Do Panda Ratings Affect the Adwords Quality Score?

[claaarky]

I believe that Panda scores are being used by Adwords to demote the ads of sites deemed low quality by Panda. Has anyone else noticed this?

My reasoning is as follows. For years I've been running a basic but steady Adwords campaign with predictable traffic levels and costs for an ecommerce site. In February 2011, around Valentines Day, traffic from our Adwords campaigns began to drop. Within 2 weeks our impressions, clicks and therefore costs had reduced to around 50% of what they had been (for years). It was right across our campaigns to varying levels but every day it equated to a 50% drop overall (almost exactly). It wasn't a pattern I'd ever seen before at this time of year but our site was performing well in the organic results so I left things alone, watched and waited. Meanwhile I discovered Panda 1 had hit America and people were reporting 50% drops in traffic. The timing and scale seemed a coincidence.

Then, in April, my site was hit by the UK release of Panda. Like many others our organic traffic fell by 50% (almost exactly).

Whilst attempting to determine what the Panda issues were with our site we naturally turned to Adwords to boost traffic and sales but there was a surprise waiting. For months we tried to regain the page 1 positions our ads had enjoyed for years but the costs were now much, much higher. Prohibitively high in fact.

Then we changed tack, set up ads for a selection of very specific, longtail keywords that produced organic sales prior to Panda but weren't any more (or not in the same volumes) and should be quite cost effective. An interesting pattern started to emerge. The Adwords quality score correlated with how we were ranking organically. If our ad got a 10 we found we were still ranking organically in the top 3, a score of 7 equated to organic ranking nearer to the bottom of the page and anything lower than 5 correlated to a 1-5 page demotion in organic results.

The slightly depressing conclusion from this for anyone hit by Panda, if I'm right, is that it's much more expensive to rank on page 1 in Adwords than your non-Pandalised competitors. Like me, you will try, discover the costs are ridiculous and give up. The bottom line seems to be, if you have a Pandalised site, Adwords is too expensive. You will not only be fighting the Adwords quality scoring system, but an added Panda demotion which will make it impossible for you to compete cost effectively.

Thinking about it from Google's angle this makes complete sense. Initially I thought Panda would be a bad thing for Adwords customers because owners of Pandalised sites would flock to Adwords, costs would go up for everyone and low quality sites would be able to survive. But applying Panda demotions to Adwords rankings as well as organic rankings is a stroke of genius. It ensures owners of Pandalised sites can't afford to keep going with Adwords for long, ensures there is a conveyor belt of sites giving it a go to keep bids up and fleeces the owners of Pandalised sites while they try to compete for worthwhile positions.

For Google this means:-
1) Quality improves
2) Revenue increases

It's good for users and good for Google. Not good for me right now but it seems a good plan.

I did wonder if there might be a positive to come out of this. Seeing as the Adwords quality score seems to reflect success in organic rankings, maybe you can use Adwords to continually assess your pages, improve quality and perhaps eventually escape Panda? My gut feeling is Panda feeds into Adwords, not the other way, but I'd be interested in peoples' views and experiences.

Just for the record I'm not a Panda moaner. Although Panda is playing havoc with my business right now I agree with the idea and I believe we will eventually overcome it. It's been a big wake up call for us.

I'm quite confident there is a Panda factor in play with Adwords though which is aimed at pricing low quality sites out of paid search. I just wonder if the Adwords quality scoring system could be used as a Panda recovery tool.

[tedster]

I've heard similar rumblings from other people - especially at Pubcon. Right now the consensus is that the organic team does NOT directly export Panda data to the Adwords team. However, both the Adwords QS and the Panda scoring are trying to model approximately the same thing, so some overlap in effect is certainly a potential.

I like the idea of using your Adwords QS to get some kind of handle on Panda. However, I've heard some loud complaints from people who are beloved in Adwords and still hit powerfully by Panda, so I would take this approach with a certain grain of salt.

[claaarky]

Seeing our Adwords campaign impressions drop by 50% when Panda 1 rolled out and seeing how our site was then treated in search results when Panda 2 rolled out, the effects certainly look very similar.

It's like Panda demotions have been applied as an additional factor to the existing Adwords quality scoring system, so if Panda determines you should be demoted 5 places for a specific term that is the penalty in both search and Adwords. The difference in Adwords is you can overcome it by increasing bids but it's not something most businesses will be able to sustain or do profitably I would imagine.

Maybe it's possible to improve Pandalised traffic if you can get good enough links, but I'm guessing Google has thought of that as well.

[Marketing Guy]

Doesn't a drop in clicks / spend just mean that a bunch of Adsense sites got blitzed, therefore reducing the market size? Even if you're not advertising on the display network, a load of your competitors will be, so if they lose out, they could be reallocating their budgets to compete with you advertising on search results.

If individual keywords are becoming more competitive, then your average ranking / impression share will drop and the QS should drop accordingly.

[netmeg]

There's a lot going on here, and it would be easy to string it all together, but I don't think it works that way.

Your AdWords QS is based on CTR CTR CTR. In my own experience across many client accounts, if we are already ranking well organically for something, plus displaying an ad for it, generally the ad will display higher, and that's where the click goes. Which causes the CTR to go up, which raised the Ad QS.

If you're not ranking organically, and can't get your ad on the front page, then you gotta improve your ad text or up your minimum bid - probably both.

Ad costs across the board have gone way up over the years. I've still got clients who started with AdWords the day they opened the doors, and while we were the first in the niche to jump in, now everyone is there, and I see some really ridiculous minimum bids to get on the first page, even for QS10 keywords. On the other side of it, as an AdSense publisher, while my CTR has gone way down, I am seeing some really reDONKulous earnings per click in the past year. Three times what it was several years ago. Since those are display ads, and not search ads, not sure how they would be Panda-affected. I think there's just more competition. The fact that there's more competition might be in part due to Panda (probably is) but we always have to be wary of mixing up correlation with causation.