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Google Quality Score Explained | 
Google wants it’s customers (aka Googlers) to enjoy their search experience and so far it has done a good job. It dominates the search engine market with more visitors than all of it’s competitors combined.
It’s search engine results are considered to be the best available and Google soon realised that if it were to continue it’s domination it had to make sure the PPC ads it showed as a supplement to it’s search results also returned good results for its users.
The logic behind this is that many of Google’s users do not differentiate between a PPC ad and the actual search results so if people didn’t find what they were expecting when they clicked on an ad they would soon abandon Google for one of it’s competitors.
Relevancy
The driving force behind the Google quality score is relevancy. Each keyword you bid on needs an ad that has the term within it and then the landing page the user is sent to once he clicks your ad should be optimised for the term.
Not surprisingly, when done correctly this also results in a higher conversion rate because the visitor had a word or phrase in mind when they visited Google and typed it in. They then spotted an ad with the exact same term, clicked it and landed on a page with the term across the top of the page in big bold letters as well as sprinkled throughout the text as they read the sales letter.
Don’t follow the relevancy rules and Google simply slaps you with a high cost per click, follow it closely and they reward you with lower costs and higher positions.
Click Thru Rate
Google also takes into account your click thru rate, that is the percentage of users who click on your ad. The more folk that click your ad, the less you have to pay per click.
How does that make sense? Someone running an ad costing £2 per click that never gets clicked on makes Google nothing, your ad costing 25p per click that gets clicked 200 times a day makes Google £50.
Google rewards you with a lower CPC and punishes the ad that gets no clicks by raising it’s costs further to encourage (force) the ad owner to increase relevancy and improve performance.
Those who don’t ‘get’ the rules usually abandon Adwords at this point claiming it’s too expensive.
There are ways you can use the click thru rate rules to your advantage. By setting your initial bid as very high you are guaranteeing your ad is shown in the top spot.
If you have compelling ads and you are constantly split testing them for performance you should get a high click thru rate. After a few days you can start lowering your bids a little each day while still keeping a top spot.
The Google quality score is the reason why so many give up so quickly and consider PPC as too risky a business model.
Avoiding falling victim to a bad Google quality score requires a very good understanding of Google’s rules, many of which are unwritten.
Constantly monitoring your ads performances, ensuring relevancy between keywords, ads and landing pages for hundreds, sometimes thousands of terms requires a skill best not learnt on the fly.
We can set up and manage your PPC campaign for you and make sure you get and maintain a top quality score. This equates to lower costs and bigger profit margins for your business.
Click here to see our services.