What are you running a PPC campaign for? If you aren’t doing it for branding reasons, I would think you are trying to get conversions from your site... correct?
And what is the best way to do that?
Well…trial and error. But another good way to make sure that you are attracting the right traffic (and the most that your budget allows) is by achieving the highest Quality score (QS) possible.
This should ensure that your CPCs aren’t too high but that you still attain good positions. You’d then receive a decent amount of traffic from your ads - traffic which is targeted and relevant. If your site is easy to navigate, this should result in more conversions. In other words: good quality score = more relevant traffic = more conversions (if your site is user friendly).
Quality score is used by the 3 major PPC engines – Google, MSN and Yahoo! (Quality index on Yahoo!). It determines your CPC, estimated first page bid and the rank/position of your ads. If you have a low quality score (QS), your CPCs will be higher and your positions will be lower. You could increase your bid to get better positions, but this will not increase your QS and you will pay more for clicks. There are many different ways to improve this traffic granting score, you just have to ask the right questions in order to figure out what to do.
I know some of you out there might be huffing and puffing because it all just seems like a bit of an inconvenience. But it’s not. The ads you see now are much better quality than they were pre-quality score. Imagine if your business was listed amongst badly written, poorly targeted and barely relevant ads. Would you really want to be associated with that? Didn’t think so.
How Quality Score works:
Ratings:
Next to your keywords on the Adwords platform you will see either “Poor”, “OK” or “Great”. In Adwords Editor you will see numbers ranging from 1 through to 10. Funnily enough, they do work together:
1 - 4 corresponds with "Poor"
5 - 7 corresponds with "OK"
8 - 10 corresponds with "Great"
Before your mind starts ticking over ways to improve your Quality Score, you need to know the basics of what the formula is based on. You also need to know what QS myths to erase from you memory.
The main factors taken into the Quality Score formula for Google are:
- Historical click through rate (CTR)
- Your account history - if this is bad you may want to create a new account and start fresh
- The historical CTR of display URLs
- The quality of your landing page
- Relevance of keywords to the ads in its ad group
- The relevance of keywords and ads to search queries
- Geographical performance
When you understand that, you know where you can start to improve your QS. For instance, you could break your AdGroups into smaller groups with more targeted keywords and adcopy, test different landing pages and display URLs. The main thing you want to achieve is an increase in your CTR. If you AdGroups are already small with targeted keywords, then try testing new adcopy.
You can also see here that by improving factors on your actual site, such as landing pages, to try and increase the QS, you could be optimising for conversions at the same time. Extra bonus!
The other search engines have their own formulas, but share Google’s top QS factors. When you have this down, you should be able to get good QS on all PPC platforms.
PPC Hero has a fantastic handbook dedicated solely to Quality Score – it is well worth the read if you are interested in wrapping your head around the ins and outs of the ever changing QS.
Also check out:
Nice Leila, after all these years you must have become a master on Quality Score!
Posted by Gordon Choi on 2009/08/31