Whilst attending "Google university" at the internet world expo in London the other day, I put a question to the two Google representatives who had just given a lecture on the quality scoring of Adwords. My question was "does the conversion rate or length of time spent on a site affect the quality score of an ad?" i.e. If everything else is equal then will an ad that people convert more off or stay on the site for a greater length of time eventually get a better quality score and appear further up the rankings for less money?
I have always suspected that these two things must count for something when Google asseses the quality score of ads yet, after a bit of flustering, they both insisted that actually the only thing that affected an ads quality score is the click through rate. If this is the case then I could have great, compelling ad copy but a really irrelevant sie and yet Google would still show me higher than other Ads as according to them my ad is more relevant.
Here is the problem. Google's mission has always been to deliver relevant pages to its searches yet its adwords system seems to only focus on delivering relevant advertising copy, completely ignoring the pages that the users click through to. Eithe this is something that Google has genuinely oerlooked or their is something they are not telling us regarding how they rate different ads for fear of exposing this loophole to people wishing to exploit the quality score system i.e f I knew that when people converted on my site I would have to pay less to get my ad shon in a higher position then I would simply place my conversion code in every page thus achieving a 100% conversion (which I recently did accidentally by placing the code in the outerlayout of an Actinic site!)
Food for thought really, but I just think its odd that google should only consider click throughs as relevant when assesing an ads quality...
fullnotes: SEO UK
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