Google Score

Your Google score is determined as:

           CTR X maximum bid price in pence for a search term = Google score.

So in the above example (extreme as it is) if you have company A having a maximum bid price of £1 for the search term ‘property’, and company B having a maximum bid price of £2, and company A having a CTR of 100% and company B having a CTR of 1%, then their respective Google scores are:

So company A has a higher Google score than company B. So even though company B is willing to pay £2 per click company A still ranks higher and pays only £1 for the click.

But it gets even better! All company A has to do to beat company B is get a score greater than 2. If they can maintain a CTR of 100% and pay a cost per click of 10p then their score is:

This is greater than company B.

So even though company B is willing to pay £2 per click and company A is only willing to pay 10p, company A still gets ranked higher.

Cost Per Click

So in this extreme example company A pays only 10p and gets ranked first. So what does company B pay? Well Google have another rule:

So if you introduce company C and company D, who have a click thru rate of 10% and are willing to pay 50p and 5p per click, you have their Google score at:

So the cost per clicks (known as CPC) are as follows:

Rank position		Google score	Max CPC	CPC
1st	Company A	10	10p	8p
2nd	Company C	5	50p	7p
3rd	Company B	2	£2	6p
4th	Company D	0.5	5p	5p

So companies A, B, C and D can be identified as these following typical companies:

Company	Name	Why?
Company A	The winner	This company knows the value of money and relevance. They are playing Google’s game. Since Google have earned their position to be the number one search engine they are deciding to play by Google’s rules. They have studied how Google’s system works and thus worked the system knowing full well they will get rewarded for it.
Company C	The amateur	They have some understanding of being relevant. They know that being relevant costs them less money, but being relevant requires effort! So to bypass effort they’ll just increase their cost per click to a level they can afford with the hope they’ll ppear somewhere on the first or second page.
Company B	The lazy	This company is stupid. They have no idea of being relevant. All they have is a big marketing budget. This budget has been given to an employee who has no understanding of money or ROI (return on investment). This company will spend that marketing budget in full but will get very few real enquiries.
Company D	The poor	This company will rarely get their ads viewed as they will be placed on the eigth or ninth page. They can still do well as the type of user viewing the eigth or ninth page will be a serious searcher. They will pay less than 8p per click and generally be start-ups or less established companies.

I have helped many people with their ‘pay per click’ (PPC) campaigns and most fall into the amateur or the poor category. Very few were in the lazy category because I had very few clients that had budgets of greater than £100,000 per month. But they all had one mission in mind: they wanted to be in the winner category.