Pay Per Click sometimes feels like one of those Sunday afternoon war films where the enemy has moved troops up in the night and pushed through, inflicting massive casualties and the good guys retreat to regroup and plan the next attack to take back lost ground.

The Quality Score Offensive was AdWords Latest push and take note that it won’t be the last, if you haven’t figured it out yet it’s time to get used to the fact that things are going to change on a regular basis and affiliates are going to be getting continually squeezed harder and harder so they need to continually evolve and diversify their traffic acquisition strategy.

The Quality Score (QS) is one of those situations what Google say publicly isn’t quite what happens in practice most of the time to many of the affiliates I’ve spoken too, let’s look at their official line here :

The components of Quality Score vary depending on whether it’s calculating minimum bid or ad position:

“Quality Score for minimum bid is determined by a keyword’s clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google, the relevance of the keyword to its ad group, your landing page quality, your account’s historical performance, and other relevance factors.”

Sounds easy enough to follow, the minimum bid QS (i.e what AdWords wants minimum to show your ad on the keyword) is based on CTR, keyword to adgroup relevance (to make you do small and tightly targeted campaigns), landing page quality, historical performance and other mysterious factors (Google’s share price or price earnings ratio perhaps ?)

Snapshot butchered from one of my affected campaigns :

Now I’m a natural born cynic and I view every “it’s for the benefit of our users” claim with a healthy dose of scepticism so bearing in mind the landing page for this campaign is on a site with everything that complies with what Google seems to want i.e a site-map, privacy policy, about us, many specific product pages, T&C’s, and plenty of content directly related to the main keywords above so it leaves little reasoning for the minimum bid demands on the keywords above, which have increased between around 5 to 10 times their current bids.

I find it hard to see a genuine case as to why the keywords above with 21% to 29% CTR’s and 30% to 59.54% Conversion ratios (you tell me if the traffic is relevant enough at that !?!) are now £5.00 per click whilst it’s left untouched many other less relevant keywords with far lower CTR and Conversion figures, which aren’t as targeted to the landing page content as the ones above which are all variations of a three word phrase.

It appears to be a case of the most relevant keywords to the adcopy (hence 21%+ CTR) and relevant to the landing page (hence 30%+ conversion ratio) have been penalised as having the lowest overall QS yet the keywords that have been left untouched don’t feature even on the landing page in full in many cases as they are wider variations of the main phrases above.

One could construe that AdWords has, on this occasion, hit the highest performing keywords which convert the best of all in an effort to force more money per click out of us, whilst leaving the lower yielding keywords alone as there’s no money in it for them compared to the main ones.

I know how to sort this out and get it back on track but this instance really annoyed me as all the boxes are ticked if normal rules apply and it’s adding value in that it’s obviously filling the need of the user or it wouldn’t be converting so well, so I find how Google are doing this random, arbitrary QS trawl so very annoying and I genuinely can’t see how they can keep this thinly veiled bid jacking operation as a “QUALITY” score excuse for much longer when they are hitting sites that are converting seriously well and are built with their landing page and site quality guidelines in mind.

Anyone else had similar experiences where the highest performing keywords with quality CTR and conversion ratios like above have been slapped yet the less relevant lower performing ones are left to run ?