After you have set up your PPC campaign Google gives each keyword in your campaign a quality score.

Quality score can range between 1- 10 with 1 being the worst score and 10 being the best.

If you have a low quality score you can end up spending between $5-$10 per click.

Google uses your quality score to determine your ad position and keyword bid price.

If you have a high quality score you will find that your Cost per Click (CPC) will be a lot lower and your ad position will be higher.

It is important to ensure that your quality score is high, otherwise you could end up bidding allot more than the advertiser in position one only to find your ad is appearing at the bottom of page. By improving your quality score you can in turn reduce your CPC which will result in an improved ROI (if the keyword in question previously converted for you)

4 Components of Quality Score

Google quality score has 4 components: Ad relevancy, history, Click-thru-rate (CTR) and landing page quality.

1. Ad Relevancy – Google judges your quality on how relevant your ads are to your keywords. Small ad groups with tightly related keywords are the way forward, if possible just use one keyword per ad group and then include the keyword in the headline. This will automatically make your keyword highly relevant to the ad copy.
2. CTR –If your ad copy has a high CTR you will be rewarded with lower CPC, justification being if your ad has a high CTR it must be relevant to the users search term and thus improving the user experience. I would recommend continually split testing your ads to improve your CTR.
3. History – Google rewards customers who have been with them the longest. By looking at account history Google can identify who the long term, high quality advertisers are.
4. Landing Page Quality – It is important that your landing page is relevant and optimized for the keyword you are targeting. Google wants to provide its users with a fantastic experience; poorly optimized landing pages don’t provide this experience and thus you will be penalized with higher CPC’s.

So how can I improve my Quality Score?

a)      Good account management – ensure keywords are in small tightly related ad groups & keep an eye on keyword impressions; you don’t want keywords generating high impressions and no clicks.

b)      Split test Ads

c)       Build quality landing pages with relevant copy.

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