PPC Management And Dealing With Adwords Quality Guidelines

Age : 34 Joined : 08 Mar 2008 Posts : 1264

If you are a regular advertiser who uses Google AdWords, you probably already are familiar with Google's Quality Score. Each and every keyword within your AdWords account is assigned a quality score by Google. This score is calculated by Google to represent how relevant your keyword is to your advertisement and destination.

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.

Google has implemented this scoring system in order to regulate the relevance of an ad to a user's search query. The idea is that searchers will be more satisfied if the advertisements they see along side their search results or page content relate closely to the topic they are interested in. This makes good sense, although it is not a perfect system, as any auto-compute ranking system is lacking "intuitive" understanding in great detail.

The publicly-known elements of the quality score system are:

1. How closely a keyword is related to the ads in its ad group. This element should cause advertisers to implement their ads and keywords in closely related units, rather than tossing all keywords together in one group. Doing the later will likely lead to high minimum click prices and lower ad spots.

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. How closely your landing page relates to your effort. When a potential customer clicks on one of your ads, it makes sense that the page they are sent to should closely relate to what they are searching for. This benefits everyone involved as the user can more quickly find what they want, Google looks good for helping them find it, and you are rewarded by having a much improved chance winning that customer's business. This element of the quality score is more subjective, but makes sense from the big picture perspective. Google rewards your good service to their customers.

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.