For many Google AdWords Campaign Managers, Quality Score often becomes an afterthought when campaigns aren’t performing, because let’s face it, our first reaction is more often than not to throw more money at the problem rather than pay much attention to the diagnostics.
When your bidding strategy is not getting you the Google Ad Positions that you are looking for, chances are that you’ve probably not paid much attention to your Quality Scores and now you’re paying penance with your Average Cost per Clicks (CPC) rising.
What is a Quality Score?
Get your Quality Score right and you’re on the path to saving yourself some unnecessary costs on your PPC (Pay-per-click) Budgets. Quality Score is Google’s way of ensuring that it offers searchers quality, meaningful and relevant ads. Quality Score is – in its simplest sense – a Keyword quality metric that measures the relationship between your keywords, your ad copy, your landing pages and your historical click through rate (CTR).
To calculate who gets ranked where, Google AdWords focuses on both your Quality Score and your Keyword Bids. To calculate your Ad Rank Google multiplies your Max Bid with your Quality Score. So if there were a Golden rule for AdWords Campaign Management, it would be to fix your Quality Scores before you touch your keyword bids. It’s a relatively inexpensive way to save yourself from inflated Cost per Clicks.
How to see your Quality Score
To see a keyword’s Quality Score you need to have the Quality Score column activated in your keywords tab.
When logged into your Google AdWords Account, navigated to the keywords tab, select the columns box at the top, select ‘Attributes’ and then add the ‘Quality Score’ attribute to your columns. We recommend you drag it to the top of the list as this is one of the most important metrics you will be measuring when doing your campaign management).
How to interpret your Quality Score
You will see that a Quality Score out of 10 gets assigned to each keyword. 0 out of 10 means that your Quality Score is very low and your ads are unlikely to be eligible to appear. 10 out of 10 means that your keywords, ad copy and landing page are all highly relevant and your ads will be not only be eligible to appear, but they are likely to appear higher up on the page (provided your bid price is right – however changes are that Google will reward you and will discount your maximum cost-per-click based on your keyword relevance). Keywords with Quality Scores lower than6/10 should be diagnosed and problems rectified before throwing more money at the problem.
If your Quality Scores are weak and you see that you’re constantly getting weaker Ad Positions, avoid the temptation of adjusting your bids. Making campaign changes that push up your Quality Scores will have much bigger benefits that trying to constantly out-bid everybody.
How to use Quality Score to get more bang for your buck
In order to get maximum return on your AdWords investment, you need to ensure that you consistently keep Cost per Clicks as low as possible, while ensuring that you maintain optimum ad rank in order to get the most relevant clicks.
Fortunately for you, Google have championed the concept of advertising quality by rewarding advertisers that stick to the philosophy of “Do right by your audiences.” By adopting this attitude as an advertiser, you will see noticeable improvements in your ROI. Google rewards advertisers with good Quality Scores by charging them less Cost-per-Click.
To benefit from these rewards, make sure that you follow these four essential tips to increase your keyword’s Quality Scores:
Ad Copy Relevance: Make sure that the keywords you are bidding on are used in your Google AdWords Ads. Users who search for your target keywords will find more value in your ads since they can see the relevance and will be more likely to click on the ad.
Landing Page Relevance: After searchers click on your ads they get taken to landing pages with your products or services. By ensuring that the keyword they searched for is on your landing page it greatly increases the relevance of your ads.
Click Thru Rates (CTR): This metric is useful for Google because it signals how many people engage with your ad based on the value that it potentially provides them.Ensure that your ad offers the most unique proposition to the user, by showing value and applying clear call-to-actions in your copy.
Keyword Matching: By applying the most appropriate keyword matching options (such as Broad, Phrase or Exact Match) you can deliver more targeted advertisements to your audience. This also makes it easier for you to create ads with copy that is highly relevant to the matching type. An Ad Group with fewer more targeted keywords will yield much higher results as the ad copy is more likely to be relevant to what the user was searching for. Exact or Phrase match keywords have been known to deliver better Quality Scores than Broad matches.
Good Campaign Performance means Maximum AdWords ROI
The fantastic thing about Google AdWords Performance is that it rewards you for performing well and penalises you for not. The more relevant you are, the better your chances of running a successful AdWords campaign. By monitoring and diagnosing your Quality Scores you will – without a doubt – see maximum return on your investment.
Good AdWords Campaign performance means that you get the traffic that you expect to get. Being able to manage how and where your ads display means you can benefit from cutting out unwanted clicks. Good Quality Scores mean cheaper clicks and increased conversions.
