The Google Adwords Quality Score is a key element of the Adwords Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising platform. In this blog post I’ll help you to understand exactly what the Adwords Quality Score is and the benefits to your PPC campaign which you can receive from a high Quality Score.
The first question you may be asking is exactly what is the purpose of the Quality Score? One of Google’s main objectives is to provide its users with highly relevant search results to queries. The Adwords Quality Score is intended to ensure that only the most relevant Adwords ads are displayed to users.
Why Is The AdWords Quality Score So Important?
Improving your Adwords Quality Score can be highly frustrating and a time consuming process. Once you fully understand how Google calculates its Quality Score you’ll be able to improve it for all of your keywords which will in turn help you to reduce your average cost per click figure.
The Adwords Quality Score is calculated every time a search query is performed. As a general rule the higher the Quality Score the lower the bidding price for that particular keyword and the higher the position an ad is likely to appear. A keyword with a higher Quality Score can consistently achieve higher ad positions at a lower average cost than a keyword with a much lower Quality Score. A keyword with a lower Quality Score will likely achieve lower ad positions and actually cost the advertiser more in bidding costs.
So How Is The Adwords Score Calculated?
For first time users the Adwords Quality Score and how it is calculated can appear a little confusing at first. When a new PPC campaign is created a provisional Quality Score is calculated for each keyword within the campaign. This provisional Quality Score is based on how that particular keyword has performed for other advertisers and how relevant it is to your ads.
Ideally when creating a new PPC campaign you should divide your keywords into groups of around 10 or less. These keywords should be closely related so that an ad can be created which will be highly relevant. Each ad group should trigger at least one relevant ad that includes the most popular keyword within the ad group. This keyword should ideally be featured within the ad title and contained within the first line of ad text.
The landing page for your ads should also contain highly relevant keywords and be closely matched to your ads. It is likely this page will not be the homepage of your website. As your PPC campaign matures Google will fully evaluate the landing pages of your ads and the remainder of your website. As a result the remainder of your website should ideally follow the theme of the keywords contained within your PPC campaign.
In addition as more time passes, the Quality Score of individual keywords will evolve and change based on the performance of each one. As a general rule if an ad achieves a high Click Through Rate then it will likely cause your Quality Score to rise. In contrast a low Click Through Rate will likely cause your Quality Score to fall. Ideally you should aim for a Click Through Rate of 1% or higher for all keywords over a prolonged period of time.
Conclusion
The exact formula that Google follows to determine Quality Score is a closely guarded secret. However we do know what factors Google looks at when determining Quality Score. We also know the Adwords Quality Score is calculated slightly differently for both the Search Network and Content Network.
For the Search Network the main factors which influence the Adwords Quality Score are:
- The historical click through rate of keywords the ad it triggers
- The historical click through rate of your entire Adwords account
- The historical click through rate of your domain
- The quality of your landing page
- The relevance of keywords to ads within your adgroups
- The relevance of the keyword and matched ad to the original search query
For the Content Network the main factors which influence the Adwords Quality Score are:
- The ads past performance on the target and similar sites
- The relevance of your ads and keywords in the ad group to the target site
- The quality of your landing page
