PPC Management - Adwords Quality Score


    Nearly every user of Google Adwords is very aware of the quality scoring of keywords. In fact, every single keyword is assigned a quality score. As calculated, this score is meant to portray the relevancy of your advertisement and destination to your keyword.

    Quality score influences a number of very important factors within your adwords account. It affects your ad's display position on the Google network and determines your minimum required bid in order for your pay per click ad to run. There are no factors more important to the pay per click advertiser than ad position and ad pricing, so understanding Google's quality score is a worthwhile effort.

    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.

    The publicly-known elements of the quality score system are:

    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. A keyword's past performance on the Google.com website. Google wants to provide a benefit to continuously improving advertisers and this aspect encourages just that. If you are not making constant refinements to your copy for a given keyword, it will end up costing you in the form of a lower quality score and high bid prices. This makes having useful and creative ad copy a necessity.

    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. The quality of your landing page. The destination URL that a visitor is sent to after clicking on your ad should display a page that is closely related, in Google's eyes, to the ad's topic. Landing page relevancy is a bit more abstract than the other factors, but it can weigh heaviliy on your overall pay per click performance. Sending users to relevant pages on your website will only help them find what they are looking more efficiently. Hence, Google rewards you for helping their search customers.

    The bottom line is that growing your knowledge and understanding of Google's quality score measure will act to directly improve your advertising return on investment. By lowering your minimum bid prices and raising your ad positions, quality score improvements are your very close friend, treat them like it!