PPC Management and Dealing With Adwords Quality Guidelines
Published on August 20th, 2008 by Brian Basch in PPC AdvertisingIf you are a regular advertiser who uses Google Adwords, you probably already are familiar with Google’s Quality Score. Each and every keyword within your adwords account is assigned a quality score by Google. This score is calculated by Google to represent how relevant your keyword is to your advertisement and destination.
Perhaps nothing affects your adwords account more than your quality score. This score influences your minimum bid amount and your ad position for each keyword in your account. Because ad position and pricing are so crucial to the success or failure of your efforts, comprehending Google’s quality score is a necessary evil.
The quality score is Google’s attempt to keep advertisements tightly related to what their users/customers are looking for. The thinking goes that Google’s customers will enjoy their search experience more with the advertisements closely related to their interest area along with the search results. Although it may be difficult to implement a perfect computer-driven ranking system, this way of thinking seems correct.
Google has revealed the following pieces to its quality scoring system:
1. Keyword relevance to the ad copy contained with its ad group. This aspect effectively forces advertisers to create closely controlled groups of keywords that are related to one another. Laziness to head this detail will only cause the minimum bids and ad positions to go in the wrong direction.
2. A keyword’s past performance on the Google.com website. Google wants to provide a benefit to continuously improving advertisers and this aspect encourages just that. If you are not making constant refinements to your copy for a given keyword, it will end up costing you in the form of a lower quality score and high bid prices. This makes having useful and creative ad copy a necessity.
3. How your entire adwords account has performed historically. Indeed, Google takes this into consideration when assigning your ad positions and minimum bids. There is no better time than the present to work on improving your account’s status in the eyes of Google: improve your performance, or pay higher advertising costs.
4. The quality of your landing page. The destination URL that a visitor is sent to after clicking on your ad should display a page that is closely related, in Google’s eyes, to the ad’s topic. Landing page relevancy is a bit more abstract than the other factors, but it can weigh heaviliy on your overall pay per click performance. Sending users to relevant pages on your website will only help them find what they are looking more efficiently. Hence, Google rewards you for helping their search customers.
In the end, paying strict attention to, and optimizing for, Google’s quality score for each keyword in your account will result in lower minimum bids and higher ad positions. Both of these factors affect your return on investment for your advertising dollars and are therefore worth understanding intimately.
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