Creating a successful Pay per click (PPC) Campaign can be a daunting task at best. Whether you are a business owner trying to set up your own AdWords campaign or trying to find a digital marketing firm that can do this for you instead, knowing what to do is often a crapshoot. While performing proper keyword research, creating relevant ad copy and creating an optimized landing page are essential for campaign creation, knowing how to do these things without making a mistake can be as frustrating as sitting in traffic caused by an accident during Monday morning rush hour.
That being said, let’s go back to the basics and determine the reason you started a PPC campaign in the first place: to make more money! To do this, you first need to understand the weight that Google places on Quality Score, which helps to determine the cost and placement of your ads on Google’s Search & Content Networks.
What is Quality Score?
Let’s start by going directly to the horse’s mouth and see what Google says about Quality Score. According to Google, Quality Score is “an estimate of how relevant your ads, keywords, and landing page are to a person seeing your ad.” So essentially, this means the following:
- Having a good Quality Score means that Google’s systems think your ad, keyword, and landing page are all relevant and useful to someone looking at your ad.
- Having a bad Quality Score means that your ads, keywords, and landing page probably aren’t as relevant and useful to someone looking at your ad.
Higher Quality Score ads earn more clicks, cost less, appear in a higher ad position, and bring the most success to your PPC campaign. Ads with a lower Quality Score do not.
What are the factors Google uses when determining Quality Score?
Now that you know what Quality Score is, let’s determine the most important factors that Google uses when calculating Quality Score.
- Click Through Rate (CTR): History of how often your keyword led to clicks on your ad
- CTRAccount History: The overall CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
- Keyword/ad relevance: How relevant your keyword is to your ad copy
- The quality of your landing page: How relevant, transparent, and easy-to-navigate your landing page is
- Geographic performance: How successful your account has been in the regions you’ve targeted
- Keyword/search relevance: How relevant your keyword is to what a customer is searching for
There are a lot of factors Google considers when calculating your Quality Score. If you’re looking to raise your Quality Score, the best method is to start with your CTR and expand from there.
What does Quality Score help determine for your PPC Campaign?
Now that you know what Quality Score is and how it is calculated by Google, you should know how it affects your ads.
- The Quality Score helps by determining ad positioning:
- A better Quality Score can help you gain that coveted 1-3 spot above a Google search query
- The Quality Score also helps determine the cost you pay per click (PPC) or pay per thousand impressions (CPM) on Google AdWords:
- A better Quality Score will lower your keyword’s actual CPC, or CPM
- Quality Score likewise helps Ad auction eligibility:
- A better Quality Score will affect how easily & cheaply your keywords enter the ad auction
- Quality Score also helps lower a keyword’s first page bid estimate:
- A better Quality Score will make it easier for an ad to show on the first page of search results
- Quality Score similarly helps lower top of page bid estimates:
- A better Quality Score will make it easier for an ad to show towards the top of the page
Conclusion
A good Quality Score is an integral part of any PPC campaign. Since a poor Quality Score can cost your company thousands of dollars, improving your score will save your company money and drive more conversions to your site. Since you can now define Quality Score, know how it’s calculated, and understands what it affects, the next step is to learn techniques that will help raise the Quality Score of your PPC campaign. to learn more about Quality Score check back soon, or subscribe to our RSS feed to learn techniques on “How to Improve Your PPC Campaign by Raising Your Quality Score.”
