resulted in 0 conversions. This particular keyword normally gets 1 or 2 clicks a month from Yahoo! and converts great for me. Then for good measure they threw in a few hits from a Yahoo! mail server in the US complimentary of… my own bank account. My campaign is targeted to the UK.

How to Join the Yahoo! Publisher Network

If you look at the site in question you’ll see how crap it is - just two lists of sponsored links. Is that all it takes to be a Yahoo! search partner? Maybe I should go build a site in 5 minutes and make myself some easy money.

I Want a Refund

I’ve contacted their customer support about this as I want a refund. There’s no way those clicks were from people searching for the keyword im bidding on or even anything close to it.

**UPDATE**

Yahoo! have kindly given me a refund for these clicks.

Here are some stats for one of the campaigns I manage, showing how ROI can differ hugely according to match type. A few points to note which show how reliable these results are:

• almost every keyword has been added for each match type
• the bid amounts are the same across match types
• data comes from approximately 20,000 keywords
• took over a year to accumulate
• has a very mature negative keyword list of over 400 words

Conclusions

The more closely you target your keywords, the higher your ROI. In this campaign, exact match produces 4 times the ROI of broad match, and nearly twice that of phrase match.

Broad match is great for finding new keywords to bid on, but it also finds a whole lot more that won’t produce results for you. This emphasises how important it is to regularly check your server logs & look through the raw search queries for keywords to add to your negative list.

Does broad match go too far when expanding your keywords for related searches? If I didnt have such a good negative keyword list for this campaign, I could very well have made a negative ROI on broad match.