How Do Google Calculate Your Quality Score?
Any business owner who embarks upon an Ad Words campaign will invariably be confronted with the dreaded quality score which is applied by Google to your Ad’s.
Following a wave of confused campaigners not seeing their Ad’s appear on the list of display ads even after increasing the bid price considerably Google finally announced they were applying an additional measuring tool which they called the quality score.
In a nutshell the quality score is a measure between 1 and 10 that is applied to your Ad’s Landing Page which is calculated by Google to determine the ‘quality’ of the landing page. The primary reason for this is to grade the tens of thousands of Ad’s & related landing page url’s to ensure they meet the expectations and claims of the Ad.
In simple terms if the Ad is offering free life insurance quotes and the landing page takes the visitor to a home page instead of a dedicated life insurance quotes form this would be deemed as a negative point score. This is one of the issues but an important one and often overlooked by advertisers and can be seen by clicking through display ads yourself.
There are a number of factors that Google use to calculate your quality score, here is the extract from Google Ad Words Help which explains these factors
How we calculate Quality Score
Every time someone does a search that triggers your ad, we calculate a Quality Score. To calculate this Quality Score, we look at a number of different things related to your account, like the following:
- Your keyword’s past clickthrough rate (CTR): How often that keyword led to clicks on your ad
- Your display URL’s past CTR: How often you received clicks with your display URL
- Your account history: The overall CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
- The quality of your landing page: How relevant, transparent, and easy-to-navigate your page is
- Your keyword/ad relevance: How relevant your keyword is to your ads
- Your keyword/search relevance: How relevant your keyword is to what a customer searches for
- Geographic performance: How successful your account has been in the regions you’re targeting
- Your ad’s performance on a site: How well your ad’s been doing on this and similar sites (if you’re targeting the Display Network)
- Your targeted devices: How well your ads have been performing on different types of devices, like desktops/laptops, mobile devices, and tablets – you get different Quality Scores for different types of devices
As you can see the factors used to calculate your quality score is far from simply looking at the Ad itself and is a complex array of factors to determine your score.
In a nutshell, higher Quality Scores typically lead to lower costs and better ad positions.
Google’s explanation and justification for this very clever additional formula encourages advertisers to spend a lot more time analysing and adjusting their ad campaign.
Google states: The AdWords system works best for everybody – advertisers, customers, publishers, and Google – when the ads we show are relevant, closely matching what customers are looking for. Relevant ads tend to earn more clicks, appear in a higher position, and bring you the most success.
If you need help on improving your quality score or require clarification email keith@whdesign.co.uk
