Goole Adwords 101 – The Importance of Quality Score

The following is a guest post.

If you are new to the world of Pay-Per-Click advertising  and Google Adwords, a cursory glance over the Adwords interface will reveal a dizzying amount of information; the possible factors that may influence the performance of a given campaign stretch out into the distance like a river in a valley: budget, cost per click, location targeting, language targeting, ad scheduling, ad rotation, the content network, campaigns, ad groups, ads…the list in endless. The process of being a PPC specialist is to tweak all these factors optimise an account(s), and ultimately get the best ROI possible.

However, once you have been working on PPC for a while, you begin to realise that while there are many things on an Adwords account you can tweak and change, there is one metric that all PPC specialists look to influence, to produce the best returns: Quality Score.

Quality Score is a rating given to each keyword in an ad group for the relevance of that keyword to the users’ query. Quality score is always a score out of ten; anything below a five is considered poor by Google, and will penalised.

So what factors go into calculating the QS algorithm? Because relevance is the watchword for Quality Score, the main factor that goes into the QS algorithm is the Click Through Rate (CTR) of the keyword.  CTR is calculated by the following sum:  ad impressions/ad clicks x 100. So a keyword that  triggers an ad 100 times that is clicked on 10 times (in a given period) would get a CTR of 10%. A CTR that is above 2 or 3% is considered good, and is rewarded with an above average QS.

There are other factors that make up the QS algorithm, including: the relevance between your keyword and the query the searcher used; the relevance of your ad to the searcher’s query and the relevance of the keywords on your landing page to the searcher’s query.

Because of these factors, Google gives the following advice to Adwords practitioners who wish to raise the QS of their keywords:

“The best way to improve your keywords’ Quality Scores is by optimizing your account. This entails making sure that each of your ad groups contains descriptive ads all advertising the same product or service, and that each keyword in the ad group closely relates to the ads”

This is the best advice – always have tight (no more than 15-20 keywords) ad groups, closely themed around a topic, and have a close match up between the keyword, ad title and landing page. Do this, and you will not go far wrong!

So what are the benefits of the QS for the advertiser? Well, if the PPC advertiser plays by the rules, adheres to Google’s advice, and gets Quality Score’s of 8,9,10, then they will rewarded with lower CPC’s and higher ad rank for a cheaper cost.

What Google are trying to achieve with QS is to try to give the best possible experience to its users, meaning that Google’s ads in the SERPs are aimed to be the most relevant to what the user has searched. This means the searcher finds what he is looking for more quickly and easily. The result of this is of course that Google make more money.

So the QS system benefits everyone –users get a better experience (better, more relevant search results); advertisers get discounts in advertising fees, plus higher rankings for their ads, meaning more clicks and better ROI, and of course Google makes more money. So it’s a win-win-win situation where everyone benefits, making Google one of the biggest companies in the world and the world’s most popular search engine.

The post Goole Adwords 101 – The Importance of Quality Score appeared first on Google AdWords Management Software - WordWatch.