Adwords Quality Score

August 21st, 2006 Jackie

Last August, Google implemented a Quality Score review to Adwords in an attempt to motivate advertisers to make their ads more relevant to the landing ages where the ad was pointed.

Per Google, the Quality Score “aims to improve users’ experience so that these users (your potential customers) will continue to trust and value AdWords ads.“ The Quality Score was Google’s response to the many low-quality affiliate ads that brought visitors to crappy web pages with lists of products and little else. The penalty for continuing to promote these types of landing pages for advertisers is not the removal of the ad in question, but an increased CPC for ads with a low Quality Score.

While it’s not a bad thing to raise the bar for paid search landing pages, it is not always clear to advertiser’s what they can do to reduce their Quality Score, particularly since there’s no way to determine the Qualty Score on a given ad (as far as I’ve seen, although I have sent Google an e-mail about this).

It’s one thing to scratch your head with organic search engine optimization, and tweak your web site based on Google’s proprietary ranking algorithm. It’s quite another to be charged more money for an ad based on a Quality Score that contains mysterious ranking criteria outside of your control. I mean, Google, please, throw us a bone here!

Google states it looks at the following variables when determining an ad’s quality:

- Previous CTR

- Relevance of your ad text (I’m guessing that this is relevance to the keyword you’re bidding on and your landing page)

- Historical keyword performance (how this is different from CTR is beyond me)

- Landing page quality (as defined by Google’s Web site guidelines)

- And (I kid you not) “other” relevancy factors

Some of the things I’m not clear on are 1) how do content-targeted ads effect the quality score? (these ads tend to have much lower CTRs than keyword-targeted ads) , 2) how often are campaigns reviewed for quality? (this is important because once I make a change to a campaign, I’d like to know when the campaign will be reviewed.), 3) beyond the max. bid imposed upon my keyword, is there a way to determine the Quality Score for a given ad? Ah questions, questions, questions. 

Until I get more info from Google (which I will happily post), here are a few recommendations for dealing with the Quality Score within your own campaigns:

• Blitz your campaign for about a month (run it at the highest budget and position you can afford for your most desired/lucrative keywords). This should give your keywords positive historical clickthrough performance, which in turn will helps improve your Quality Score.
• Do not link to your home page unless it is relevant to your ad and the keyword you’re bidding on - link internally. If an internal page of significant relevance does not exist, then create one.
• Customize ads to match the keywords you’re bidding on - this is to address the “relevance of your ad text” quality indicator - plus it’s just a good SEM rule of thumb.
• Remove poorly performing ads from your campaign quickly. Again, the higher CTR should help reduce your CPC and increase the quality of your ad.

Entry Filed under: E-Marketing Advice