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.
Perhaps nothing affects your adwords account more than your quality score. This score influences your minimum bid amount and your ad position for each keyword in your account. Because ad position and pricing are so crucial to the success or failure of your efforts, comprehending Google’s quality score is a necessary evil.
In order to try to keep ads related closely to what the user is searching for, Google decided to introduce the quality score to adwords. Ideally, users will experience a better result if the advertisements displayed next to their queries are closely related to their area of interest. This is both logical and a bit idealistic: as any algorithm-driven ranking system is bound to have some problems with understanding every single keyword.
The published components of Google’s quality score are the following:
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. A keyword’s past performance on the Google.com website. Google wants to provide a benefit to continuously improving advertisers and this aspect encourages just that. If you are not making constant refinements to your copy for a given keyword, it will end up costing you in the form of a lower quality score and high bid prices. This makes having useful and creative ad copy a necessity.
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. How closely your landing page relates to your effort. When a potential customer clicks on one of your ads, it makes sense that the page they are sent to should closely relate to what they are searching for. This benefits everyone involved as the user can more quickly find what they want, Google looks good for helping them find it, and you are rewarded by having a much improved chance winning that customer’s business. This element of the quality score is more subjective, but makes sense from the big picture perspective. Google rewards your good service to their 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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