Understanding Adwords Quality Score

To be successful in your Adwords advertising you must understand what Adwords Quality Score is and why it is vital---essential---to your cost per click advertising program.

Though there are millions of pay per click ads, most of the folks writing these Adwords ads have never heard of Quality Score and are being penalized as a result. 

They end up paying too much for their ads while getting lower ad placement than other competitors who are paying less money.

Now, you can either join this mass or set yourself apart and take the time to learn how to advertise with Google.

While anybody these days can get onto the internet and advertise their wares in a way not even imaginable just a few years ago, if you really want to know how to advertise with Google the very best way, you've got to understand Google's Quality Score.

Throughout this site, we emphasize the importance of finding and incorporating highly relevant, high traffic, targeted keywords in your Google Adwords campaign. 

Why?  Because every day there are some 250 million (that’s a quarter billion) online searches using Google and a true Google professional employs keyword rich ads and landing pages, coupled with a great Adwords Quality Score, to rise above the competition.

It’s easy to forget that Google only burst onto the web scene about a decade ago.

Though Google is credited with inventing pay per click advertising, it didn’t, but it was clever enough to buy the company that did so---and then to understand that the trick to becoming the most successful, and profitable, search engine on the planet wasn’t by figuring out how to show the top 1-2% of search results at the top of a list but by eliminating the other 98%+.

The Birth Of Adwords Quality Score

The sea change came in 2005. 

Before that, if you wanted to know how to advertise with Adwords, you were told to develop a huge list of keywords and bid the highest to get to the top placement.

 For Google, the problem with that very logical approach was that its advertising program wasn’t showing the most relevant ads that its searchers were looking for.

Consequently, it decided to embark upon a revolutionary approach to pay per click ads:  reward the most highly relevant ads to a searcher’s query. 

Quality Score was born.

This is how it works:

Every time (literally) a keyword has the potential to trigger an ad, Google’s Quality Score measures how relevant that keyword is to the ad and landing page text and to a user’s search query and assigns a number between 1 (poor) and 10 (best) and rewards quality over cost:

General Rule: the higher your Adwords Quality Score, the lower your CPC costs and the better your ad position.

How Quality Score Affects a Google Ad Campaign

Google uses the Adwords Quality Score to:

Ø Influence your keyword’s actual cost per click

Ø Estimate your first page bids that you see in your Adwords account

Ø Determine if a keyword is eligible to appear on specific Google Content sites when a user enters a search query

Ø Affect the Ad Rate; i.e., how high your ad will be placed

Google displays the Quality Score for every keyword within your Adwords account.  Put another way, each of your keywords, whether you have one or a million, will show its particular Adwords Quality Score.

That number, so vital to your Google Adwords campaign, can be easily understood, quantified, and improved to the point of optimization by researching, examining, and testing  your keywords, Adwords ad copy, and landing pages.

Your goal (we’ll show you how) is to get to the highest ad rank you can.  The highest ad rank gets the first advertising position, the second highest ad rank gets the next position, and so on.    

You can calculate ad rank with a simple formula:

Maximum Bid x Quality Score

Hence, to get a higher ad rate, you can increase: (1) your Adwords advertising bid (pay more), (2) your Quality Score or, (3) both.

Now, look at how it’s possible to pay less than your competitor for a higher Ad position:

Think about it. 

Why pay premium cost per click advertising rates and end up with an inferior ad rank and lower ad position when all you need to do (perhaps dramatically) is improve upon your Adwords Quality Score?

It’s easier than you think.

Stay with me and I’ll show you how to advertise with Google and use Quality Score to your benefit.

 
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