What is Quality Score and why is it so important?

The primary key to delivering the best traffic to your website through Adwords is through achieving a high quality score for each of your keywords.  This is the first thing we look at to determine how efficiently an Adwords campaign is running and how many improvements can be made.  So let’s look at what Google’s definition of Quality score is:

“Quality Score is an estimate of how relevant your ads, keywords, and landing page are to a person seeing your ad. Having a high Quality Score means that our systems think your ad, keyword, and landing page are all relevant and useful to someone looking at your ad.”

So the Quality Score is therefore broken down into the three areas of Click Through Rate (showing a high relevancy to the users search), Ad Relevancy to the keywords you are targeting and the overall landing page experience for the user.

Now we understand what they are looking for we need to go back to the drawing board with your campaign and look at how it has been set up.

1.       Structure – the structure of your campaign will be the foundation for success.   The approach needs to be very granular to ensure that each adgroup is targeted to very few keywords.  This way we can ensure the relevancy required to generate the Quality Score.

2.       Ad Relevancy – Once you have created the structure correctly with many adgroups, each with their own small set of keywords, ads are created for them.  As the ads are only relevant to two or three keywords in that group, it is easy to ensure that keywords are contained in the ads and therefore naturally create relevancy.

3.       Ad Testing – When creating an ad, ensure your try two or three versions of that ad.  Small changes and techniques can give you a much better click through rate.

4.       Landing Pages Experience – The more flexibility you have in controlling your website the better. This will allow you to try different landing pages and see what converts.  If users stay on the page for longer, then this metric will be recorded by Google and help boost your Quality Score.  If you lack control then at least send them to the relevant page on your website and not just the home page!

5.       Management – Google will always take into account your historic performance so you need to ensure that poor performing ads are not dragging your over-all quality scores down in each of the ad groups.  Don’t be afraid to be ruthless and cut them out if they are under performing.

So putting all of this into practice will make a dramatic improvement on your Adwords campaign.   The graph below show a recent Adwords account we reworded following these basic principles and shows instant performance improvements.

We will look to explore each of these areas in more detail in our blog over the coming months and really get under the hood of the Adwords Juggernaut.