What Is Google’s Quality Score and How Do You Improve It?

by DigiMarketing on July 19, 2010

Pay per click (PPC) Advertising Tips for Online Advertising Campaigns

A ranking developed by Google, Quality Score is an algorithm that calculates how relevant your paid keywords are to the end-user you’re targeting.  Because of this, your Quality Score is just as important as your bid when it comes to where your ad will be positioned.

How does this really impact you? If two competitors have similar or equal bids, the higher Quality Score will earn a higher position.

Pretty important to understand right?

Here’s a few ways to analyze the data and create a plan to increase your Quality Score:

#1-Prioritize & Optimize

Review all of your current campaigns and sort based by:

- spend

- then > ad groups by spend

 -then > keywords by Quality Score.

In those top spending campaigns and ad groups, any keyword with a Quality Score below 7 should be the priority for Quality Score improvement.

#2-Coordinate Search Queries and Text Ads 

Since your Quality Score also factors in click-through-rates, the more you can refine your ad groups so that the keywords are highly relevant to the text ad copy, the better results you’ll see.

Make sure you have different ad groups set up based on how a user may search for your product.  If you’re selling beauty products, you wouldn’t want to have the keywords “anti-aging” and “mineral makeup” in one ad group.  You will want two separate ads to break out these products and target the ads specifically for people searching for these specific products. Hence, your ad copy and your ad groups should be aligned based on this type of user-search structure.

#3-Revise and Test Ad Creative

Now that your ad groups are aligned and organized, you need to make sure your copy is proving to be compelling and effective.  Persuasive and targeted copy is the most optimal way to get good click-through rates.

Take a look at all of your text ads now and analyze the current data.  Find your lowest performers by click-through-rate in your top Ad Groups (by spend).  Delete any non or poor performers and start to integrate and test copy that is stronger and even more persuasive.  Continue this exercise to weed out the under performers and gain higher Quality Scores.

#4-Eliminate Bad Keywords

Get rid of low performers. 

Take a look at the overall distribution of your Quality Score in your account.  If you see overall good performance, you don’t need a major overhaul.  However, this is all part of the vigilance needed in maintaining or increasing our Quality Score. 

Since your Quality Score also looks at historical click thru rate (CTR) on your keywords, you do need to review and  eliminate keywords and text ads that you see with historical low CTRs. These non-performers pull down your overall average and historical rates, which will impact your QS negatively.

Maintain and eliminate as necessary.

#5-Have an Effective and Relevant Landing Page

Your Landing Page can have a huge negative impact on your Quality Score if it’s not functioning, has irrelevant copy, broken links, etc.  If your Quality Score has been driven down, make sure to watch for the issues below and fix asap.  Because Google doesn’t look at landing pages as frequently, be patient, your improvements to your landing page will be soon be realized in a higher Quality Score.

-Pop-ups

-Landing pages that are “bait and switch” offers or that have very little to do with the ad or search query

-Very slow loading pages

Below are the factors you should have on your landing page to ensure a high Quality Score.

- Set up landing pages in Silo Structure

- Content MUST be relevant

- Have at least 5 pages of content

- Have a sitemap on your page: www.xml-sitemaps.com

And finally, include your business pages: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy,  Contact Us,  About Us

Digispace Solutions, is an online performance-based advertising and technology company focused on providing proprietary web technologies to power online advertising strategies and solutions.

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