Importance of AdWords Quality Score

The majority of Australian businesses incorrectly assume the advertiser who bids the highest amount per click will be the highest listed website in the sponsored links of Google. This is incorrect. Our experience indicates there is huge scope for Australian businesses to significantly reduce their Adwords expenditure through improved campaign set up and boosting the quality score of your campaigns.

Google uses quality score as the basis for measuring the relevance of PPC ads and determining their minimum Cost Per Click (CPC) bid for its search network. This score is calculated using your keyword’s click through rate (CTR) on search result pages, and the relevance of your ad text, keyword, and landing page content to the search keywords/phrases.

Your Adwords quality score impact the position of your ads in the search results and also determines whether the ad will show or not! This is fundamentally the same for the other top Pay Per Click networks e.g. Yahoo Search Marketing. For greater transparency Google now shows keyword quality details at the keyword level in individual Adwords accounts. Google classifies your score into such categories as Great, OK or Poor and this is a great help when trying to diagnose why your PPC bid is so high.

Simple steps to boost AdWord Quality Score

To increase your quality score and returns on PPC spends here are a few simple steps:

1. Always begin/continue ad text testing even if you feel you have an ad that is a clear winner. There are always ways to enhance the ad message and speak more convincingly to your target audiences.
2. Use the dynamic keyword insertion technique to increase keyword relevancy to users, and in turn, increase click-through rates.
3. Adjust keyword bids to increase the ad placement (i.e. higher ranking) for better CTR.
4. Improve ad text/keyword relevance within the ad body copy as it enables the ad to ‘connect’ better with a user’s search term.
5. Use dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) tools to use DKI even in the headline to catch users attention more quickly/effectively.
6. Search for more ways to make your ad content (including headline) more customer focused based on ongoing consumer behaviour and competition research and using these insights to develop tight (relevant) keyword clusters.
7. Consistently measure your quality score and strive to improve it over time (even if it’s a slow growth). Soon AdWords will notice the improvements for a better ROI.
8. Enhance keyword relevance of the landing page to maintain consistency from keyword query, to your PPC ad text, and finally to your website’s (relevant webpage) landing page. Always ensure that there is a logical progression for the prospect/customer. This will deliver higher click-through rates and also better conversion rates.

As is generally thought, quality score analysis and its usage is about generating an improved ROI from your Adwords campaign. What is true if you keep monitoring and testing new scenarios whilst staying committed to measurement your business will achieve better results.

We all have the ability to improve our quality score albeit with some help from known tools and experts.