PPC Management - Adwords Quality Score

PPC Management - Adwords Quality Score

by Brian Basch

Practically everyone who is a normal user of Google Adwords is aware of their quality score and its importance to your account. Google calculates and assigns a score to each keyword within your account in order to determine its relation to displayed ads and destination pages.

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.

Google has implemented this scoring system in order to regulate the relevance of an ad to a user's search query. The idea is that searchers will be more satisfied if the advertisements they see along side their search results or page content relate closely to the topic they are interested in. This makes good sense, although it is not a perfect system, as any auto-compute ranking system is lacking "intuitive" understanding in great detail.

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. The historical performance of the keyword on Google.com. This factor means that if you don't have your act together today, you will likely end up paying a higher premium for your ads tomorrow and into the future. Google has decided to reward advertisers whose ads have a higher CTR(clickthrough rate), so attention-grabbing ad copy and relevancy is a must.

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. Your landing page's quality. Your visitor is sent to the destination page by Google, thereby becoming Google's customer, and Google wants to please their customers by ensuring that the page is related to what their user is looking for. This element is pretty subjective when compared to other quality score factors, however it is an important element of your quality score. Driving visitors to pages that are closely related to their search query will likely help them find what they are looking for quickly. As such, you get rewarded for giving Google's customers what they want.

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.