All About Quality Score – The What, How and Why of Google AdWords QS

January, 2004 – My campaign is going great gun and I have increase bid amount today and the number of click is just overwhelming.

March 2005 – I am destroyed. All my campaigns are nowhere near in top ranking and CTR has taken a plunge.

Well, as you have been guessing correctly for the last 10 or 15 seconds, this is an imaginary account of an Adwords expert who failed to cope with the changing pattern of Google Adwords and found the pit of darkness even when the search world was getting pervaded with the launch of Quality Score. Before the launch of quality score, Google paid advertising network was in a shamble. Since it was all about bid value, often the search page was stuffed with irrelevant ads if not derogatory. So, if you want to run an advertisement campaign in Google Adwords for the first time, you need to have a clear idea of what Adword Quality means, as it will mean a lot to you once you are hopped into it.

Quality Score

Depending on the quality score, Google determines which ads should appear first and which next when a user searches with a particular term. So, it is calculated every time your targeted key phrases trigger the possibility of appearing in SERP. It has several impacts on your ad camping, like it will determine where your ad will appear, what will be the probable cost per click of your ads, whether your chosen keywords are eligible to appear in SERP and many more. In nutshell, the higher the quality score, the lower the costs. Quality Score ensures that only high quality ads appear in search result, get the more clicks and bring fortune for the advertiser. So, a win win situation for both Google and advertiser.

Quality Score Behind the Veil: factors that influence quality score varies widely depending on where the ads are appearing –

1. Ads on Display Network
2. Ads On Search Network
3. Ads on Google

Here we are going to have a quick look to have a basic understanding.

Quality Score for Google and the Search Network

Search network and Google search ads share almost the same kind of quality score factors and here they are:

Historical CTR. Google will take into account the past performance of your adwords campaign history and the CTR before calculating QS. It is rather complex and there is almost nothing you can do expect that you are using an old account and are using the best Adwords optimized ads and display URL that have the highest CTR.
Quality of your landing page is certainly another vital score that cannot be undermined at any cost. You landing page should get loaded fast and should have least distractions.
Relevancy of the keyword is certainly of those factors that are employed by almost all types of advertising network.
Geographical targeted and the past performance of your ads in that geographical region.

There are some other factors that you should be aware of though they are thought to be not so important. While considering ad position in Google search network, Google not only takes into account CTR on a particular site along but it also considers CTR of other sites within that same network.

Quality Score for Display Network

The position and eligibility of being selected for appearing on a website under display network have its share of criteria and here they go:

Past performance of the ads in the website and similar website in the same niche.
Quality of the landing page
relevancy of the keyword as well as the ads within the adgroup

So, we have a brief idea of what quality score and what it means for our adwords campaign. So, next you decide to invest in AdWord campaign, make sure that you are giving it due attention to reduce costing.