Quality score. One thing most people “Google” because they have no idea what it is and how to get it higher or lower, and chances are you did it to find this article. In this article, I’ll tell you what Quality Score is all about, and outline a few things tips to get a higher quality score in AdWords, and recommend a tool to use for researching, creating, and managing your AdWords campaigns. First things first, there are a couple of different types of Quality Score when you are referring to different things. Keyword, Ad Group and Account level Quality Score are top tier of importance, and we’ll look into those.

Keyword Quality Score is based on a scale from 1-10, and is measured by the performance of keyword search query that match your keywords. Google calculates it’s Quality Score based on historic performance on http://Google.com. After your keyword gets a good amount of impressions, the Quality Score will reflect more a performance, less history based number. AdGroup Quality Score is a good measure to see how specific AdGroups are doing in comparison to your total account effort (account-level Qualty Score). If your overall campaign is an 8, and a specific AdGroup is 3, you know there are some issues in the Adgroup. The best way to raise your overall Quality Score is fix these lower graded scores, and to do that you can edit Ad copy or restructuring your Adwords campaign if it’s a mess. The last Quality Score to measure is Account level. Quality score is the total keyword and ad performance summed into a number. It’s mentioned that Google doesn’t place a number on this, but knowing it exists should be enough of a push to want to keep your campaigns run tight and performing well. Google favors older accounts over new accounts, and historically the older accounts that have been performing well for a longer amount of time will get better placement, and cheaper.

When trying to “cut the fat” with your Adwords campaign, it’s important to remember that pausing or deleting keywords will make the keywords less important on the account. Adding them back in later Google will see them as duplicates and the keywords will place less of a significant roll in your account-level Quality Sc ore. Try lowering the bids on keywords so they show less if you are uncertain or not if you want to delete or pause.
Google cares a lot about Quality Score because it’s their checks and balances for showing relevant ads to users search queries. To keep this system working properly, they put a lot of attention to this score and they provide benefits for maintaining a higher score. Quality score is used in equations that will decide your Ad Rank in your SERP (search engine results page) as well as being a factor in how much the Ads cost to you and how often it’s shown.

A tool I’d recommend would be WordStream’s Keyword Tools ( http://www.wordstream.com ), and recently they had just released a free AdWords Performance Keyword Grader ( http://www.wordstream.com/google-adwords ). It’s a great way to measure your PPC efforts along with very easy to use software. They are ahead of the curve then it comes to PPC management.

If you’ve taken home anything with this article, it’s QUALITY SCORE MATTERS. It has a massive affect on your account in the price you pay and your chance and success of ROI, the only things that matter.

Author Bio: Bio: Hi it’s me, Mark Vanguard. I make a living off Google AdWords consulting and have worked for companies all over the globe, remotely. I am a PPC enthusiast, all about cool tools, a writer and cook.

Category: Marketing
Keywords: marketing