Friday, January 23, 2009

PPC Management - Adwords Quality Score

By Brian Basch

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.

The impact of a keyword's quality score in your adwords account is far-reaching and important. Google uses the quality score to help determine the minimum amount you must pay in order for your ad to be displayed as well as the position on the page that your ad will be displayed in. Those two factors are very important to every pay per click advertiser, and thus, understanding the many aspects of the quality score is required.

Google has implemented this scoring system in order to regulate the relevance of an ad to a user's search query. The idea is that searchers will be more satisfied if the advertisements they see along side their search results or page content relate closely to the topic they are interested in. This makes good sense, although it is not a perfect system, as any auto-compute ranking system is lacking "intuitive" understanding in great detail.

The published components of Google's quality score are the following:

1. Keyword relevance to the ad copy contained with its ad group. This aspect effectively forces advertisers to create closely controlled groups of keywords that are related to one another. Laziness to head this detail will only cause the minimum bids and ad positions to go in the wrong direction.

2. The historical performance of the keyword on Google.com. This factor means that if you don't have your act together today, you will likely end up paying a higher premium for your ads tomorrow and into the future. Google has decided to reward advertisers whose ads have a higher CTR(clickthrough rate), so attention-grabbing ad copy and relevancy is a must.

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. Your landing page's quality. Your visitor is sent to the destination page by Google, thereby becoming Google's customer, and Google wants to please their customers by ensuring that the page is related to what their user is looking for. This element is pretty subjective when compared to other quality score factors, however it is an important element of your quality score. Driving visitors to pages that are closely related to their search query will likely help them find what they are looking for quickly. As such, you get rewarded for giving Google's customers what they want.

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. - 16651

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