Thursday, September 11, 2008

PPC Management and Dealing With Adwords Quality Guidelines

By Brian Basch


Practically everyone who is a normal user of Google Adwords is aware of their quality score and its importance to your account. Google calculates and assigns a score to each keyword within your account in order to determine its relation to displayed ads and destination pages.

Quality score influences a number of very important factors within your adwords account. It affects your ad's display position on the Google network and determines your minimum required bid in order for your pay per click ad to run. There are no factors more important to the pay per click advertiser than ad position and ad pricing, so understanding Google's quality score is a worthwhile effort.

In order to try to keep ads related closely to what the user is searching for, Google decided to introduce the quality score to adwords. Ideally, users will experience a better result if the advertisements displayed next to their queries are closely related to their area of interest. This is both logical and a bit idealistic: as any algorithm-driven ranking system is bound to have some problems with understanding every single keyword.

The publicly-known elements of the quality score system are:

1. The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group. This factor results in the need to tightly and efficiently group your ads together, as throwing several hundred keywords into one ad group will often result in higher minimum click costs and lower ad positions.

2. The historical performance of the keyword on Google.com. This factor means that if you don't have your act together today, you will likely end up paying a higher premium for your ads tomorrow and into the future. Google has decided to reward advertisers whose ads have a higher CTR(clickthrough rate), so attention-grabbing ad copy and relevancy is a must.

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. Your landing page's quality. Your visitor is sent to the destination page by Google, thereby becoming Google's customer, and Google wants to please their customers by ensuring that the page is related to what their user is looking for. This element is pretty subjective when compared to other quality score factors, however it is an important element of your quality score. Driving visitors to pages that are closely related to their search query will likely help them find what they are looking for quickly. As such, you get rewarded for giving Google's customers what they want.

The bottom line is that growing your knowledge and understanding of Google's quality score measure will act to directly improve your advertising return on investment. By lowering your minimum bid prices and raising your ad positions, quality score improvements are your very close friend, treat them like it!

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