Compared to conventional/off line advertising, it's incredibly compelling to see things such as impressions, click through rate, cost per click, average viewing length of video, quality score....etc. These are good indicators on a small aspect of the campaign, but shouldn't distract you from the bigger picture - your business! It's staggering, the number of people I hear boasting about their quality score or their CPC on direct response campaigns. However, this isn't going to keep you in business. In these difficult economic times, there's only really ROI and perhaps CPA that really matter.

I've heard a couple of advertisers recently wanting to target high click through rates for good quality scores! I can't think of anything more pointless, in business terms. Besides, the lower your click through rate, the lower your equivalent Impressions or eCPM - basically, cheaper brand awareness.

CPC is a common one too. If you get a good return on a keyword, what do you do? Reduce bids? No way, I want more leads or sales, push as hard as you can, until the ROI falls below what is acceptable. Better still, employ an automated Bidding system, such as BidFluency to do this for you. Don't worry, this isn't a cynical sales pitch!

Google Quality score is something that is defined as being so vague, it's barely worth wasting much time over. Calculation of this metric is not nearly as dynamic as you have been led to believe. The safest bet, is to ensure that business/campaign objectives, campaign relevancy and lading page experiences (and beyond) are as aligned as possible with your target market. Stop me if any of this is new......if you happen to get a high quality score, great, but I'll be watching the sales and ROI before that.

Some advertisers suffer from something akin to 'search blindness', avid Google Adwords users more commonly, where the lure of the technology is so compelling, they lose sight of reality - sorry, that sounds harsh, rather, the ability to look through the technology and understand the implications and if there's a business benefit. Some of gadgets and gizmos are actually pretty cool and very useful, but the basic process must always remain the same, pilot, observe, learn.

Don't get blinded by science, follow your business objectives!