Maximising Your Google Adwords Quality Score

Back at the start, I said that you had to do two things to be successful - maximise your conversion rate, and persuade Google that your adverts were very relevant to the searcher. I’ve looked at the conversion rate, and now it’s time to look at the Quality Score.

If you recall, the Quality Score is Google’s measure of the relevance of your offering (advert, landing page, and keyword), and it has a strong bearing on the success or failure of your campaign because it determines the amount that you need to bid in order to appear in any given position in the search results.

To be more precise, there isn’t a Quality Score statistic in Adwords, there’s a few. For the moment, I’ll look at the two that you have when advertising text adverts on Google’s search results page - the Ranking Quality Score and the Minimum Bid Quality Score.

Page last updated by Steve Baker on May 11, 2008 at 7:09 pm.

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8 Responses to “Maximising Your Google Adwords Quality Score”

  1. Geoff Mentor

    So if Google is rewarding people with highly relevent ads and keywords by giving them better quality scores, does it take regions into account?

    What I mean is would I be better off running individual campaigns for different cities rather than one nationwide campaign? Would regional campaigns get better quality scores?

  2. Steve Baker

    Each campaign will have its own Quality Score, which influences the positioning of the adverts in the results.

    But it’s only a small part of the Quality Score, which is far more strongly affected by the performance of individual keywords, advert text and landing pages (all of which are controlled within Adgroups, and can be controlled within a single campaign).

    That said, there is one potentially very valuable advantage to having local campaigns - you can bid on the same keywords, with different adverts (just make sure that your areas don’t overlap!).

    For example, if you are bidding on the term “Plumbers”, you can advertise “Plumbers in London” if the searcher is in London, or “Plumbers in Cardiff” if the searcher is in Cardiff, etc. Even if they don’t specify their location, you can still advertise a service locally.

    As a result, you will potentially see an improvement in your clickthrough rate, and hence your adverts will appear higher for the same bids…

  3. Spondishy

    I was wondering if you’d answer a specific question regarding initially bidding high on a keyword. I’m finding that I’m bidding high in a competitive niche but am in the top 3 and getting a decent ctr.

    My question is specifically when would you expect to see CPC dropping, and if so by how much?

    I realise this isn’t cookie cutter and no one campaign is the same as another, but best guesstimates would be appreciated.

  4. Steve Baker

    Your Clickthrough Rate may be good, but in order for your Cost Per Click to fall, it needs to be better than the other PPC adverts.

    If you’ve looked at the example of how the Ranking Quality Score works, you’ll see that if everybody has the same Quality Score, then it doesn’t really matter whether it’s very good or very poor.

    As a result, the impact of a good Clickthrough Rate depends entirely on how much better it is than your competitors’ Clickthrough Rates.

    In terms of how long it takes to see an improvement, it’s very difficult to tell - it’s not like the advert text, or the landing page, where the change is instantaneous. Google can’t simply look at yesterday’s Clickthrough Rate to determine today’s Quality Score.

    My guess, and it really is just that, is that they will take a weighted average of your Clickthrough Rate over time to determine how attractive searchers find your advert. If this is the case, then you’ll probably see a gradual improvement over time, rather than a very sudden change as you might from (for example) putting the search term in your advert text.

  5. Adworders

    hello.

    I just want to know how to let my ad text KEEP SHOWING in every search. my competitor can do that, but I can’t do that,even I max the day Cost by adwords ! what can I do?

  6. Steve Baker

    The first thing to check would be your campaign settings. You should have advert distribution set to accelerated.

    Do this, and Google will keep showing your adverts until your daily budget runs out.

    If you’ve already done this, then the only reason that Google won’t show your advert is that you’ve spent your daily budget. Reducing your bids will give you more clicks for the same spend every day.

    If you aren’t spending your full budget, and your campaign is set to ‘accelerated’ then your advert should appear every time.

    BUT! You should not check using http://www.google.com. You need to use http://www.google.com/adpreview, as repeatedly searching the same term will cause Google to vary the results (therefore your advert will seem to disappear).

    Hope that helps,

    Steve

  7. Adworders

    Hello steve

    THank you for your help. But I am so sorry to say:

    1\My advert distribution set to accelerated 3 month ago.Never changed.

    2\the cost still less than my full budget.

    My website is http://www.buylida.com and the key word is lida daidaihua .
    If you have other suggestion,Please let me know.

    Thank you for your time again.

  8. Steve Baker

    If your budget isn’t running out, and you have set your distribution to accelerated, then your advert will show.

    However, as I said, you need to use the Adpreview tool - repeatedly searching for the same keyword on Google Search will give you different results. You can get more information here: http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=71301

    However, I would suggest that you might want to spell-check your website before you put a lot of money into Adwords - since you’re paying for each click, the conversion rate of your website is critical, and mis-spellings can have a very serious impact on it…

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