Search Marketing InsiderPay Per Click, Social Media and SEO Strategies – An Internet Marketing Institute Publication

By Craig Danuloff, President and Alex Cohen, Senior Marketing Manager at ClickEquations

Quality Score is Google’s way of assessing how relevant your paid search keywords are to the searchers you’re targeting.  In our popular blog post about The Economics of Quality Score, we showed how improving your keywords from 7 to 10 could reduce your CPCs by 30%.

But, the way Quality Score works and how you can improve your Quality Score isn’t as easy to understand as it should be.

Just How Important Is Quality Score?
Quality Score plays a critical role in two formulas that Google uses to determine where (and if) your ads appear and how much you pay for clicks.

Quality Score and Ad Rank
The first is the formula for Ad Rank. This is the math that decides which ads appear in the top slot, which ones sit in position #2, and so on all the way down to the point at which ads don’t get shown at all. The formula is:

 
Quality Score is equally as important as your bid in terms of when and where your ads are positioned. It’s the sweat-equity of PPC. You can out-maneuver bigger or slower competitors without spending more.

So if your keyword earns a Quality Score of 10 and your nearest competitor earns only a Quality Score of 5 for that same keyword, your $2 MaxCPC will earn you a higher Ad Rank (and display position) than your competitor’s $3 MaxCPC. Your Ad Rank = 20 (10 x 2) while their Ad Rank = 15 (5 x 3).

If two competitors have similar or equal bids, obviously the higher Quality Score will earn a higher position.
And since there are often more advertisers than available display slots, the Ad Rank impact of Quality Score in many cases is the difference between an ad displaying and not displaying at all.

Quality Score and Your CPC
After Quality Score is used to determine the position of your ad, it is used again to calculate how much you’ll pay for each click.

The formula for your CPC on any keyword is based on the Ad Rank of the advertiser who scored just below you and your Quality Score.

 
Using the previous example, our Ad Rank was 20 while our competitors’ Ad Rank was 15. Our cost-per-click is then calculated as 15/10 + $0.01 or $1.51.

For every point (or fraction of a point) our Quality Score goes up, our cost-per-click goes down. And each rise in our Quality Score literally costs us less money on every click.

Assuming that the average Quality Score is 7 (which is our experience based on ClickEquations clients), earning a Quality Score of 10 is like getting a 30% discount. If your Quality Score is 5, then you’re paying a 40% per-click premium.

These are approximate values, because the numbers Google reports to us as Quality Scores aren’t the actual numbers they use in their calculations. We can assume they have much more precision than they share, and their numbers may or may not be exactly proportional to those they show us.

5 Steps to Improve Your Quality Score
Understanding and optimizing your Quality Score puts you in a powerful position: you can improve performance while reducing costs.

1. Prioritize: Analyze and prioritize your Quality Score optimization
2. Align: Precisely match search queries with ad copy
3. Revise: Extensive ad copy tests to find best performers
4. Remove: Delete or pause ineffective keywords
5. Eliminate: Landing Page problems and penalties

To get started, we’ve put together our 5 favorite tips to boost Quality Score

1. Prioritize Your Optimization - They say sunlight is the best disinfectant, and you need to know your Quality Score before you can improve it.  Pay as much attention to Quality Score as you do to CPC, CTR, and Conversion Rate.

A great way to start is by creating a distribution of your Quality Score to get a snapshot of how things look overall. Here’s one example.

Then, sort campaigns by spend, then ad groups by spend, and finally keywords by Quality Score. In those top spending campaigns and ad groups any keyword with a Quality Score below 7 should be the priority for Quality Score improvement.

2. Align Search Queries and Text Ads  – Because Quality Score is driven by click-through-rates, the more you can narrow ad groups so that keywords (and the search queries they attract) are highly relevant to the provided text ad copy the better results you’ll see.

For example, a pet website selling organic pet food wouldn’t want to have the keywords “organic dog food” and “organic cat food” in one ad group. Each of those searchers has a specific pet and a specific pet food need, so they need custom ad copy and landing pages to maximize CTR, Quality Score, and ultimately conversion rates.

3. Revise and Test Ad Creative – Writing compelling, persuasive and distinctive text ads is the most important way you can improve CTR and drive up Quality Score. (The presumes you have organized ad groups narrowly as described above.)

Find the lowest perform text ads (by CTR) in the highest priority ad groups (by spend).  Remove poor performing text ads and work to introduce new ones that are even better. To really figure out what works, run disciplined tests. 

Here are some tips for writing killer text ads.

4. Remove Bad Keywords - Because Quality Score looks at historical CTR beyond the keyword itself, it’s important to remove low CTR keywords and text ads that pull down your overall average and historical rates.

Before deciding to pause or delete a lot of keywords with relatively low CTRs, you should consider the overall distribution of Quality Score within your account. If your account shows these strong signs of solid Quality Score performance, you can be less vigilant about hunting down and removing the low-end performers.

If you’ve got some Quality Score drag, the ?rst step is to remove keywords and text ads that have particularly poor CTRs relative to their closely related peers.

For example, you may have one or more particularly broad keywords within an ad group that gain a massive number of impressions but achieve very low CTR. The decision to pause those is an easy one.

If you have a new or marginally performing account,  you may need to cut more off the bottom and put tighter controls in place, at least until you push the vast majority of your keywords to a Quality Score 7 or higher.

There is a weight of history to the Quality Score calculation so the longer you let poor results linger the harder it may be, and the longer it may take to earn your way out.

5. Eliminate Landing Page Problems  – Of all of the Quality Score components, landing pages are the source of the most confusion and myths. Let’s start by clearing up some of the more egregious ones:

a. Landing pages can only hurt Quality Score, they can’t help it. Generally, only major problems will cause landing  page penalties.

Here are some obvious things to avoid
i. Extensive, unoriginal copy (such as scraped text)
ii. Pop-up advertising
iii. Landing pages that are “bait and switch” offers or that have very little to do with the ad or search query
iv. Very slow loading pages

b. Unlike keyword Quality Score, landing page Quality Score is not updated frequently. If you make changes, be patient. It make take a few weeks to see the impact.

Google landing page guidelines provide the most definitive suggestions.

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Craig Danuloff and Alex Cohen work at ClickEquations, a complete, easy-to-use paid search platform for large advertiser and agencies. For more free tips, check out the ClickEquations Learn section and their paid search blog.