How Quality Score Impacts Your PPC Campaigns

Quality score affects your cost per click, which in turn will affect your ROI. If you can improve your quality score you can improve your ROI. Sounds simple, right?

Don’t be fooled! There is a lot that goes into improving your quality score. Here, Andrew Jacobs tells you exactly what you need to do to increase the elusive quality score so that you can increase your ROI.

We’ve posted a transcript below…

Hi there. My name is Andrew Jacobs and I’m a PPC account manager here at WMG. Prior to working for WMG, I worked for Google for four and a half years.

What is quality score?

Today, we’re going to be talking about how quality score impacts your campaigns. So what is quality score? Well, it’s a score from one to ten that’s applied to each keyword in your account. Why is this?

Well, Google wants to make sure that the end-user has the best experience possible when typing in a search query. So relevancy is the key. If you can make sure that your keywords are relevant and your ad text is relevant and your campaign is relevant, Google will award you with a higher quality score.

How does Google decide on a quality score?

So how does this quality score come about? How is it made up? Well, there are three main factors as to make sure that you can get a good quality score in your keywords. There’s landing pages, ad text and there’s the actual campaign construction.

Landing pages

So we talk first about landing pages. Your site has obviously many pages and for your purposes, you want to make sure that the end-user gets on the best landing page possible which has the most relevant information based on what they’re actually typing in.

So it does you justice that you make sure that your ads go to the right landing pages. Then it makes sense. But from Google’s perspective, it looks at the backend of your coding, sees what the site is all about in that particular page and if it can see relevancy of the keywords to the landing page, it will award you and that’s your first tick with regards to quality score.

Ad text

Your second is your ad text itself. Now you’ve got 25 characters for your headline. You’ve got two lines of 35 characters for the body and then you’ve got the display URL as well. So your 25-character headline really should be reserved for the keyword phrases themselves. Make sure you’ve got that keyword in the headline.

In order do to that, we recommend that you certainly don’t have any more than 20 keywords but ideally 12. If you’ve got even less, one or two keywords in your ad group, making sure that that phrase in the headline is really key.

The body needs to try and crowbar in a couple of keyword phrases as well but you got to try and balance that with making it interesting and also putting in your calls to action and trying to stand out from the rest of the adverts that are on the page as well.

Construction

So once you’ve got your ad text right, then really it’s important that you get your construction right as well. So making sure that every ad group has two to three ads in there with a slight differential of the words and phrasing is really healthy. Google will recognize that as well and making sure that you’re proactive with your campaigns as well by adding in your negative keywords. When Google can see that a campaign is progressing and developing, your quality score will stay high as well.

Tip: Display URL

Tips for you there, in the display URL, if you’ve got a short domain name and you put a forward slash in your display URL, if you can try and put more of the keyword phrase in there, that helps high relevancy and it doesn’t have to match the destination URL in terms of the landing page as long as your domain name is in there properly.

Tip: Bid aggressively to start with

Second tip for you is when you start a campaign, inevitably you can end up with fives and sixes to begin with. Google doesn’t give you a ten to start with and lose it. You have to kind of earn it.

So if you bid aggressively, what that means is you get yourself into the top positions in the page and your clickthrough rate will be much higher than on the right hand side. Now clickthrough rate is basically the number of times your ad is shown which are impressions versus the number of times it’s clicked on which are clicks.

If you can get a higher clickthrough rate because your ad is more relevant and you’re also at the top of the page, Google will give you a higher quality score.

So in terms of impact of how much quality score is in terms of importance, your ranking on the page is your bid times your quality score.

Ranking = bid X quality score

Example

So if we give an example here of a nine out of ten score on a keyword and you set a bid price of a pound, then your ranking is one times nine which is nine. If you’ve only got a quality score of four and you set a bid price of two pounds on that, then the best that you can achieve is two times four which is eight.

So when people ask me, “How much is it to get to the top of the page on PPC?” I would say, “Well, that actually depends on your quality score. You could literally be paying half the price of the person below you and appearing above them in the search rankings because of your superior quality score.”

So in conclusion, making sure that your landing pages are relevant, that your ad text is relevant and that your construction sound will lead you to a high-quality score, which will lower your cost per click and if you maintain your conversion rates, get you a high ROI return off the back of that.

If you’ve got any questions with regards to this, please feel free to get in touch with us here at WMG. My name is Andrew Jacobs. Thank you for listening.