Many of you are probably well versed in quality score, but I’ve had several questions lately about QS basics so I thought it may be helpful to provide a refresher.
Google’s Adwords Quality Score is an automated measurement of how relevant your keywords are to a user’s search query and to your ad copy. Google’s goal is to provide the most relevant search results so their Quality Score system aims to help with this effort and reward advertisers who have tightly organized and relevant accounts.
Two Reasons to Care About Quality Score
1. Higher Ranking for Lower Cost: Ad Rank takes both your Max CPC and quality score into consideration. The basic formula is: Rank = Max CPC X Quality Score. With this, a higher quality score can off-set a lower max CPC — so your ad can show in higher positions with a lower actual cost per click. This is of course good news and an important reason to care about quality score.
2. A Poor Quality Score Can Hurt You – Big Time: On the opposite end, a poor quality score can mean you have to pay much higher than your competitor for the same ranking. This is bad news. Even worse, if you have some really bad things going on in your accounts (especially if you get off to a bad start with a new account) a poor quality score can make it difficult to redeem yourself when you start implementing better practices after-the-fact.
This post is on the very basics of Adwords Quality Score. I plan to write some posts down the road that dig into the nitty-gritty and cover some more advanced Quality Score concepts.
Fundamental Items to Keep in Mind
- One of the biggest factors in Quality Score is your CTR (click through rate). Consequently this is also quite good for Google.
- Matching adds and keywords improves quality score. For the keyword “Red Jumpsuit” you would not want an ad talking generally about Work Clothes. Instead, you would want to focus it on, well, Red Jumpsuits.
- Having keywords in each ad group that are closely related to each other is good.
- Your landing page for a particular keyword should be relevant and related to that keyword (and the keywords in that adgroup) as well as the ad copy
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Questions or thoughts? Feel free to leave a comment below or shoot me an email.
Cheers,
Forest
