Google Quality Score

Google Adwords is a great advertising platform. However, managing your adwords account is often complex and time consuming and very expensive if you get it wrong. One thing which can make or break an adwords campaign is quality score.

Quality score is Googles way of making sure that adverts which appear on search results are meaningful and relevant to the end user, the searcher.

It is important to bear in mind that your ad rank (your position on the Google search results page) is determined from a very basic calculation:

Ad Rank = (Max Bid) x (Quality Score)

Max bid can be different to actual cost per click. Google operates a discount ad system, so you are only everpaying $0.01 more than is required for your ad to show just above your competitors.

The three main features which determine quality score:

1. CTR - Click through rate. Google will look at may things to determine your quality score, but the main one is your CTR. Google thinks that if lots of people are searching and your advert is appearing many times, yet not many people are clicking on your advert, it assumes it is not relevant, so your quality score drops! A low CTR = Low quality score. A good way to increase your CTR is to add negative keywords to avoid your advert showing on irrelevant searches.

2. Landing Pages - There is a school of thought which suggests you can keep altering the landing pages to improve your quality score. However, this is not the case. A landing page will either be relevant or not. If it is that is it, you need not spend any time altering it. However, if it is irrelevant which would be indicated on your status at keyword level, you need to look at ways to improve the landing page. Suggestions could involve making sure what you are writing about is relevant to the keyword. Read over the text and ask yourself, is it relevant to the keywords I am bidding on?

3. Landing Page Speed - This can impact on your quality score. A slow loading page will be seen to impact on user experience and so Google will drop your quality score if this is the case!

There are other factors which Google use to determine quality score. However, these are very hard to optimise and often have very little impact on altering quality score. Due to this fact these factors are not published by Google.

The Robots!

Google uses two robots to spider your site...Once is Googlebot and the other is Adsbot-Google. The Adsbot is different to Googlebot, as it ignores instructions in the robots.txt file and crawls all pages. It does this so it can see pages not covered by Googlebot. It does this so it can determine landing page quality.

A great way to see how relevant your site is, can be to use Google keyword tool...you can add your URL and it lists the most relevant, close related keywords to your webpage. This can be a great way to see other keywords you may wish to use in your adwords account, and to also find out if Google sees your landing page as close relevancy to your selected keywords.

Privacy Policy - Did you realise having a privacy policy on a landing page can be an excellent way of increasing your quality score? If you’re a business which stores address and personal details, then having a privacy policy can help...a hyperlink to the actual page on the landing page is fine (anchor tagged "privacy policy"). Google likes transparency and so by demonstrating that you are also transparent by having a privacy policy can help you.

Navigation - Having the option for users to navigate around your website from your landing page is a great way to boost your quality score. But to be honest this should always be the case. You would not let a customer on your site if they can’t navigate around...would you?

Probably by now you are realising all the information provided in this article about increasing quality score is not hard, nor is it difficult. It is all based on providing an excellent user experience. You provide an excellent user experience your quality score should be excellent!

There are a few more things you should consider...For example getting more information on your subject you can add a "~" at the start of your search. For example if you wanted to research information on boxing gloves simply add in ~boxing gloves....Notice how Wikipedia often makes an appearance. This can be a great way of getting relevant and meaningful keyword ideas to add to your campaign which would have a higher chance of getting a good quality score.  If you needed to get information on a related subject linked to boxing gloves but not boxing gloves themselves, you would type in ~boxing gloves -boxing gloves.....

More information on Google quality scores can be found at:

http://zinceconsulting.com/i-need-ppc/google-quality-score