AdWords Quality Score: Your Most Important AdWords Metric

AdWords Quality Score is perhaps one of, if not the most, important metrics available in your AdWords account. However, few AdWords advertisers understand Quality Score, and as a result they don’t optimize and improve it.

This is a big deal because Quality Score largely determines the cost-per-click you will pay, in what position your ads will how, and finally, if they will show at all – the phrase “Rarely shown due to low quality score” is all too common in the Keywords view of many clients’ AdWords accounts when they approach me for help.

Here are the key components that make up your AdWords Quality Score (at least the known ones – Google is a bit secretive about this):

1. Clickthrough rate (CTR): This is huge. If your CTR, the percentage of people who see your ad and click on it, is too low, your quality score will go down with it. To get around this problem, see this article on shortcuts to high clickthrough rates.

2. Keyword relevancy to ad copy: This is fairly simple to achieve. It consists of having keywords, or individual words that make up your search phrases, actually appearing in your ads, either in the headline, in the body, or even both. This is why it’s crucially important to have tightly-themed ad groups. If you throw 500 keyword phrases into an ad group, it will be literally impossible to come up with ad copy that is relevant to all of them. So limit your ad groups to no more than about 50 keyword phrases each, and keep them relevant to each other and to the ad copy.

3. Keyword relevancy to landing page: This is growing in importance (though Google hasn’t reached the level they have over at MSN/Microsoft adCenter where they are extremely picky about keyword-to-page relevancy). If the individual keyword phrases that triggers an ad isn’t relevant to the landing page, your quality score will suffer, costs will go up, and ad positions will drop. The solution here is to have multiple landing pages on your site(s). This is easy to accomplish, because if you follow the advice in step 2 above, when you create those tightly-themed ad groups and ad copy, create relevant landing pages to go along with them.

4. Your site’s speed and load time: This one is little-known and largely overlooked, but AdWords analyzes your landing pages’ load time, and penalizes your Quality Score for poor performance. So if you’re still using one of those cheapo $10/month shared hosting accounts, you really need to think about whether it’s worth the savings. Bumping up to a dedicated server for $200-300/month can potentially save you thousands in wasted AdWords costs!

5. Your site design and layout: This has to do with having full navigation on all pages, including landing pages, and avoiding squeeze pages.

Follow these five simple steps to improve your AdWords Quality Score, and watch your return on investment and profits quickly improve!