Let’s go back in time and remember the days when pay per click marketing was as simple as highest bid and best click through rate won the battle of the position. If you wanted to rank higher, you just paid more or you improved your ads so that they got more clicks. The PPC formula looked something like this:
Position=Max Cost Per Click x Click Through Rate.
So in late 2005 Google turned the PPC world on its head and introduced Quality Score. They did this because:
Landing pages containing almost nothing but ads
- Landing Pages with little or no original content
- Landing Pages designed solely to collect email addresses
Google began to get a bit nervous, realizing that if users were served too many poor quality pages they might stop clicking on the ads and dry up Google’s primary revenue stream.
To keep people clicking on those ads, Google rolled out the Quality Score and shortly thereafter made landing page quality an integral part of calculating that score.
Before long, Quality Score took over as one of the primary components determining the success of your AdWords campaign.
What’s a Quality Score?
Your Quality Score is a major factor in determining how high your ads rank and how much you pay for each click. A big part of Quality Score depends on how relevant your ad groups, ad text and landing pages are to the keywords you’re bidding on.
So if we take a look now at the PPC formula:
Position =Max Cost Per Click x Quality Score
This means that the higher your Quality Score, the less you need to pay for each click and the higher your ads will rank.
I know what you are going to ask. It is the $64,000 dollar question. How can I determine my Keywords Quality Score?
Assuming you have an AdWords account you can find your keywords’ Quality Scores by:
- Signing into your AdWords account.
- Select the appropriate campaign and ad group.
- Click the Keywords tab.
- Click Customize columns at the top of the ad group table.
- Select Show Quality Score from the drop-down menu.
- Click Done when you’re finished.
On Google’s Quality Score rating scale, 1 is the lowest rating while 10 is the highest. 1-4 corresponds with Poor, 5-7 with OK, and 8-10 with a Great Quality Score.
Your First Page Bid Estimate (the minimum bid Google charges to show your ad on the first page of search results) is also a strong indicator of Quality Score. If it’s low, then you’ve likely got a good Quality Score. If it’s high, then your Quality Score is probably poor and you could be paying a lot less if you followed the guidelines in this report.
The 8 Key Factors Impacting Quality Score
Quality Score is calculated differently for keywords running on Google’s regular search results pages vs. Google’s Content Network (sites showing AdSense ads). Let’s discuss the eight factors affecting Quality Score on Google’s search results pages first.
- Your keyword’s and matching ad’s click through rate (CTR) on Google’s search results pages. Just like in the old days, CTR still plays an extremely important role in reducing click costs and increasing ad position. That means writing ads people want to click on is still essential. Google keeps a historical record of this click-through rate, so your past clicks play a role too. Think of it from Google’s shoes. If visitors don’t click, Google cannot charge the advertiser and if they cannot charge the advertiser then why should they rank the advertisers ads in high positions?
Please note that your CTR on Google’s Content Network , (when your ads are displayed on other websites) does not effect Quality Score for your keywords showing in Google’s search results pages. Google also runs a Search Network, made up of Google Maps, Google Product Search, Google Groups, Amazon.com and others which also has its own separate Quality Score calculations.
- Your overall account history. The CTR of your entire account for as long as you’ve been running it also impacts your Quality Score. This means that if you have a lot of keywords with low Quality Scores and those keywords aren’t doing well for you, I would highly suggest you killed them out of your account because they will negatively impacting the Quality Scores of your other keywords. Many marketers like to dump huge numbers of keywords into their accounts (the long tail approach), even though most of those keywords get almost no searches. What they don’t realize is that this approach will drag down the keywords that do get traffic.
- The historical CTR of the display URL in the ad group. The display URL is the URL that shows up at the bottom of your ad, telling the user what domain they’ll go to if they click. All the past clicks to that domain name get factored into your Quality Score, a fact that can be a bit tough for those marketers who may have run a lot of low CTR campaigns to their site when they were just starting out. If you’re new to AdWords, practice on a test domain first, and save your main domain for after you’ve learned to write ads that get clicks. You do not want to give your domain a black eye so to speak.
- The relevance of your keyword to the ad group it’s placed in. This means that each ad group should tightly focus on a small group of related keywords, and those keywords should all be tightly focused around the ads in that ad group. Often, this means no more than 10-20 keywords (at most) oriented around a single product or service per ad group.
Going larger than 20 keywords makes it very hard to keep the keywords relevant to each other and to the displayed ad, and mixing lots of loosely-related keywords into a single ad group is a sure way to lower your Quality Score and force yourself to pay more per click. Some marketers go as far as using a single keyword per ad group. While that works too, I feel it’s not necessary and makes campaigns harder to manage.
- The relevance of your keyword and ad to the search query. No surprise there, of course. Google calculates Quality Score on the fly and gives preference to those ads and keywords that most closely match what the searcher typed. So the Quality Score you see in your AdWords account doesn’t really give you the whole story, since many aspects of Quality Score are calculated in real time. However, keyword relevance only affects ad ranking, and doesn’t impact how much you pay.
- Geo-locational performance. Again, Google factors in where the searcher is located and calculates Quality Score on the fly. If your account has traditionally received good CTRs from users in that region, then you’re going to get a Quality Score boost.
- Your landing page’s quality and relevance to your ads and keywords. We’ll discuss this in more detail later. However, note that landing page quality only impacts how much you pay, and does not determine where your ad ranks.
- Other ranking factors. Basically, this could mean anything. This is the Quality Score “secret sauce” that Google doesn’t tell anyone about. It also means that Google can arbitrarily set a First Page Bid floor for some keywords. You may have seen cases where you’re the only advertiser bidding on a keyword, but Google still wants $1.50 per click to show up on the first page. They can lower your Quality Score to the point where you’re forced to pay that much even when no one else is competing for that keyword.
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