Why Impression-based Metrics Are Misleading

Profit per Impression, or PPI, is a popular metric in PPC. So popular that it sparked a little side discussion during last week’s #ppcchat when I called it misleading. Let me explain why.

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What Landing Page Quality Score is Really All About

A year ago, in October 2011, Google announced a change to how Quality Score was calculated. Since then, landing page quality is supposed to play an important role the ad auction, where ad ranks and click prices are determined. It was easy to miss that this was actually a fundamental change – one that didn’t add up.

In my opinion, Google has once again given priority to marketing and neglected to tell the real purpose behind this change. In consequence, advertisers got a completely wrong picture of what landing page quality is and what they’re supposed to do. Basically, all conclusions and strategies to deal with landing page quality are utterly wrong. Continue reading

Why the Migration to “Optimize for Conversions” is a Good Thing

A few months back Google announced to change the ad rotation setting for certain campaigns to optimize for conversions. This move has sparked some controversy, but I believe it’s actually quite beautiful.

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It’s important to note that only campaigns which meet certain criteria will have their ad rotation changed. These criteria are: Continue reading

Would Google miss your Advertising Dollars?

Over at the RKG blog, George Michie wrote an article on a very interesting question: How much do you matter to Google? Or, in other words: How much would it cost Google to lose an advertiser?

George looked at the decline of CPC’s in different scenarios of ad auctions where the top advertiser dropped out. He concluded that it matters a great deal how tightly packed an auction is. If there are a hundred advertisers with similar bids and quality scores the top advertiser is easily replaced with minimal declines in CPC’s. But even in loosely packed auctions the decline isn’t that big.

I was fascinated with the idea and started to play with the numbers myself. But I didn’t want to look only at CPC’s as they are just one part of the equation. While CPC’s matter a lot to advertisers, Google’s attention is on revenue. So how much revenue would Google lose if an advertiser dropped out of an auction?
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