Wednesday, February 25, 2009

PPC Management - Adwords Quality Score

By Brian Basch

If you are a regular advertiser who uses Google Adwords, you probably already are familiar with Google's Quality Score. Each and every keyword within your adwords account is assigned a quality score by Google. This score is calculated by Google to represent how relevant your keyword is to your advertisement and destination.

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.

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.

Google has revealed the following pieces to its quality scoring system:

1. How closely a keyword is related to the ads in its ad group. This element should cause advertisers to implement their ads and keywords in closely related units, rather than tossing all keywords together in one group. Doing the later will likely lead to high minimum click prices and lower ad spots.

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. How your entire adwords account has performed historically. Indeed, Google takes this into consideration when assigning your ad positions and minimum bids. There is no better time than the present to work on improving your account's status in the eyes of Google: improve your performance, or pay higher advertising costs.

4. Your landing page's quality. Your visitor is sent to the destination page by Google, thereby becoming Google's customer, and Google wants to please their customers by ensuring that the page is related to what their user is looking for. This element is pretty subjective when compared to other quality score factors, however it is an important element of your quality score. Driving visitors to pages that are closely related to their search query will likely help them find what they are looking for quickly. As such, you get rewarded for giving Google's customers what they want.

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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