Hidehisa Watch

I keep reading on this site that the toolbar PageRank doesn’t matter, but if it’s useless why is it there?

Because having it there got a lot of webmasters and seo’s to download and install the Toolbar.

Transcript of the closing plenary address delivered March 22, 2009 at ASIS&T IA Summit 2009 in Memphis, Tenn.

This address was written to be read aloud. I encourage you to listen to audio or watch video of the address if possible.

2009-04-23: The HTML Working Group has published a Working Draft of HTML 5. HTML 5 adds to the language of the Web: features to help Web application authors, new elements based on research into prevailing authoring practices, and clear conformance criteria for user agents in an effort to improve interoperability. This particular draft specifies how authors can embed SVG in non-XML text/html content, and how browsers and other UAs should handle such embedded SVG content. See also the news about moving some parts of HTML 5 to individual drafts. The full list of changes since the previous draft are listed in the updated companion document HTML 5 differences from HTML 4. Learn more about the HTML Activity. (Permalink)

「Town Market」の話です。東京中野の自宅のポストに、その「Town Market」のチラシが入っていたんですね。そこにはこんなコピーが。

　週刊TV情報紙と地域の広告・チラシを
　毎週（金）あなたのポストへ無料でお届け！

　なるほどなあ。さすがリクルートと思いました。やっぱり考える人は考えるんですよね。そのキャッチコピーの下には、赤色の囲いの中に想定ターゲットが示されたこんなコピーもあります。

週末にお得な情報が欲しい方、
ご自宅で新聞を購読していない方にオススメ！

　この企画、かなり考え抜かれていますよね。新聞にあまり興味のない人、ニュースはネットで見るという人にとって、新聞本紙であえて必要だと思うのはテレビ欄。そのテレビ欄と芸能情報をコンテンツにして、まとめてチラシを届けてしまうという方法。しかも、信頼性はリクルートという企業名で担保。一応、これで、新聞折り込みチラシのメディア特性の要件は、完全にではありませんが、すべて満たしています。

Demystifying Google Quality Score & the Click Thru Rate Factor

I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about Quality Score (for search networks) lately. I usually don’t think much about quality score (QS) and over time, I got fed up with people who were obsessed with it. I suspected it was just people’s fascination with mysteries- Google algorithms cause a lot of discussion because they’re complicated and partly secret. But I figured, if you create ad groups that make sense and test good ads, QS takes care of itself.

PPC Account Average Quality Score

I had never thought of it, but it suddenly made a lot of sense to find the average quality score for all keywords in each of our client accounts. Quality score, if you get it from the Reporting Center, is on a 1-10 scale. I found that our average client had an average quality score of about 7.5. But they ranged from 6.1 to 8.2. I also profiled their total number of keywords, number of ad groups, avg CPC, what vertical they’re in, and average ad position.

The above is a scatter chart of a selection of the quality score and CPC of about 700 keywords across about ten of our PPC clients. As we’d expect, there’s an inverse relationship between QS and CPC.

Now, average quality score is just an indicator, and not perfect. You might use it to question if your account could be structured better or not. If you get more granular, if you increase CTR, you can lower CPC for the same ad position and increase ROI. Yes, there’s a balance between CTR and CR and Avg Sale- you can optimize for all by focusing on ROAS or ROI. But lower CPC also gets you more clicks and more impressions for the same budget. So when you consider all the factors, choosing a KPI is not as easy as it looks. Dealing with a suite of KPI’s could be too complicated.

Number of Keywords and Average Quality Score

You should also think about how many keywords you have. Every niche has a different number of relevant keywords, and within that, a different number of high ROI keywords. If you have too many keywords, your quality score may go down, because your offer is truly relevant to only so many search keywords, and CTR will decrease when you pass beyond some critical point of relevance. On the flip side, you could get a very high QS by using fewer keywords, but then are you missing out on important customers?

Average Quality Score and Your Bottom Line

And never forget- the most important keywords are the ones that perform the best for your KPI- the most profitable, the most volume-producing keywords… the quality score of these keywords is more important than the quality score of 100 long tail keywords, if the long tail ones don’t produce much ROI. So, take the average quality score for an account with a grain of salt.

Quality Score = CTR, Says AdWords Rep

Another interesting point I had clarified by one of our AdWords Dedicated Support reps was that though Quality Score is composed of multiple factors, far and away the most important one is CTR. He said:

In actuality, the CTR is really the largest component of Quality Score. If you increase the CTR, you will increase the Quality Score. It can be pretty tough to get scores of 9-10, but it is definitely possible. More often than not though, the keywords I see in accounts that have scores of 9-10 are branded keywords that have very high CTRs (sometimes 10-20-30%).

This is not surprising, when you think about it, that AdWords defines quality as the relevance that leads to clicks- that’s their bottom line- Google is still not fully devoted to your success- they only take you part way through the journey. You have to fight for the conversions and increased revenue. And they’re not wrong to do that- they’re not responsible for the effectiveness of your website usability, your offer, your copywriting and so on.

So, How Then Shall We Optimize?

The way to lower CPC via increasing QS is to increase CTR. And that brings us back to where I started with quality score- when you test ads, you need to balance CTR, CR, and Avg Sale optimization. Clicks alone are not your goal, and high CTR ads sometimes are low ROI ads.

When it comes to campaign and ad group structuring and how much of your keywords are in their ad group’s ads, that’s where you can increase CTR and QS without worrying. The more granularity you have at the campaign level, the more you can optimize by budgeting, but you can start something as an ad group and move it into its own campaign later- quite easily in fact with AdWords Editor. And it makes sense to prioritize this above ad testing, even though I believe in constant ad testing, because ad success can be limited by bad ad group structure.

Brian Carter is the Director of Search Engine Marketing for Fuel Interactive, an interactive marketing agency in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. He is responsible for the SEO, PPC, SMM, and ORM programs at Fuel and its partner traditional agency Brandon Advertising & PR.

AmazonEc2を使ったSaaS運用事例 (SonicGardenの並河さん)

以前から参考にさせて頂いているRX7のブログの人でした。

けんてーごっこがAWSに出会って1年半 (学びingの五十嵐さん)

Amazon EC2/S3クラウド入門を書いた人

Cloud Computing @Tokyo Cloud Dev.Meetup (EXAの安藤さん)

* 上司を説得する文句など。

関西スポンサー協会は、関西に事業所を構える広告主の広告宣伝担当部署４０数社が加盟する団体であり、その活動目的を協会規約において「広告宣伝活動の健全なる発展向上に寄与し、会員相互の連携協調と親睦を図り、併せて専門的調査研究を行う」ことと規定しています。その活動は、昨年５０周年の節目を迎えました。

近年の広告を取り巻く環境は、『デジタル』社会の中にあって、インターネットを中心に大きく変化しています。一方、時代のニーズは『健康』を志向しています。それは地球環境の乱れやストレス社会の進展、災害の多発、更には医療費の問題等で生活者の不安が増大し、健康であることの大切さがクローズアップされているからです。こうした状況の下、広告主は新たな気持ちで広告の持つ社会的役割・使命を認識し『デジタル』と『健康志向』という時代のトレンドを捉えた広告課題に目を向けた上で、LOHASという大きな社会的トレンドに取り組んで行く事も必要とされています。

今後の協会活動は、LOHAS等時代のニーズを意識しながら、上記活動目的の達成に向けて、関西らしさを大切に元気よく進めてゆきたいを考えています。皆様の絶大なるご支援を、何卒宜しくお願い申し上げます。