What is it?

When you create a new advert in Google AdWords, Google will assign it a quality score. Essentially this is Google’s assessment of how relevant your advert is to the keyword you’re bidding on.

Why does it matter?

Google’s business model depends on providing users with the most relevant search queries. That’s why the quality score exists. By assessing how relevant your advert is to the keyword, it can then weight your advert against all the other ones being put forward for that term, and display the most relevant ones higher up.

As such, if your ad isn’t judged at all relevant, it may be ineligible for a particular keyword. But, if you get a high quality score, your ad will be displayed further up, and for a lower cost-per-click (CPC) that one with a lesser score.

Paying attention to your quality score will get you greater visibility, at a lower cost.

How do I get a good one?

Google makes no secret of how to get a good quality score. After all, they want you to get a good score so they can serve the most relevant ads to their users. It’s well worth brushing up on the official guidelines.

Key areas to look at are:

• Ad title
• Keyword density in ad copy
• Separate campaigns for separate products
• Custom landing pages for each campaign
• Keyword density on landing pages

Essentially, the ideal situation is to have a bespoke advert for each keyword you’re bidding on, going to its own custom landing page – with the copy in both tweaked to reflect your bid.

Obviously this may be far too resource intensive to achieve. As long as you aim for as much overt relevancy as possible then you should be fine. Make sure the keyword is in the ad title, and at least once in the ad copy.

Make sure your ads are pointing at the most directly relevant page rather than the homepage. Make sure your campaigns and ad groups are well organised and clearly delineated along product lines.

It’s useful to imagine seeing and clicking on your ad from a user perspective. If your ad would appear directly relevant to the search, and the landing page the same, then you’ll most likely get a good quality score.

If you liked this article you may also want to read a beginner’s guide to PPC keyword matching types

Image Credit: kikashi

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 3rd, 2011 at 9:58 am and is filed under Pay per Click. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.