PPC Management and Dealing With Adwords Quality Guidelines
Practically everyone who is a normal user of Google Adwords is aware of their quality score and its importance to your account. Google calculates and assigns a score to each keyword within your account in order to determine its relation to displayed ads and destination pages.
The impact of a keyword’s quality score in your adwords account is far-reaching and important. Google uses the quality score to help determine the minimum amount you must pay in order for your ad to be displayed as well as the position on the page that your ad will be displayed in. Those two factors are very important to every pay per click advertiser, and thus, understanding the many aspects of the quality score is required.
In order to try to keep ads related closely to what the user is searching for, Google decided to introduce the quality score to adwords. Ideally, users will experience a better result if the advertisements displayed next to their queries are closely related to their area of interest. This is both logical and a bit idealistic: as any algorithm-driven ranking system is bound to have some problems with understanding every single keyword.
The publicly-known elements of the quality score system are:
1. Keyword relevance to the ad copy contained with its ad group. This aspect effectively forces advertisers to create closely controlled groups of keywords that are related to one another. Laziness to head this detail will only cause the minimum bids and ad positions to go in the wrong direction.
2. The historical performance of the keyword on Google.com. This factor means that if you don’t have your act together today, you will likely end up paying a higher premium for your ads tomorrow and into the future. Google has decided to reward advertisers whose ads have a higher CTR(clickthrough rate), so attention-grabbing ad copy and relevancy is a must.
3. The historical performance of your entire adwords account. Yes, you read that correctly. Google factors in the CTR from your entire account history when determining your minimum bids and ad positions. This, more than any other factor, dictates that you pay special attention to your account’s quality. Get good or pay more, it’s pretty simple.
4. Your landing page’s quality. Your visitor is sent to the destination page by Google, thereby becoming Google’s customer, and Google wants to please their customers by ensuring that the page is related to what their user is looking for. This element is pretty subjective when compared to other quality score factors, however it is an important element of your quality score. Driving visitors to pages that are closely related to their search query will likely help them find what they are looking for quickly. As such, you get rewarded for giving Google’s customers what they want.
In the end, paying strict attention to, and optimizing for, Google’s quality score for each keyword in your account will result in lower minimum bids and higher ad positions. Both of these factors affect your return on investment for your advertising dollars and are therefore worth understanding intimately.
