How To Increase Your Keyword Quality Score
Quality Score and CTR (Click-through-rate) are part of what determines your ad rank, or how your ad performs on AdWords. If you improve one of these factors, you will improve the others since they all work together. As campaigns perform better, they bring the right customers to you as a business owner and reduce your overall ad spend. In this post, we will focus specifically on Quality Score.
A Quality Score is a 1–10 number that is an automated opinion on the type of experience a searcher will have with your selected PPC keywords. The reason the Quality Score matters to Google Adwords Experts is that it accounts for a large percentage of the overall ad rank. And it is this rank that determines where an ad is shown in the search results. Improving the Quality Score can increase an ad’s position while also lowering the bid without actually doing anything to your bids.
This visible Quality Score is the number you, as a Google Adwords Expert, see in your AdWords account based on ad relevance, landing pages, and expected CTR. Note that this Quality Score is not what is used in the actual auction which happens every time someone conducts a search on Google.com or visits a partner site that displays AdWords ads. This is why you might see a change in how your ad ranks during the time of the auction but not see a change in the Quality Score visible in your account. Think of this visible Quality Score as a guide for areas Google thinks needs to be improved in your AdWords account. During the actual auction, your Quality Score is influenced by location and network, in addition to the user’s search query.
What confuses advertisers is when their ad appears relevant because they have exact match keywords and have incorporated these keywords into the headlines and/or description of the ad. In fact, Google encourages appropriate use of keywords in the ad group, landing page and ad copy. Although it appears relevant based on those factors, Google also looks for supporting keywords to determine relevance. As a Google Adwords Expert, you want to ask yourself if the supporting keywords in your ad are useful for the searcher. When Google determines that the overall ad relevance is poor, it is often an indicator that better organization is needed for the ad groups or different ads should be created which is why you want to look at all of these factors together.
The conversion rate for the exact match keyword type is higher than other keywords because Google is all about relevance and exact match keywords are highly relevant. The keywords exactly match the search query entered by a user. As a result, with exact match keywords, it will take fewer clicks to get a positive outcome with your ads. This does not necessarily mean you would start a new campaign with only exact match keywords. Watch this 4 minute video for an explanation on the different keyword match types.
