I have written several posts on Quality Score, but I recently found two articles on the subject that make it worth revisiting. Quality Score is Google’s way of assessing how relevant your paid search keywords are to the searchers you’re targeting. 

This article by by Craig Danuloff discusses  in monetary terms what the real costs of a low-quality-score are and this recent article, also by by Danuloff suggests 5 Steps to Improve Your Quality Score.

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Google just published updated information on ‘Quality Score’ and how is it calculated. Quality Score is a major factor in determining what advertisers pay for ad phrases.

I believe this is the clearest information so far on this import, evolving algorithm.
What is ‘Quality Score’ and how is it calculated?

Past Articles:

• How Google AdWords Bidding Works – Quality Score
• Landing Pages to Improve Quality Score
• PPC Campaigns and Quality Score
• Chasing the Long Tail

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Great article that explains Google’s AdWords auction process. No real insight into Quality Score here, but it does explain how it figures in the mix.

Google Quality Scores and Ad Auctions

Added 11/08/2008

More on Quality Score woes here:
The Account Quality Score: Money Pit for the Uninformed
Google’s Ever-Evolving Quality Score

Added 11/11/08
Google AdWords Quality Score — That’s Old-School for SEO

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I have been on a mission with several of my clients to establish good landing pages. Good landing pages can improve Quality Score and your rank for key phrases. A good Quality Score means Google considers your page to be relevant to the phrases used in your ad campaigns and directly impacts what you pay Google for your ads.

This test demonstrates the real dollar impact (savings), when it’s done right.
see: Landing Pages to Improve Quality Score

Google suggests:

• Edit your keyword and ad text so they clearly relate to each other and accurately describe your landing page.
• Choose keywords that target your audience. What terms would your customers use to describe your products or services? Use the Keyword Tool for help.
• Optimize your ad text to include your keyword and a call-to-action (such as purchase or sign up).

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Google recently announced changes to its approach to Quality Score. Quality Score is the bane of my existence. It turns previous ‘best practices’ into bad practices and dooms the long-tail to obscurity.

Sure it makes sense to have the keywords relevant to the ad and the landing page relevant (duh!), but in practice Google weighs click thru rates (CTR) in the overall campaign to judge what you should be paying and if your CTR drops too low for the ad group, you’ll receive a Quality score minimum bid “penalty” of $5 or $10.  This means you need maintain only small campaigns grouped with only top performing keywords.

Unfortunately when you launch a new campaign you don’t know what your top performing phrases are going to be. Many times it the second tier phrases that provide the most cost-effective conversion for your clients and finding those takes time. The problem is during the time when you are trying to build effective campaigns you are getting soaked by Quality Score penalties.

I can only hope the upcoming changes to Quality Score will improve the current strangle hold.

Here are three articles on Quality Score you may find helpful:

• Ah-Oh…PPC Feeling A Lot Like SEO
• How to Raise Your Google AdWords Landing Page Quality Score

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It appears that attitudes on mining the lesser used, but more specific “long-tail” phrases is changing. Quality Score is making it too expensive to go after these phrases. What this means is to improve the performance and lower the cost of your campaigns you need to clear out the deadwood.

If you must stubbornly clinging to your long-tail phrases, move them their own group so they aren’t needlessly impacting the Quality Score of your other campaigns.

More on this topic here in Yahoo’s Search Marketing Blog titled:
Chasing our Long Tails.

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