Google AdWords Case Study: The Quality Score
More fun with AdWords! In Part 1 we dissected AdWords text ads and in Part 2 we looked at AdWords keywords. Today we look at the infamous AdWords quality score.
Note that we’re not yet talking about the cost of ads and how the bidding process works. Many people make the mistake of jumping into AdWords and spending a lot of money before figuring out there are other things they need to do first. So this approach may seem circuitous, but it will all make sense in the end.
The AdWords Quality Score
After many advertisers started abusing the system with spammy and often irrelevant ads, Google introduced the concept of a quality score in order to force advertisers to write better ads. The AdWords quality score (QS) really just extended the built-in dampening mechanism in the AdWords bidding process whereby ads with higher CTR (clickthrough rate) would over time dominate the ads with lower CTR, even if they were paying more. (Note that there is actually more than one quality score algorithm to consider, but usually the algorithm that interests advertisers is the one used to determine the minimum bid price of a keyword, as it directly affects their advertising costs. Unless told otherwise, then, you can assume that anytime someone says “quality score” that they’re talking about the minimum bid price quality score.)
Google does not disclose exactly how the quality score is calculated. They do admit that it considers a number of factors:
- The CTR rate for the keyword involved (both on a historical basis across Google and within your own AdWords account)
- The relevance of the keyword to the ad group it’s in (i.e., the other keywords and the ad text)
- The quality score of the landing page
- Other undisclosed factors
You can’t actually control all these factors, but there are some things you can influence:
- Which keywords you bid on.
- How you group the keywords.
- The ad titles, text and display URLs.
- The landing pages.
Let’s look at each of these factors.
Factor 1: Keyword Selection
Many marketers spend most of their time trying to find the right keywords for their campaigns, in many cases too much time. I’m actually not going to cover this topic because it’s discussed extensively elsewhere and there are various tools you can use (free and paid) to generate lists of relevant keywords. Keyword selection is as much an art as it is science: think outside the box and pass a critical eye over each and every keyword you add to your list. Gone are the days when you generate thousands and thousands of keywords to throw into one or two ad groups to “see what sticks”.
Factor 2: Keyword Grouping
The rule of thumb for grouping keywords is very simple: all keywords in an AdWords ad group should be thematically related. Google understands keyword relationships very well, don’t forget that they’ve developed extensive technology in this area via the AdSense program. The simplest way to create a good-quality ad group is to ensure that each phrase in the group uses a common word or subphrase.
The ultimate ad group, however, consists of a single keyword or phrase, with up to three separate matching options for that keyword. (There may, however, be an unlimited number of negative keywords to ensure that the right queries will trigger the ad group.) This is a tightly focused ad group that ultimately delivers the best results as long as the ads and the landing pages also focus on the same keyword. You can also do very fine-grained tracking and split testing.
The downside of the single-keyword ad group is that it requires a lot more work to create and maintain all those groups, ads and landing pages. That’s why many marketers start with broader groups of thematically-related keywords and then split those groups down into smaller groups once it becomes apparent that some of the keywords in the larger group are converting better than others.
Factor 3: The Ads
Writing a good AdWords ad is hard. It’s a little bit like writing a haiku, since the limited line lengths and the editorial guidelines really constrain what you can do. And being able to tap into human psychology and getting users to click the ads in the first place is truly an art: this is why advertising copywriters exist.
That said, Google’s algorithms don’t actually understand or react to the ads like humans do. They look for things that a computer can determine, like whether the ad group keywords appear in the ad. Whether there are obvious “call to action” phrases. Whether the display URL somehow relates to the keywords. The more relevant the ads are to the keywords in the ad group, the better.
Factor 4: The Landing Pages
Google caused many advertisers a lot of grief when it added landing page quality to the QS calculation. This is what many advertisers referred to as the “Google slap”: if you had a (in Google’s view) poor landing page, you were “slapped” with (often much) higher minimum bid prices for your ads. It wasn’t unusual to see minimum bid prices jump from 25 cents to over $10 per click because of this.
The best way to understand how landing page quality affects your quality score is to read Google’s advice on how to create a quality landing page. Here are the general principles, however:
- A landing page must directly relate to the ads and the keywords in the ad groups that refer to it. Standard AdSense ad targeting techniques work well here.
- The more related content that the user can browse when they get to the site, the better.
- Include privacy policies, disclaimers, copyright information, contact details (especially phone numbers and postal addresses!), logos/seals, etc. on the landing page, either directly or indirectly via links to other pages.
- Make sure the user can easily navigate from the page to other related pages.
Creating landing pages that follow these guidelines takes substantially more work than just slapping up a single-page sales page, as many affiliates do.
That’s all for this installment. Next, we’ll look at a site design strategy based on what we’ve learned so far about AdWords.
Sponsored Link: Purchase the EzineArticles Domination reports and get a free tool I wrote as a bonus.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
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AdSense, advertising, AdWords, content, Google, keywords, quality score, text ads
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