What is Quality Score?

Quality score is how Google rewards Adwords advertisers who display the right product to the right audience in the right manner.

Why does Google reward relevant advertising?

Google’s holy grail is “user experience”. If a Google user searches for information on “Car rental in Paris” and the search results displays Autotrader car sales, tractor leasing and Paris Hilton fan sites, the searcher is unsatisfied and quite likely to use another search engine such as Yahoo instead (well the “hes” might take a peek at Paris Hilton first). It takes less than 5 seconds to type Yahoo.com into the URL or Google search bar*, and the switching costs are zero.

Because it is so simple for a Google user to switch to another search engine, Google prizes “user experience” above all and seeks to reward Adwords advertisers who focus their efforts on the same.

Concurrently, if Googling e-shoppers are finding the products they seek easily, they are more likely to buy, and likely to buy more. This broadens Adwords advertisers’ smiles and they will funnel more of their advertising spondoolas into Google. It’s your classic win-win-win!

*Did you know: The second most searched term on Yahoo in the UK is actually Google!

So how does a good Quality Score benefit me as an Adwords advertiser?

1. It increases your Ad rank on the Google Results page. You can bid less for keyword than your competitors yet appear higher on the Google results page if your Quality Score is sufficiently higher.
2. It reduces your Cost Per Click. CPCs are a function of Bid and Quality Score. Simply put, the higher your Quality Score the less you will pay for your ad position.
3. It increases the Cost Per Click for the competitor immediately above you. This benefit appeals to the more “Machiavellian” advertiser. Because Google Adwords is an auction, advertisers pay the maximum bid the next placed advertiser would have paid. Having a strong Quality Score increases the value of your bid meaning the person above you needs to pay more to be above you.

These benefits are explained in detail in the YouTube video at the end of this post.

How do I increase my Quality Score?

There are 3 principle determinants of Quality Score for Google Search:

• Click Through Rate. Hight CTR = High QS, Simple as that (please see case study below).
• Keyword to Adtext Relevance. The more times the search query appears in the adtext the better.
• Landing Page relevance & quality. Again search query repetition on the landing page is important here. Not just on the face of the page but in the backend too (Well search optimised pages will benefit from better QS). Landing page loadtime is another factor, the faster the better (sorry Flash).

Case Study: Click Through Rate and Quality Score “The Chicken and The Egg”.

Recently the most important keyword (SEO) in our own adwords campaign (SEO Campaign!) was not showing due to poor quality score (4/10). The CTR for this keyword was 0.3%, The average CPC was €3.83 and the average postion was 5.9. What to do? Well I know that higher positions benefit from higher CTRs (although Google states they have “normalized” Quality Score to even out differences for rank) so I decided to drastically increase my my maximum bid to see if by increasing Ad Rank, I could increase Click Through Rate which in turn would increase Quality Score.

I created a new adgroup with exactly the same keywords and adtexts but tripled my maximum bid and gave it a good start by searching “SEO” on Google and clicking on our own ad myself to give it a CTR jumpstart (I just invented reverse click fraud!). 3 weeks later I checked back. My Quality Score was now a healthy 7/10, my ad position was now 2.5, my CTR was now 1.8% and AMAZINGLY, my CPC had only increased to €4.22 (10%).

Lets analyse these stats. By tripling my maximum bid (and bumping up QS with a cheeky click), I moved from ad rank of 6 to top 3, my CTR increased times 5, my quality score nearly doubled and in the end I only ended up paying 10% more per click.

So what exactly happened here? There is a little bit of “egg before the horse” and “cart before the hen” here. The increased bid led to increased position led to increased CTR which led to increased QS which may have increased position again which would have increased CTR again further increasing QS and so on and so on. I’m sure you catch my drift.

What is evident is a multipler effect from higher ad position to higher CTR to higher QS and back.

Conclusion: The first point worth noting is by improving Quality score I moved 3 postions up the ranking and only paid an extra 10% per click! The second point to note is the relationship between Ad Rank and Quality Score via CTR. The third is if you are starting from a low quality score there is potential for a multipier effect of higher QS = higher postion = higher CTR = higher QS and so on, this could be called the “Chicken & Egg” effect because one leads to the next.

Recommendations: To benefit from a strong Quality Score; start campaigns by bidding aggressively on keywords (this doesnt mean increasing your budget, just your bids). Let the campaign work up some “history” at the higher bid levels and CTRs, you can then start reducing your bids and reaping the rewards of a strong Quality Score.

Everybody loves Videos!

This is an excellent video fro Google’s chief economist Hal Varian which explains The Google Adwords Ad Auction using practical examples. Well worth a watch!