By Helen Brown
We are all familiar with the quality score metric in our accounts, but how well do we all understand what this means for us? How does a well (or low) performing quality score affect an account? This week I have viewed the AdWords webinar “Understanding Quality Score” and I am going to dedicate this post to discussing the importance of paying attention to this metric, and also how to start addressing the issue of a low quality score.
The basic idea behind the quality score metric is for it to be a measurement of a keywords relevance in comparison to its ad text and also to the given search query. Keywords play an important part within your account as they can effect the ability of an ad to display and also the ads position.
There are two types of quality scores to think about within your account.
Although you will not actually be able to view the first type as an actual statistic, your auction quality score is calculated every time your keyword matches a search query. The score is a unique score and it is given for each query.
The second is your keyword quality score. This is based on a figure ranging between 1 – 10 and is designed to be a guide of how a keyword would be expected to perform in an ad auction. Google advise the following figures as a guideline when considering your keyword quality score-
A score of 1 – 4 is classed as poor performing
5 – 6 is classed as well performing
7 – 10 is classed as very well performing
The clear purpose to quality score is to keep the equilibrium with regard to relevance between the users, us (the advertisers) and also Google. They want their users to keep using their search engine, we the advertisers want the most relevant traffic to visit our websites and the people searching want the most appropriate results returned when they enter their search queries. Makes sense!
A user who searches for the product or service that they want will be happy and have a positive experience when they get what they required from their search quickly.
From our point of view, we need to think of maintaining a high quality score in a few different ways, as quality score is responsible for deciding whether or not the ad is in the running for the ad auction. It also decides where on the results page your the ad will appear in relation to other ads. When you think in terms of your costs, having a high quality score will enable you to maintain a good position and the amount you need to bid should be less. If you have a low quality score, you can expect to see a high first page bid.
There are many components that contribute to quality score, but there are a few in particular that we need to be mindful of. Click through rate is considered the most important factor contributing to your quality score. Relevance of keywords to ads in an ad group, and search queries are very important, and also the quality of your landing page needs to be high. Your site content must be relevant to your ads, it must be easy for users to navigate and considered ‘transparent’. Be clear about what you are doing and selling, and what you do with any personal information collected and how it will be used etc.
If you find that you have a low quality score, it is important to identify and understand why this has happened and also to work towards rectifying the issue. There can be a number of reasons as to why you can have a low score. During the webinar, a list of reasons were suggested and discussed as to why an account can have low quality scores, and that around 99% of the time that a low quality score could be attributed to one of the following reasons-
Poor landing page quality,
Low CTR,
Poor historical performance,
Recent changes that have been made to the campaign,
The ads not receiving enough impressions or clicks.
An efficient way of finding out about this is by hovering over the speech bubble next to your keyword(s) within the keywords tab of your account. This will give you a diagnosis with quality score and landing page information. From there, you can decide your best course of action and start to rectify the issue.
You may find that you need to review policies and guidelines to make sure you are compliant, or that you need to start assessing your keyword relevancy and use for example keyword insertion, or maybe even delete under performing keywords in order to increase your CTR. A search term report is a good place to start when refining your keywords (you can find this from within the keywords tab > see search terms).
Assess the changes you have made to your account, do not be afraid to revert your changes if you find that they are not working.
In summary, evaluation of your keywords and statistics is key to maintaining a good quality score. However, Google advised at the end of this webinar that sometimes, even when you have done everything correctly, you may still not see a perfect quality score. Don’t be disheartened with a quality score of 6 – 7 because this is perfectly acceptable. I hope this helps to give a better understanding of the subject and also helps anyone striving to improve their quality scores. Good luck!
