Spring 2009 – Quality Score: The PPC X-Factor

Discover the power of this poorly understood paid search KPI to get more out of your search marketing campaigns.

By Craig Danuloff

Quality Score is the secret sauce in Google Adwords. It plays a critical role in nearly everything advertisers care about: when ads run, how ads rank and what ads cost on a per-click basis. Understanding it is both a competitive advantage and a money saver.

Quality Score Defined

Quality Score is Google’s way of assessing how relevant your paid search keywords are to the searchers you’re targeting. This rating is then used to determine the suitability of your ads to run against a particular keyword in a particular situation.

Quality Score does three things for Google. First, it provides a filter to prevent unwanted advertisers from showing low-quality ads. Second, it delivers a reward mechanism for top performing keywords and ads. It also makes the placement and pricing of ads somewhat opaque, so advertisers can never be precisely sure why certain things are occurring within their campaigns.

You can see the quality score of any keyword in AdWords itself, by running an AdWords Keyword Performance report, or in the interface of some paid search management tools.

Each keyword is rated on a scale of 1 to 10. Keywords that get a score of 8, 9, or 10 are considered “Great” and tend to receive higher positions at lower costs. Scores of 5, 6, or 7 are considered “OK,” although in our experience, anything below 7 is going to incur something of a penalty. Scores of 1-4 are officially “Poor” and often will result in ads that do not appear frequently–or at all.

In the world of organic search engine optimization (SEO), the secret sauce is called PageRank. In the world of pay-per-click advertising (PPC) it’s called Quality Score. Both help Google to best their competitors and keep publishers and advertisers ever so slightly in the dark about how Google’s algorithms really work.

The Importance of Quality Score

The paid search process begins when you select keywords, specify bids and write the text ads you want shown to people who search on Google. The next step is for Google to decide when and where to run your ads as people execute searches which match your keywords. This is where Quality Score comes in.

Each time someone executes a search which is matched to one of your keywords, Google determines whether your ad is eligible to be displayed. Then, they must determine in which position your ad will appear and how much you’ll have to pay for the click if the user delivers it.

To determine the position for your ad (called AdRank), the following formula is used:

As you can see, Quality Score is exactly as important as your bid. For every drop in Quality Score (or every low Quality Score that isn’t improved), your only option to stay competitive is to increase your bid.

Keywords with a low Quality Score can experience a number of different problems:

Bad Position – You bid the same as your competitors, but because you’ve got a lower quality score, you’re pushed further down the page or even off the first page.

Overpaying – A low quality score will result in your CPC taking a larger percentage of your Max Bid, and you may even have to increase your bid in order to show at all.

Low Impression Share – Inevitably, keywords with a low Quality Score–and this is very relative; if all of your competitors are getting 9s, then even a 7 is a low Quality Score–will result in your ad not appearing for many searches where it might have otherwise been displayed. These missed impressions can be seen in the Impression Share metric Google provides in their campaign performance reports.

So if you’re not minding your Quality Scores, you’re getting bad positions, overpaying and/or missing out on qualified searchers. In this economy, who can afford that?

Understanding Quality Score: Separating Myth from Fact

As is their way, Google has described and defined Quality Score, noalthought with the full degree of completeness and clarity that many of us would like to see. As advertisers, we’d like to know exactly how our keywords and ads are being judged, so we can take specific action to earn the highest scores.

Google, on the other hand, doesn’t want to reveal too much, for fear that certain advertisers will game their system and perhaps because they maintain an amazing level of control over both individual advertisers and their overall revenue stream by leaving a substantial dash of mystery in the system.

Here’s what we know about Quality Score:

Click-through Rates Rule – Quality Score is largely determined based on click-through rate (CTR). People vote with their clicks and that human “feedback” helps tell Google if an ad and landing page are appropriate for a given keyword.

Relevance Matters – Your keywords, text ads and landing pages should be aligned contextually. This doesn’t mean you have to use every keyword in your ad copy and page titles, but it isn’t a bad idea. Both Google and searchers are looking for specific, on-target information.

Deception or Poor Experience Aren’t Tolerated – Landing pages packed full of AdSense ads or promises of “free” items that aren’t really free are given extremely low Quality Scores regardless of CTR. Slow load times, missing privacy policies and other indicators of third-rate enterprises can also lead to penalties.

There Isn’t Just One Quality Score (Part I) – Although it’s talked about as if there were just one Quality Score and it is always associated with a keyword, the truth is far more complex. Quality Score at the keyword level is actually calculated at the time of each search, and takes into account the specific search query and user geography, among other attributes. So even a keyword really doesn’t have just one Quality Score.

There Isn’t Just One Quality Score (Part II) – When there isn’t enough information about a particular keyword to calculate a Quality Score, the Quality Score is influenced by the overall Quality Score history of the ad group, the campaign or even the entire account. The Quality Score history of the visible landing page URL is also considered. And if another advertiser has used a keyword before you start to use it, the Quality Score history of that keyword in the other company’s account may be applied.

You Can Take it With You – Keywords and keyword/text ad combinations hold Quality Score histories. If you delete a keyword and add it back later or in another ad group, the Quality Score history applies. If you move a keyword and text ad to a new account, the Quality Score history moves with it.

Quality Score Computations are Complex – This list is far from complete, but it gives you a good indication of the most important factors regarding Quality Score–and it shows you that Google is putting all those Ph.Ds to good use!

Improving Your Quality Scores

So what can and should you do to manage and improve your Quality Scores? The first step is education and awareness. Expect and review Quality Score reporting as much as you do bid and spend reporting. The next is to drive up your click-through rates. This is done by making sure you have tight groups of contextually related keywords in every ad group and focused, matching text ads. Methodically test your ad copy, running three to nine variations in active accounts to find the word choices, issues and calls to action that produce the highest possible CTRs. Testing ad copy can increase CTRs by two to five times–or more–and that kind of impact on CTR can have a dramatic influence on Quality Scores. Simply put: there is no more effective way to improve your PPC results. Beyond this, there are other more tactical steps you can take:

Get Darwinian – Poor-performing keywords and text ads should be improved or removed. Keywords or ad copy with CTRs that are well below their peers in any ad group can be a huge drag on your overall results. See if you can improve them through testing, but if you can’t, pause or delete them as soon as possible.

Organize for Success – Everyone has keywords and ad groups that don’t perform well, but, for one reason or another, you really need to keep them. Or maybe you have new keywords or ad groups you’re testing. Re-organize your campaigns so that these lower-performing elements are segregated from your more typical and higher performers. This keeps them from dragging down performance averages in those ad groups and campaigns.

Enable a Smooth Landing – The impact of landing pages on Quality Score is dwarfed by elements that occur on the search engines themselves. But the Quality Score improvement process forces a very healthy review of both your marketing messages and the user experience; take advantage of the mood and ensure that your landing pages satisfy consumer expectations.

Quality Matters

Quality Score is a central component in the management and success of your paid search campaigns. It has lived in the shadows of keyword selection and bidding for too long. In recent months Google has refined their calculations of Quality Score, making it somewhat easier to see and assess this information.

Serious paid search marketers should take advantage of this new information to apply Quality Score-related best practices to their campaign reporting and management.

Craig Danuloff is the founder and president of ClickEquations, an advanced paid search platform for advertisers and agencies managing large campaigns. He’s also the author of High Resolution PPC. He can be reached at craig@clickequations.com.