“Google AdWords” is the name for the small ads you see to the right-hand side of search results in Google. The Google AdWords “Quality Score” is a numeric value placed on the ad, keywords, and landing page to indicate the relevance to someone seeing the ad. (The landing page is the website page a user visits when he or she clicks on the ad.) Having a good Quality Score means Google rates your ad, keyword, and landing page as relevant and useful to someone seeing your ad. This article gives some suggestions on how you can improve your Quality Score.
First of all, why do you want to do this? The Quality Score is used by Google to rank adverts in the AdWords column, and if an ad appears at all! A good Quality Score mean that an ad may appear high in the list, it also has the potential to appear FIRST in the list, and customer click-throughs have a potential lower cost. You can check the Quality Score for an ad in the Campaigns | Ad Group | Keyword list.
So, here are some tips.
The quality of your landing page – Google checks the web page used as the target for an ad when a user clicks on the ad. It determines how relevant, transparent, and easy-to-use the page is. All of these factors are used to assess the Quality Score. So it is vital to ensure that, first of all, your website is easy to use and navigate. Probably a Flash-based menu, whilst looking cool, counts against it because Google may fail to comprehend its function. The landing page also needs to contain keywords related to the ad in the text on the page itself.
Your keyword – search relevance – This tests the relevance of your keywords to what a user searches for. Suppose the user is looking for striped socks. He enters “striped socks” in the search box and up pops the search results with ads to the right hand side. Because you run a website selling socks, you may have created an ad with the keyword of “socks”. This may cause the ad to be displayed, but it will suffer adversely if another company has used the keywords “striped socks”. Their keywords are a better match to the search phrase, and get a better Quality Score. So their ad appears higher than yours and may catch the user’s eye before he even sees your ad.
Your keyword – ad relevance - This is a measure of the relevance of the keyword to your ad. Let’s go back to our sock-shop website, and searching for striped socks. If the ad doesn’t mention striped socks but just socks or even clothing in general, this reduces its Quality Score. On the other hand, mentioning something like “Great range of striped socks” does beneficially affect the Quality Score.
Other factors affecting the Quality Score are determined by Google when your ad is triggered by a search. There isn’t much you can do about this except create AdWords that are successful at achieving click-throughs.
Keyword expected click-through rate – The click-through rate is partly based on the keywords’ previous click-through rate, or how often the keywords lead to clicks on your ad.
Your display URL’s past click-through rate – How often you received clicks with your display URL.
Region performance – How successful your account has been in the geographical regions you’re targeting.
Ad performance – How well your ad has been doing on this site.
Targeted devices – How successful the ads have been performing on different device types, such as desktop PCs, smartphones, and tablets. You get a different Quality Score for different device types.
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