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.
Perhaps nothing affects your adwords account more than your quality score. This score influences your minimum bid amount and your ad position for each keyword in your account. Because ad position and pricing are so crucial to the success or failure of your efforts, comprehending Google’s quality score is a necessary evil.
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 published components of Google’s quality score are the following:
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. The historical performance of your entire adwords account. Yes, you read that correctly. Google factors in the CTR from your entire account history when determining your minimum bids and ad positions. This, more than any other factor, dictates that you pay special attention to your account’s quality. Get good or pay more, it’s pretty simple.
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.
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.
