“Quality Score is the basis for measuring the quality and relevance of your ads and determining your minimum CPC bid for Google and the search network. This score is determined by your keyword’s click through rate (CTR) on Google, and the relevance of your ad text, keyword, and landing page.”

Quality Score, as the name suggests, is a quality scoring method for Pay per Click Ads. It is an assessment by Google AdWords (and now other search engines) of an individual keyword and its ad, which, in combination with the bid amount determines the ranking of the ad relative to competitors.

The primary factor for determining Quality Score is the click through rate (CTR) for each ad, but Google also considers the match between the keyword and the occurrence of the keyword in the ad copy, historical click through rates, and the engagement of the searcher when they click through to the site as well as the speed at which the page loads.

Components of Google Quality score:

• Landing page quality
• Landing page load time
• Ad copy relevancy
• Keyword relevancy
• Keyword CTR on Google Search Network (not syndication or content networks)
• CTR history based on exponential moving average (more emphasis on recent history)
• Total Account Spend

The 5 Different Types of Quality Score

• Keyword Quality Score – determined by landing page quality, ad copy relevancy, keyword relevancy, keyword CTR, and CTR history
• Ad group Quality Score – determined by an average of individual keyword quality scores
• Account Quality Score – determined by a combination of keyword Quality Scores, ad group Quality Score, account spend and account Quality Score history
• Ad copy Quality Score – determined by relevance of ad copy to search query and actual ad performance
• Landing page Quality Score – determined by optimization (having proper title, description, keyword, alt tags), page load time, site structure (sufficient content, least amount of JavaScript, Flash for site navigation)

Impact of Quality Score:

The purpose of quality score is to reward relevance. That is what major search engines are looking to deliver to their customers through their paid and natural listings and by focusing on the relevance of our ads we can achieve better results. Of course, the use of a quality score is also smart from a search engine’s point of view since it reduces the transparency of the bidding process and encourages higher bids to overcome deficiency in other aspects of the campaign.

A higher quality score of a keyword is a key goal for a search marketer since it should deliver better campaign performance through:

• A higher ad position within search results for that keyword at a given bid amount
• A lower minimum bid amount necessary for an ad to be served for the keyword that triggers it. Ads with a low quality score may not be displayed until a higher amount is bid.

Thus a better quality score will enable a search engine marketer to maximize his/her performance and help in improving other PPC matrices such as:

• Margin (Revenue-Cost)
• Margin% (Revenue-Cost/Revenue)
• ROI (Revenue-Cost/Cost)

Overall, Quality Score is an unconditional factor to decrease your campaign spend and simultaneously increasing your ROI.

Google Adwords: The 5 Different Quality Scores is a post from: Response Marketing Blog - Search Engine Marketing by Mediarun