Adwords Quality Score

I don’t normally get to technical about what we do, not from a lack of willingness, but in order to keep interest and understanding to the maximum level I can within the boundaries of computers and the Internet. Maybe not always the most interesting subject for our clients as they focus on their businesses and activities and I on mine. But here goes Adwords Quality Score:

Adwords is the means by which you can get your Advert on to Google’s search engine. However, you can go further with Adwords, not only do you get to write your own advert, but you get to chose the keywords it will show up for, it’s a bit like saying I want my Ad on page 18 under the plumbing section, in a local rag. Going further still and you can chose what you want to spend on your Advert, from a penny upwards, Adwords works on a simple auction system where you pay 0.01p more than the person below you.

This it got more complicated – Google realised that people with the biggest wallets were always going to be at the top. It wasn’t quite fair and more importantly it risked directing Googlers onto website that were right for them. So they introduced something called Quality Score.

Quality Score is defined as the relation between the Advert copy relevancy, the click through rate (CTR) and the landing page quality. It ties the knot between making sure that the Advert is relevant to the page it’s being directed to and that peoples response to the Advert is positive. There are a couple of other factors, notably how quickly the landing page loads, that’s important for viewers of a website and also how well the Advert is being used within Google – are you optimising or using all the tools you can from Google?

You can see this makes sense, the better that advert, the more people will click on it and if the landing page is good as well then the more profitably the whole thing comes. It’s win win for Google, you and the viewer.

Why’s Quality Score important to you?

Apart from the win win situation, quality score also factors into how much you’ll pay for an advert.  Google have come up with a simple function for something called AdRank – or where you advert is likely to show up on Google.  For certain you can show willingness to pay £10 per click for a keyword and that will get you nearer the top of the Google, but if your Quality Score is low or useless… someone paying £1 per click could easily over take you and Rank better than you.

The idea is again really simply – the more effort you put into your Adverts making them as relevant as possible and directed to a landing page that is as relevant as possible and that uses all the tools Adwords offers to maximise your click through rates then you will pay less for your Advert.

This firmly puts the ball back into the small businesses court and once again we can compete with far bigger companies within respective industries.  Bigger businesses will often have wider offerings, more money to spend and are more likely to outsource, when that happens, they don’t pay such close attention to Adwords and what is going on with their accounts.  The leave it and let it lie.

Where as with a good understanding and a few hours a month of work you can concentrate on improving your Quality Score and with out paying any extra money to Google your clicks and in theory your sales should go up handsomely.

Our Experience at NComp@ss

We’re always seen other peoples Adwords accounts, clients ask our help and our first reaction is that we know we can do better.  A quick look at the clients Quality Scores tells us almost immediate how many extra clicks we could be getting for that client if they allowed us to manage their Adwords.

Or alternatively we can estimate fairly quickly how much a client can save should they switch management of the Adwords to us.

We’re not necessarily touting for business here, as everything we do can be done by a client themselves, there’s no magic to any of this, all that is required is a decent understanding of how Google Adwords works and today the single most important fact in making your Adwords work for you better is to understand Quality Score.

You Advert copy, the click through rate (CTR) and the landing page relevance and quality are key to making sure all your Adwords work 100% to your best advantage.