Understanding Adwords Quality Score

If you’re considering Adwords advertising you need to  understand what Adwords Quality Score is and why it is a critical component of your pay per click advertising program.

Although there are tens of millions of Google pay per click advertisements, most of the people creating Adwords ads have never heard of Quality Score.

They end up paying too much for their ads while getting lower ad placement than their competitors who are aware of Google Quality score. 

This latter group---a very small minority of google advertisers--- get their ads placed higher for less PPC outlay.

Across this site is a common theme; namely, the importance of finding and incorporating commercially targeted, relevant, high traffic keywords in your Google Adwords campaign. 

Here’s the reason.  Every day, more than 250 million (that’s a quarter billion) online searches are made on Google.  Most of these searches display pay per click Adwords advertisements and  competition for ad placement and profitability is fierce.

The Evolution of Adwords Pricing

Before Google developed Adwords Quality Score, Google professionals always recommended developing a huge list of keywords and bidding more than your competitors to get to the top of Google ad placement.

While that seemed a very logical approach, Google discovered that it often resulted in displayed ads that were not relevant to what their searchers were looking for.  Irrelevant ads weren’t clicked very often and, not only did they clutter up valuable advertising space, they hurt Google’s bottom line.

Because necessity is the mother of invention, Google embarked on a revolutionary approach to its Adwords advertising program: it decided to measure the extent to which an Ad Words advertisement keyword is relevant to both the text in the ad and to user’s search queries. 

 Quality Score was born.

Here’s how it works:

Every time a keyword can potentially result in an ad being displayed, Google’s measures how relevant that keyword is to the:

1. Adwords ad 
2. Landing page to which the searcher will be directed and
3. User’s search query

Instantaneously, it assigns a score between 1 (poor) and 10 (best) which today results in this

General Rule: the higher your Adwords Quality Score, the lower your CPC costs and the better your ad position.

How Quality Score Affects a Google Ad Campaign

Google uses the Adwords Quality Score to:

• Influence your keyword’s actual cost per click
• Estimate your first page bids that you see in your Adwords account
• Determine if a keyword is eligible to appear on specific Google Content sites when a user enters a search query
• Affect the Ad Rate; i.e., how high your ad will be placed

And, since its goal is to encourage its pay per click advertisers to create more relevant, targeted ads and landing pages, Google  displays the Quality Score for every keyword within your Adwords account. 

That number, so vital to your Google Adwords campaign, can be easily understood, quantified, and improved to the point of optimization by researching, examining, and testing  your keywords, Adwords ad copy, and landing pages.

Your goal (we’ll show you how) is to get to the highest ad rank you can.  The highest ad rank gets the first advertising position, the second highest ad rank gets the next position, and so on.    

There’s a simple formula for determining ad placement:

Maximum Bid Price x Quality Score

Armed with that formula, you can quickly see that there are three ways to get a better ad position.  Increase: (1) your Adwords advertising bid (pay more), (2) your Quality Score or, (3) both.

Now, look at how it’s possible to pay much less than your competitor for a higher Ad position:

Remember when I mentioned that Google displays your Quality Score for every keyword in your Adwords account?  Well, it does the same thing for your competitors.

But, most of them never, ever look at their quality score or try to increase it.  So they pay more than they should and get inferior ad positions to boot.

Think about it. 

Why pay premium cost per click advertising rates and end up with an inferior ad rank and lower ad position when all you need to do may need to do is improve your Adwords Quality Score?

It may be easier than you think.

You’re already a step ahead of your competitors.  You’re armed with knowledge. Now you need to do something with it.

I’ll show you what on other pages.

Go from Adwords Quality Score to Adwords Guide

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