Google Quality Score and Minimum CPC

Word is spreading that Google, who is well known for their incredible line up of perks, is cutting back their budget on their culinary program. Among several things being cut from the program the largest hit will be the elimination of free dinners.

It has been estimated that Google spends anywhere from $20-$30 a day per employee. about $5000-$7,500K per Google employee which results in about $50-$72 Million a year just on providing free food for their employees. The headquarters in Mountain view alone holds 8,000+ employees.

Google’s founders have always communicated their commitment to providing great perks for their employees. The only sign of breakage from this commitment was the rumor that Sergey Brin complained about employees’ sense of entitlement to “bottled water and M&Ms”. Google has lost a lot of their chef’s to other companies such as facebook and has been supposedly understaffed.

What will this mean for Google’s culture and the sustainability of future perks?

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - SEM

Google is changing the way they measure your Quality Score. Though Google uses an auction bid type system for its Adwords management, much of your position ranking is currently determined by how relevant Google deems your structure, ad, keyword and landingpages are with one another. Then it takes that score, factors in your account history, click through rate and many other factors and this final “score” is often called “Quality Score” or “index”. If this Quality score is too low, Google will raise the minimum bid required to show your ad. This is how more established players who have good history and have properly structured and optimized accounts can out position you with a $0.10 bid while you may be unable to show your ad even at a $2 bid.

The news out of Google is that in the next few days, the Quality Score, which used to be static and by keyword, will now be calculated at the time of each query.
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A little known tactic with Dynamic Keyword Insertion (the “bracket trick”) is placing keywords into your destination URLs.

Most Internet marketers just implement the bracket trick in their headline or description line (see below example)

{KeyWord:Lead Generation Marketing}
Get ROI focused SEM PPC Management.
We Share All Our Strategies & Data!
www.LeadQual.com/Leads

You can also use the bracket trick for your destination URLs: http://leadqual.com/?keyword={keyword}

By implementing the above tactic, you can use your web logs and analytics to record which keywords generated the most leads for you by tracking referring URLs.

Why is this useful? Conversion tracking is not 100%. MSN can sometimes inflate your numbers by 4 fold. Also, there are situations where Google, Yahoo or MSN are just not able to track your conversions. What is an ROI-focused marketer to do? By dynamically inserting your keyword into the destination URL you have just greatly increased the likelihood of properly tracking the truest number of conversions. Now, just add a distinct variable for your adgroups and you no longer need to rely on Google for conversion tracking.

Rock On,
Nicholas Abramovic

Nicholas prefers playing {KeyWord:FoosBall} over blogging, but just thought you should know about a useful way of implementing DKI.

Source: Nielsen Online

Google continues to grow both in searches in and in market share. In July Google’s searches increased 16% over last year. Yahoo’s searches decreased 11 percent while Microsoft searches dropped 10%. Ask.com which has shifted its focus to targeting soccer moms and women grew 13% for 2% of the market share. Microsoft however had made a lot of gains in the past few months by providing monetary incentives to searchers for using their live.com search engine. It has brought many users to their site and increased their market share.

However Google owns 60 percent of the 8 billion searches and continues to own this market by a large lead. The industry as a total increased 3 percent in terms of total searches.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - Search Engine Marketing