PPC Management and Quality Score Details
Posted on: September 12, 2008
Posted in: Search Engine Marketing
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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.
The impact of a keyword’s quality score in your adwords account is far-reaching and important. Google uses the quality score to help determine the minimum amount you must pay in order for your ad to be displayed as well as the position on the page that your ad will be displayed in. Those two factors are very important to every pay per click advertiser, and thus, understanding the many aspects of the quality score is required.
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. 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. 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.
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!