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.

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. Keyword relevance to the ad copy contained with its ad group. This aspect effectively forces advertisers to create closely controlled groups of keywords that are related to one another. Laziness to head this detail will only cause the minimum bids and ad positions to go in the wrong direction.

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.

When you get right down to it, learning about and optimizing for Google’s quality score system will only benefit your advertising efforts. Lower minimum bids and higher ad positions directly drive your return on investment higher, and are justifiably worth working towards.