Quality Score is a metric tracked in Google AdWords that gives each keyword in your account a score out of 10. It is assigned to each keyword in your account and changes based on a variety of factors that change over time.
Your Quality score is calculated by Google every time a search is carried out in which your ad is triggered. However it can take time to achieve significant improvements in your score as reported in your account . The default keyword quality score when a new campaign is created is 7, and it is very likely however that this will change over time.
You take a look at Google’s overview of Quality Score here
What affects quality score and how it works?
The keyword quality score is affected by a number of factors:
- Click Through Rate (CTR) – The click through rate of your ad has a big impact on the keyword quality score. Google interpret the CTR of an ad to be a good indicator of how relevant and appropriate your ad is to meeting the requirements of the user. It is important to note that the click through rate expected by Google varies based on the position of your ad as position 1 will be expected to receive a higher click through rate than an ad in position 5. The challenge of improving your click through rate lies mainly in the difficulty of competing for a limited number of clicks. This is in essence the idea that for your click through rate to increase your competitors’ ads must decrease.
- Ad Copy – Your ad copy plays a role in your keyword quality score as Google regard ad relevance to be important to providing good search results to users. As such it is very important when writing ad copy that you include the keyword that you are targeting in the ad copy both in the title and the ad itself where possible. This can be a challenge as you want to write ads that both appeal to customers and attract visitors whilst using the search term in the ad. Conveniently Google will let you know when it does not think that you are is as relevant as I could be so you can change it accordingly.
- Landing Page – Your PPC landing page is another key factor in determining your keyword quality score. Google determines the quality of the experience of your landing page based on a number of factors such as the relevance of your content on the page and the load time of the page. By sending traffic to a relevant landing page you will start to see your quality score increase.
Conveniently Google provides information about your Quality Score in your account so that you can identify issues that need fixing:
By using this tool you should be able to outline the issue with your keyword and start to improve your rankings.
How you can use the quality score to your advantage?
Improving your quality score should not be the objective of a change it should however be the result of changes that are carried out.
What I mean by this is that you shouldn’t set out to make changes just to improve your quality score. You should make changes to your campaigns to improve the campaign performance and if done correctly this will naturally increase your quality score.
The big advantage to increasing your keyword quality score is that you pay less per click. When determining how much you pay per click Google uses an algorithm to determine how much you pay per click based on a number of factors including maximum cost per click and the keyword quality score. Having a high quality score across your account also demonstrates that you have well run, well optimised account.
The main thing to remember when it comes to quality score is that it should be achieved through the changes carried out on the account to increase performance rather than making changes to directly change the quality score.
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