Downside of Quality Score

A good search marketer these days knows the importance of landing page – not only will conversion rates (and therefore profits) be higher, but a solid landing page might even raise Google’s Quality Score and so bring down the cost of ads. That’s a double bonus – more conversions for the same amount of traffic and less cost for that traffic.

We can’t get too focused on the relationship of the landing page to the keywords used, though. Recent research at ClickShift shows that about half of transactions at multi-category ecommerce sites are in categories unrelated to the ad clicked! So if you focus too much on matching the ad exactly to the landing page, you may miss out on a bunch of cross-sell traffic. You might boost your conversion rate by 10% but miss the 50% of revenue that comes from traffic flowing freely around the site.

The graph below shows some details (we posted a longer whitepaper here, or you can email us). Across the bottom, we show the category of the ad that was clicked, and the colors represent the first purchase made by the user after arriving. For all but cosmetics, jewelry, and housewares, well over half of the transactions came in categories unrelated to the original ad.



I think this is a problem for Google’s current Quality Score – let’s hope Yahoo’s new ad platform focuses just on click through rate so that well-tuned advertisers can use this effect to give users what they want.

Sites should be using their search data to drive their cross- and up-sells. If they really get fancy, they could drive those uniquely by user and not by SKU, as most of them do now.

Related Tags: online marketing, quality score