If you are on a paid search network you better know what a quality score is and how to improve it. If you don’t, keep reading! Google AdWords calculates a Quality Score for each keywords you are bidding on in your account, and this score determines how often you show, how much you pay per click and your position in the rankings of other ads. It is one of the most important items to review and optimize for in your whole paid search campaign.
So what is it and how do I fix it? Google looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keywords are to your ad text and to a user’s search query. A keyword’s Quality Score is closely related to its performance. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).
The core components are:
- The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on Google. If you aren’t getting clicks on your ad when it shows, you have a lower CTR and your score drops. This means your keyword and ad really need to speak to each other and offer EXACTLY what the user is looking to find.
- Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account. If you had a bad few months, let things run wild without optimization, your scores can drop quickly. This will take much more time to fix than it did to lower your score.
- The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group. One good add with great CTR and one bad add with terrible CTR will cancel each other out. To increase those scores, make sure all of your ads have high CTR.
- The quality of your landing page bad content or irrelevant content = low quality scores. Make sure your pages are easy to read, speak exactly to the search term and create action!
- The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group make sure each ad group only has one target or topic separate each into its own ad group and optimize the ad accordingly.
- The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query. If you are bidding on a keyword, make sure that keyword is in the title of the ad, and potentially in one of the description lines too.
Summary A high quality score = better performance and less expensive clicks with higher conversions. Take the time and do it it is worth it!
