Focus on Quality Score for Adwords Campaign Optimisation

An Introduction to Quality Score

Unlike other paid search programs, Google Adwords doesn’t allow you to bid directly for a position in the paid search results. Instead Adwords allows you to set a limit on what you’re prepared to pay, and then applies a measure of relevance to your ad before deciding where to return it in the results. As an ad runs and builds a history of usage this position can fluctuate.

This relevance is measured by something called a ‘Quality Score’ for the ad you’re running. The Quality Score is a measure of how relevant Google believe the ad being shown is to the keyword being searched.

Getting a high Quality Score is important because it means the keyword you’re targeting will trigger your ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC) than competing sites with a lower Quality Score.



How Quality Score Works

The formula for how a quality score is generated changes over time but there are a few cornerstones that appear to remain inherently important. The main factors are:

• The historical click through rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on Google
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
  
• The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• The quality of your landing page
  
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
• Your account's performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
  

In addition to this, there’s that every present mystery factor that Google, in this instance like to call, “other relevance factors” that is worked into the equation. There is also some variation to the Quality Score formula when it affects ad position and first page bid.



Improving Your Quality Score

You’ll see from the section on how Quality Score is measured that there’s a fair amount of historical data being considered, so you should expect your Quality Score to improve gradually over time as your optimised campaign begins to take effect.

Outside of that, the main issue here is one of relevance so it’s worth spending some time organising your account structure. This will make it easier to manage while concurrently helping you better target your customers.

Think about creating separate campaigns for each of your product lines, resources, or brands. This helps you control your advertising better and make the necessary adjustments to improve your campaign performance. Ask yourself what each campaign’s objective is, then structure your campaign based on this goal.

The next consideration is targeting who sees your ads. Be sure to target only the languages and locations that are relevant for your business. For example if you only deliver within your own country for a product you’ve created a campaign for, make sure you select this, rather than ‘All Countries’.

Take the time to make your ad groups as specific as possible. Build a list of keywords or placements, then separate them into related ad groups. Create ads that pertain directly to that list. For example, if you sell mp3 players, and you've organised your campaigns by brand, create multiple ad groups based on the models of each brand.

Google shows only one ad per advertiser on a particular keyword, so there's no need to include duplicate keywords in different ad groups or campaigns. Identical keywords compete against each other, and the better-performing keyword triggers your ad.

Structuring your account with this level of attention to detail might seem initially like an onerous task, but once you’ve got over the initial hurdle of putting the structure in place your account will be much easier to manage, and you should start to see your goals more easily realised.­­­­­