What is Quality Score?

Quality Score is a variable used by Google, Yahoo and MSN that can influence both the rank and cost per click (CPC) of advertisements. In late 2008, Google revealed that Quality Score was used to determine which ad would show above organic results and that a higher quality score could actually cause ads to jump over ads with lower scores.

The primary reason for giving a Quality Score is to improve and maintain user experience for website visitors and those who click on sponsored advertisements resulting in more frequent clicks on ads and increased advertising revenues for the search engines.

Landing Page Experience

We can’t talk about Quality Score and not touch on user experience as well, because they do directly relate to one another.Your overall landing page experience refers to how good Google may think someone’s experience is going to be when they visit your landing page, directly related to clicking on your link or advertisement.

Things to Improve

  • Provide relevant, useful and original content
  • Foster trustworthiness and promote transparency on your site
  • Make your site easy to navigate through, including mobile sites.

User experience does in fact matter. The more comfortable your users feel with your advertisements and landing page, the more they will trust you.

This will keep them coming back to your site over and over again. So look at your landing page and see how easy it is to make a purchase, sign up for you newsletter or go through the necessary steps to convert for your particular product or service.

You can even track and view your landing page experience rating by going into your Keywords tab and placing your cursor over the speech bubble next to the status of any keyword.

The rankings are above average, average and below average. If you are in either average or above average, you are doing well and your Quality Score won’t be negatively affected by your landing page experience.

Warning!!

If you are at a below average ranking, your score may be lowered.

Factors that Determine Quality Score

  • Landing Page Quality: Simply put this means how relevant, transparent and easy it is for users to navigate your site.
  • Landing Page Load Time: It is important for your website(s) and landing pages to load quickly. This does two things, makes your user experience more positive and allows visitors to get to the information they are searching for more quickly.
  • Ad Copy/Keyword Relevance: Your keywords need to be relevant to your overall site and advertisements and vice versa.
  • Click-Through Rate: Your click through rate (CTR) is the measurement of how often that a particular keyword let to clicks on your advertisement.
  • Account history: Your account keeps a log or history of movement on your site. It measures the overall CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account.
  • Geographic Performance: Measures how well your account is doing in your targeted regions.
  • Targeted Devices: Because of how fast technology has come in the past few years there are now more possible devices than ever.
    You get a performance score based on how well your ads perform on each of those devices such as desktops/laptops, mobile devices and tablets.
    Each device gives you a different Quality Score.
  • Your Ads Performance: How well or how successful your ad does in general and on similar sites if you are targeting other areas.
  • Your Display URL’s Past CTR: The frequency you receive clicks with your display URL.

Well Done!!

Following these tips is a great start to a successful PPC campaign, but make sure to read the rest of our tips.

Why Quality Score Is Important

Keeping an average or above average Quality Score is important and useful to you in many different ways. For starters, if you are at the average or above average range, you are not penalized in any way. In addition, you also can take advantage of the below benefits:

  • Higher Quality Scores make it easier and cheaper for a keyword to enter the ad auction; therefore you will have increased eligibility.
  • Your overall cost-per-click (CPC) is lower when you average a higher Quality Score.
  • You may also begin to show up higher in ad positions with a Higher Quality Score. This means your ad will show up first or higher than others when your keyword is searched.
  • It will also be easier for your ad to show up on the first page of the search results when your keyword is higher because your higher Quality Score gives you lower first page bid estimates.

To sum up why your Quality Score is important I will simply leave it at this: good Quality Scores lead to lower costs and better ad positions. This AdWords concept works best for everyone including; advertisers, customers, publishers and Google. The more relevant ads are and closely match what people are searching for, the better experience it is for everyone.

Improve Your Quality Score

Typically, the best performing ads are the ones that people find most useful and relevant.

Think about your own search habits: You probably ignore those items that pop up that aren’t interesting to you or those items you weren’t searching for at all. If you are looking for blue paint, you’re probably going to ignore the ad for the sale on hot pink paint.

If you can narrow down what exactly your customers are looking for, you can focus on also customizing your ads, campaigns, keywords and landing page to be more relevant to them and their needs.

This will result in more clicks on your particular ad. In addition to creating very specific ad groups, you can additionally try the below tips to improve your ad score.

  • Include Keywords In Your Ad Text and Landing Pages
  • Simplify Your Ads
  • Select Your Keywords Carefully: Do Your Research
  • Test Your Ads and Landing Pages

Final Thoughts

Even though you are given a score based on your content, keywords, advertisements and landing pages, you should want to produce each of these items with the upmost quality anyway.Properly setup the framework of your business online and think about all that I have laid out for you here.

Take pride in your company and do it right from the beginning and you won’t have to worry about what the search engines say.

“Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.” – Henry Ford