The Google Adwords Quality Score is a bit of an enigma to most people who run their own Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing campaigns. This is because there are multiple factors involved, several of which are confidential to Google. The importance of the quality score, however, cannot be understated because it determines your position on sponsored results pages, and a page with a higher quality score can get a top ad position at a lower cost per click than the ad below it. High volume advertisers who pay better attention to quality score could potentially save hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on the same amount of traffic. Smaller businesses could still save tens of thousands of dollars, and get better online exposure or more clicks in general.

In order to understand the Adwords Quality Score, it is necessary to understand some of the history of Google Adwords, and Pay-Per-Click in general. PPC ads originally had been based on an “auction” method, where the highest bid on a keyword got the top spot. Search engines really didn’t care where the keyword landed, or even if the keyword was relevant to landing page content. Early on, Google Adwords adopted a different method for showing ads, where a higher click through rate (CTR) would result in better ad placement. In a manner of speaking, Google would rather make a nickel ten times than a quarter once. This still didn’t stop people from sending cheap traffic to barely relevant pages. Google prides itself on relevance, so it instituted a quality score which uses various algorithms to ensure that the keyword is relevant to the web page. MSN Adcenter and Yahoo Search Marketing also have followed suit with similar page quality guidelines.

In the course of our everyday PPC management work at Web.com Search Agency, we have compiled a useful set of guideline for PPC quality management. Here are some hints on how to improve your quality score:

1. Read Google’s Quality Score Guidelines. Google updates this list regularly, and you may find a new quality improvement factor that is affecting your keywords.
2. Improve Your Landing Page and Content. If you have a batch of keywords landing on a particular page, make sure that most variations of the keyword are visible on the page. This does not mean that you should stuff every variation into the content, but the highest volume words should be represented. Ideally, having the main keyword in the page title and an H1 tag would be a good idea as well.
3. Build a history. Quality score is based on data related to your account, your ads, and your keywords. New accounts are going to experience a lag in exposure, which sometimes has to be overcome by high bidding. It can take a few weeks for keywords and ads to settle in their proper positions.
4. Make better ads. Click through rate improves ad position. You want to create ads that are relevant to the products or services on the landing pages. You may want to use dynamic match, which has been shown to increase clickthrough and conversion rates when used properly.
5. Don’t delete or edit old ads, pause them! Any time an ad is edited, its quality score resets. If you’re creating new ads, it is best to let the old ones run while the new ones build a history, so you don’t experience a sharp drop in traffic. If you’re using the Adwords Editor to make wholesale changes, you can experience a huge disruption if you aren’t feathering in new ads. Note that your keyword destination URL can be different than your ad’s destination, and a similar effect may occur if these destinations all change at the same time.
6. Create specialized landing pages. One of the advantages of PPC is that you can land people on highly specialized pages that regular users will never see. Every keyword could potentially have its own landing page, but most people group pages by a set of keywords. You have the potential to adjust your quality score upward and test out new page elements at the same time, and you can prevent “duplicate content” SEO issues by placing your ads in a folder not visible to normal search engine spiders.
7. Get rid of poor performers. If you have keywords that aren’t relevant enough, you should take them out of your adgroup. Generally speaking, smaller adgroups with tight sets of focused keywords tend to perform better. This also allows you to customize your ads for better keyword topic matching.
8. Throw your landing page into the Google Keyword Tool. There is a feature on this tool that lets Google spider a page, and you can see what types of keywords Google thinks are relevant to the page. This tool will also show you potential broad match terms that might land people on your page, so you can use negative matching to filter out bad matches.

A final potential dividend that comes with improving your Quality Score is a higher conversion rate. Through its scoring system, Google is ensuring that the content on your site matches the keywords on your landing page. If you make your landing page keywords more prominent, people are more likely to look around the site and follow the sales process to its conclusion. In a manner of speaking, your PPC ad makes a promise, and your on-page content keeps it. Therefore, the work you do to improve your quality score saves you money, improves the prominence of your website, and earns a higher profit when people arrive at your website. Investing in a better quality score simultaneously serves as a cost-cutting and profit-increasing initiative, and should be a major part of any company’s continuous improvement process.