Drug companies make a lot of money by inventing diseases so they can sell drugs to people who would otherwise be considered healthy.
For example, “high cholesterol” is now defined as a disease, rather than a risk factor associated with heart disease. Everyone with total cholesterol over 200 is encouraged by drug companies and doctors to take statin drugs to lower that number – despite the fact that lowering cholesterol artificially through drugs doesn’t seem to have any impact on heart disease or longevity. In other words, both your cholesterol level and your likelihood of developing heart disease depend on your lifestyle: diet, exercise, sleep, attitude, environment, and so on.
Yet the marketing scare tactics have us all running around trying to manipulate our cholesterol through drugs with nasty side effects, rather than addressing the root causes of our declining health.
Quality Scores are Like Cholesterol Numbers
Similarly, AdWords advertisers tend to get paranoid about the quality scores of their keywords. And AdWords educators and consultants encourage this obsession by writing myriad blog posts deconstructing Google’s ad rank algorithm. Doing the math, they point out that the higher your quality score, the less you have to pay per click to outrank your competition.
The logic seems airtight: if your quality score is 7, you should do everything you can to get it to a 10. And I was guilty of this until I got schooled in the subject by my colleague Joel McDonald. Quality scores, he avers, are to CPC what cholesterol is to heart health: A single number related to the end goal, but not a cause of it.