What You Should Know About Google’s Quality Score (or, How to Save 50% on AdWords)

This illustrates the important Quality Score factors that affect your Quality Score in Google AdWords. A high Quality Score can significantly reduce the cost of your AdWords spend.

If you’re a Google AdWords advertiser selling car, truck, ATV or motorcycle parts and accessories, you may already know the importance of your Quality Score. You might not know how it affects your bid or how to improve it, so we thought this would be helpful.

(Why you should improve it and reduce bid costs is at the bottom of this article.)

AdWords Quality Score factors

Our diagram at the left shows the factors that determine your Google AdWords Quality Score for keywords. Your QS can run from 1 (bad) to 10 (good).

The most important factor is click-through rate (CTR) including how many times your keyword produced clicks on your ad and how often your display URL was clicked. Next is keyword relevance, or how well your keyword matches what a shopper is searching for.

Lower in importance is how relevant your keyword is to your ad, the quality of your landing page, your account’s historic performance, your targeted geography and other relevancy factors.

Here are a couple of ways to think about how to improve Quality Score. Let’s say you sell ATV accessories so you have an ad for “ATV accessories.” Since most ATV owners probably don’t wake up thinking today’s the day to buy an “accessory,” more targeted keywords like “racks for ATVs” would have more clicks and would contribute to a higher Quality Score.

Likewise, if you sell motorcycle apparel, an ad for motorcycle helmets should go to a landing page for helmets and not to your home page or a landing page of general apparel including jackets. That would benefit your “motorcycle helmet” keyword Quality Score by directing customers to a higher quality landing page.

To check your Quality Score in AdWords look in the Keywords tab and get to work on any low scores you find.

Why Google’s Quality Score is important

That question leads us back to our cheesy headline, “How to Save 50% on AdWords.” When you have a high quality score you pay less for a click.

Your Quality Score is a ten-point scale from 1 to 10. Larry Kim tells us the average Quality Score today is 5. When your Quality Score is a 1 Google will charge you about 400% more for a click than if it was a 5! On the other hand, if your Quality Score is a 10 you benefit from a 50% discount compared to a score of 5. That can produce substantial savings for an AdWords account.

One strategy to improve Quality Score is to make sure you bid on your brand keywords (this is part of the brand/non-brand debate which we’ll cover in another blog post in the near future). Shoppers looking for you are likely to click when they see your company name, so you’re getting high click-through rates from brand keywords, helping your Quality Score.

If you sell auto, truck, motorcycle or ATV parts or accessories and have any questions on running an effective AdWords campaign and improving your ROI, give us a call before or after the SEMA Show and AAPEX.

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