Nearly every user of Google Adwords is very aware of the quality scoring of keywords. In fact, every single keyword is assigned a quality score. As calculated, this score is meant to portray the relevancy of your advertisement and destination to your keyword.
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.
The quality score is Google’s attempt to keep advertisements tightly related to what their users/customers are looking for. The thinking goes that Google’s customers will enjoy their search experience more with the advertisements closely related to their interest area along with the search results. Although it may be difficult to implement a perfect computer-driven ranking system, this way of thinking seems correct.
The publicly-known elements of the quality score system are:
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. 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!
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