Quality score is a very important factor when managing your Google AdWords account, it can in fact make or break your pay per click campaign. In this post we will discuss what quality score is and how you can improve it.

So lets start out by explaining what a quality score actually is. Simply, it is a score that Google AdWords  places on a keyword you are bidding on every time it matches a search query. It looks at a number of different factors to measure how relevant the keyword is to the phrase that has been entered. This then influence a number of factors including:

• Actual Cost Per Click
• Position your ad will be placed
• First Page Bids estimates of that keyword

To keep things open, Google informs advertisers what the quality score of their keywords is in the AdWords account within the Callout bubble in the “Status” column. When hovered over an image like the below will appear:

The definitions of the score are:
1 – 3 Poor
4 – 7 OK
8 – 10 Great

So, a high Quality Score means that your ad will be placed in a higher position on the sponsored listings, whilst receiving a lower Cost per Click (CPC).

Therefore, you can see why exactly it is an important factor in your AdWords account and why it needs be be high, but how exactly can you achieve this?

Well, first of all we need to understand the components of the account which affect your quality score. Whilst Google have not released all, we do know that the core basics are:

• The quality and relevance of the landing pages
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The relevance of the keyword to the search query
• The relevance of the Ad Text to the search query
• Your account’s geographical performance
• Your account history

You may notice the one word that is a theme of the above, “Relevance”.

Google needs to understand that you are not just bidding on the keyword, that the keyword is relevant to the Ad Group it is placed in, that the Ad Text is relevant to your landing pages and is also relevant to the keyword. Then it will look at the performance history of the account. As you can see, this is no mean feat.

The best ways to improve your quality score are too large for this post, so I think its best that we dedicate a whole post to it. For more information on quality score read the post “How Do You Improve Your Google AdWords Quality Score“.