By Elmer on March 27, 2009

Perhaps a lot of people still think that the only way to achieve top rankings for pay per click campaigns is to show Google and Yahoo! the money; whoever bids the highest gets the top spot. It used to work that way, looking back during the years when Yahoo! Search Marketing used to be called GoTo and later, Overture. During that time, most prominent ad placement goes to the highest bidder. Thankfully, especially to those with shoestring budget, it’s no longer the rule.

AdWords calculates Quality Score for each keyword we bid on various factors and not on bid cost. The reason for this is that Google wants to display the most relevant ads on every keyword search. Had Google used only the bid cost as basis on ad placement, advertisers who spend the most money will only benefit, even if their ads are atrociously bad.

As a reward advertisers for delivering good quality ads (keywords, ad copies, landing pages, etc), Google AdWords promote the position of their ads without costing them extra money; in fact, costs per click could even go down. So it is possible for an ad with little CPC spend to rank higher than an advertiser who pays higher rates.

What are the factors considered in Quality Score?
Here are some of the factors Google AdWords considers

Search Network (Google search results, Ask, AOL, etc)
* Historical click-through rate of keyword and corresponding ad. If our keyword-ad copy combo has high historic clickthrough rate compared to other advertisers, we get good Quality Score points for that keyword.

* Quality of landing page. Quality Score is accorded when we place high relevance between what our ads promise (discount, freebies, etc) and the content of our landing pages. If our ad copy says we sell fresh tulips, it makes more sense to point the landing page to the tulips page, rather than a list of tulips, daisies, carnations and other flowers for sale.

* Other relevance factors.

Content Network (About.com, NYTimes, Food Network, etc)
* Ad’s performance on similar sites. Quality Score is determined based on how an ad performs on one or more sites of similar nature. For example, the performance of our training shoe ads advertised on sports page of the New York Times is also affected by performance of the same ads on other sites.

* Relevance of the ads and keywords in the ad group to the site. This measures how much it makes sense for the ads to appear in the chosen content network. How relevant is placing an ad on cooking utensils in a recipe website or mobile phone in a gadget review portal?

* Other relevance factors.

How do I improve Quality Score value of my keywords?
Now that we somehow have an idea how Quality Score is measured, it should give us an idea how we can improve the QS of our keywords within our campaigns.

Segregate keywords into more smaller ad groups
The purpose of doing so not only to manage groups more efficiently, but more importantly to ensure that keywords within each ad group are more closely related with each other and the ads that they trigger.

Create ads customized for each ad group created
This is a corollary to #1. When ad groups contain keywords that are closely related, it is easy to create ads that relate to each of these keywords. Using the flower shop example, if we have an ad group that focuses on free delivery of Holland tulips, it may contain keywords such as

tulips delivery
free flower delivery
holland tulips

Create multiple version of ads within an ad group
Splitting keywords into smaller, more targeted ad groups does not mean we can only stick with one ad copy. Creating more ads allows us to evaluate which one works best, and adopt the ad group with highest yield and remove the poorly performing ones.

Include selected keywords in the landing page
It only makes sense that a visitor expects to see the keyword he or she uses as search query in the landing page, right? If I am searching for valentines day flowers, I would expect that I land in a page that contains information about flowers for Valentines Day.

Create variety of landing page combinations
Does more text mean more conversions? Or maybe more images? Or placement of the “Buy” button? We wouldn’t know until we test these landing page variations. In this manner, we can determine which one yields the best conversion rate. This can be accomplished with A/B split test, or multivariate testing, using Google Web Optimizer.

Include ONLY the elements that matter to visitors
If our site employs site-wide navigation to provide convenience for typical visitors, maybe such experience is not necessary for those who came to our site through the ads we posted. So in this case, if someone was looking to buy birthday flowers, linking to pages about types of flowers (especially those that are not typically intended as birthday flowers) may not be as relevant as pages that talk about security in online payment, about our company or testimonials from happy customers.

Hopefully this article gives us idea on what Quality Score is, how search engines make use of it, and how we can optimize our PPC campaigns by following steps in improving Quality Score of our keywords.

BeansBox offers PPC advertising services. Contact us for more information.

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