Google Adwords

How does Google Adwords calculate or determine Quality Score ?

There are two schools of thought, that of this website, and those in the field of Google Advertising Professionals.

Theory Number One : Ads-Bot is in charge

The first theory, endorsed by every professional, is that Adwords, or the Ads-Bot Google, is in complete control of all quality scores and relies solely on the information it gathers to generate these scores. And, therefore, whenever the Ads-Bot visits your website, is when the opportunity for improvement, or regression, of your campaign can occur. In other words, you are at the mercy of timing, whenever the Ads-Bot Google crawls your website.

The following reads from Google's Help Archive

Let's examine those statements, and take Google at it's word, it means exactly what it says. There are three interesting points to consider.

The first interesting point we come to is automated programs, which means machines will decide, or more to the point, software algorhythms will decide. It is not possible to determine the decision process these programs make, unless of course, you work for Google and are in a position to examine these software algorhythms. Furthermore, Google does not define or outline the data used in order to inform these software algorhytms, so we are left to speculate on how those decisions are made.

The second interesting point Google defines is how often the system will visit advertiser sites and how many pages it will crawl. In other words, you are not in control of when the Ads-Bot visits your site, or even which page or pages it crawls or visits.

Why would Google design a system like this ? Shouldn't it be possible for the Ads-Bot to crawl a web page, at your direction, read the contents of the page, and render a score ? Why is there a need to wait ? We are discussing automated programs, software running on servers, that should be able read a web page, filter the data through it's algorhythm, and output a score.

Google has various tools to aid your Adwords' campaigns, but one in particular will examine your URL or page, and actually define a suitable list of keywords for you to use, the amount of competition involved vying for those keywords, and even the price you should pay, during an auction, for those keywords.

This tool is called Google Adwords External Keyword Tool. What is the purpose of this tool ? To estimate the quality of the keywords found on your website or landing page, and to provide you with estimates for impressions and cost-per-click. Why does this tool exist, if not to provide a reasonable expectation of success or failure in outlining a campaign with ads ?

Unfortunately, this is simply not the case. In fact, using the Keyword tool and actually using the Adwords system to develop campaigns can offer completely different, sometimes significantly different, results. How can this be ?

How can Google Adwords' own keyword tool suggest what keywords are relevent to a specific landing page, export those keywords directly in to a campaign with the identical landing page, then have the Adwords system blow it all up, reporting the keywords it suggested you use are not relevent to the landing page you are using in your ad ? Where does the keyword tool get its information, and where does the Adwords system get its information ?

The third interesting point is:

This means Google isn't going to modify its data relating to information already stored about your website ( data collection from the Google-Bot ) based on the data collected from its Ads-Bot, or the Adwords System.

There are those who would point to this statement to suggest that the inverse is true, although it is not stated anywhere, and that is whatever ...data gathered by the Google-Bot will also not affect your Adwords products.... Interesting to note that Google fails to point this out, which brings us to an alternate theory...

Theory Number Two : Google-Bot is in charge

The second theory, which at this point, can only be found on this website, is based on personal experience with Adwords and a 3 month ordeal in which a campaign succesfully recovered from a poor landing page.

It is the contention of mfwebservices that the Ads-Bot Google is not the sole arbitor of the Adwords system, rather it relies on its parent, the Google-Bot ( organic search driven robot ), to inform the Adwords system of changes to your website. The Google-Bot, of course, is the famous robot that crawls websites and stores information in databases about them, and many, many others. And, the information it gathers is wide-ranging, detailing such aspects of your website as:

• Keywords:

  How many times they appear, on which pages, and which pages rank the highest - containing a given keyword.

• Backlinks:

  Other web documents linked to your website or web pages.

• Search Results:

  What search terms people are using to find your website, how often your website appears in search and what keywords were used, as well as click-through percentages, and what pages were accessed.

• Page Load Times:

  Load times are averaged daily, spanning a 3 month interval that you can modify to see how long it takes to load your pages.

The information gathered is used to analyze your website, to ultimately determine where it will rank in search results using a method that is proprietary and not disclosed. So, we are left to speculate on how the page rankings are determined.

Again, from Google Help Articles..

We're going to go ahead, and assume, this means Google is not going to replace the data archived from the Google-Bot, with data collected from the Ads-Bot, so as not to affect any changes to a websites' page rank positively or negatively.

First, lets clarify something. Your website, and the landing pages you use in your Adwords campaigns are directly related, being they reside on the same server, accessed through the same top-level domain. Google already has information archived about your website by virtue of its Google-Bot crawling it.

It does not make sense for Google to store one set of information about your website, and another, identical set, about your landing pages in Adwords, with a possible exception being there is no data stored by the Google-Bot, thus allowing the Ads-Bot to house its contents instead, preventing likely inefficiencies in storing your websites' data.

It is far more likely, Adwords uses the data archived from Google-Bot visits to develop a profile to be used to formulate quality scores, rather then a completely different data set archived from an Ads-Bot visit. One could infer a duel-standard from that which would mean, what is good for Adwords is not necessarily good for organic search results, potentially undermining the quality in advertising that Google seeks to achieve.

The only difference between organic search results, and results generated by Adwords, are one is paid for, the other is not. Adwords was developed to take advantage of the search market, by allowing lesser-known websites the opportunity to be listed on the same page as more popular websites by paying to be there. Google cannot afford to sponsor unrelated advertisements in their search results because it will eventually lead to its searchers avoiding Adwords altogether due to a lack of faith they will not find what they are searching for.

It makes more sense for Google to rely on one source for your website data, which would include keywords, pages, URLs, backlinks, sitemaps, page load times, spam complaints, terms of use violations, crawling rates and errors, the list goes on as to what the Google-Bot has access to already by crawling and indexing any website, while keeping and maintaining a separate database for the activities related to your Adwords account.

This is important to understand, because your Adwords account does not provide information specifically about your website, only that relating to your ad campaigns. So, if your website has been hacked, had a server crash, has broken links, has missing images, has html errors inside web documents, is blocking access to robots, or some other problem, you won't be aware of the specific nature of these problems or errors, simply by using the Adwords system, only that the quality score has been affected.

There is a hiarchy, a process that Adwords goes through, immediately after your ad campaign has been completed, and it might look something like below:

Why is the where data is collected from significant ? If you can't analyze, for yourself, what data Google is using to determine these scores, and make adjustments, you'll end up confused, angry, and dissatisfied with the entire experience, which is an utter shame. Thousands and thousands of Adwords' users depend on the traffic generated from their ads, and when they suddenly stop running, the income derived from those visitors stops too.

For more information on what steps you can take to become more aware of the data used, refer to the article below.