Down time and Quality Score: a hole you might not climb out of
Published June 20, 2008 by Garry Przyklenk Google Adwords, Google Analytics, Omniture
The dreaded “d-word” that many online marketers wince at hearing is “downtime”. For media buys or traditional landing pages the impact isn’t so bad, because visitors may click through to a page and either get redirected or a 404 error, but the ad serving program won’t necessarily penalize that advertiser. With pay-per-click it’s an entirely different ball game. Google Adwords algorithms penalize Quality Score for ads with high bounce rates, and if your site or landing page is down, all bets are off.
The Quality Score Mystery…
Quality Score is perhaps the most misunderstood metric in the search marketing industry because it is at the core of Google’s Adwords ad serving equation. Regardless of what anyone says, no one knows the secret sauce of Quality Score aside from Google Engineers, and even they may have to rely on assumptions of certain market variables.
Two things are certain: bounce rate definitely does affect Adwords Quality Score and the worst causes of guaranteed bounce rate boil down to infrastructure/system/site/page downtime. Everyone is undoubtedly going to have a bit of bounce to their pages and that’s normal, but downtime is the only case where bounce rate is 100%!
Types of Downtime
As already suggested, there are several different single points of failure that can independently or collectively produce a dreaded “404 error”. As is most often the case, single points of failure manifest or occur most often in a hierarchy:
- Page failure (most common)
- Site failure
- System or server failure
- Infrastructure, network, or carrier failures (least common)
Understanding single points of failure is great, but without swift action to either correct the failure or pause campaigns, Quality Score will suffer tremendously.
Plummeting Quality Score
So how can you tell when your quality score begins to plummet? Some of the signs that may manifest in your campaign and account are as follows:
- Minimum bid CPC increases
- Dramatic drop in position
- Deactivated keywords
- E-mail notifications
- Quality Score indicators next to keywords
It’s best to catch poor quality score problems before they get worse, and many analytics and search management solutions will allow you to set business rules that will take action on your behalf. Because it’s so hard to recover poor quality score due to downtime, my suggestion would be to setup rules that monitor bounce rate and deactivate campaigns when bounce rate surpasses a certain limit.
Tips to Recover your Quality Score
There isn’t much you can do if your quality score plummets for a long period of time, with little to no attention given to a campaign in distress. However, if you catch your slip in quality score early, your chances for recovery is much better. Here are some tips that may help you recover your quality score:
- Pause campaigns as soon as you see a slide in quality score, make sure your ad preview tool is reporting on the status of your ad, and follow-up on any suggestions the ad diagnostic may recommend.
- Weather the storm of your site/infrastructure downtime and reactivate ads after you’re back up and running.
- Write new ad text, or write identical ad text in a new ad. This will reset your quality score for that ad and hopefully help you recover your old Quality Score.
- If your quality score slides for a prolonged period of time, start a new campaign with nearly identical creative, keywords, and budget. Your new campaign should not carry any historical data and therefore give you a fresh Quality Score.
If you can’t recover from any of these tips, be sure to contact an Adwords representative. It’s in Google’s best interest to get you back up and running after a spell of downtime, and they realize stuff does happen that is out of your control. They may be able to help you recover your Quality Score, or help you down the road to recovery.
