PPC Management – Adwords Quality Score
If you are a regular advertiser who uses Google Adwords, you probably already are familiar with Google’s Quality Score. Each and every keyword within your adwords account is assigned a quality score by Google. This score is calculated by Google to represent how relevant your keyword is to your advertisement and destination.
The impact of a keyword’s quality score in your adwords account is far-reaching and important. Google uses the quality score to help determine the minimum amount you must pay in order for your ad to be displayed as well as the position on the page that your ad will be displayed in. Those two factors are very important to every pay per click advertiser, and thus, understanding the many aspects of the quality score is required.
The quality score is Google’s attempt to keep advertisements tightly related to what their users/customers are looking for. The thinking goes that Google’s customers will enjoy their search experience more with the advertisements closely related to their interest area along with the search results. Although it may be difficult to implement a perfect computer-driven ranking system, this way of thinking seems correct.
Google has revealed the following pieces to its quality scoring system:
1. The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group. This factor results in the need to tightly and efficiently group your ads together, as throwing several hundred keywords into one ad group will often result in higher minimum click costs and lower ad positions.
2. How the keyword has performed historically on Google.com. This element enforces a long-term aspect to your advertising efforts. If you don’t take care to work on your ad copy for a given keyword consistently, you will very likely be looking at a higher price for your advertising well into the future. Users who have ads with a higher clickthrough rate(CTR) are rewarded, so writing relevant copy that attracts visitors is required.
3. Past performance of you whole adwords account. Not surprisingly, Google looks at your entire account’s history as a component of your quality scoring and bid pricing. Because of this, it highly recommended that you work to optimize and enhance your account’s campaigns in order to reap the benefits that can bring to your advertising expense.
4. How closely your landing page relates to your effort. When a potential customer clicks on one of your ads, it makes sense that the page they are sent to should closely relate to what they are searching for. This benefits everyone involved as the user can more quickly find what they want, Google looks good for helping them find it, and you are rewarded by having a much improved chance winning that customer’s business. This element of the quality score is more subjective, but makes sense from the big picture perspective. Google rewards your good service to their customers.
In the end, paying strict attention to, and optimizing for, Google’s quality score for each keyword in your account will result in lower minimum bids and higher ad positions. Both of these factors affect your return on investment for your advertising dollars and are therefore worth understanding intimately.
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