PPC Management - Adwords Quality Score
Nearly every user of Google Adwords is very aware of the quality scoring of keywords. In fact, every single keyword is assigned a quality score. As calculated, this score is meant to portray the relevancy of your advertisement and destination to your keyword.
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.
The quality score is Google’s attempt to keep advertisements tightly related to what their users/customers are looking for. The thinking goes that Google’s customers will enjoy their search experience more with the advertisements closely related to their interest area along with the search results. Although it may be difficult to implement a perfect computer-driven ranking system, this way of thinking seems correct.
The publicly-known elements of the quality score system are:
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. 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. 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.
When you get right down to it, learning about and optimizing for Google’s quality score system will only benefit your advertising efforts. Lower minimum bids and higher ad positions directly drive your return on investment higher, and are justifiably worth working towards.
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