Today I thought I’d take some time to cover a somewhat mysterious topic to some, and hopefully dispel some myths about the Adwords Quality Score.

There are some major misconceptions about how the Adwords quality score works, how it’s calculated, and what is required to “beat” Adwords and obtain a good quality score.

First off, some of what I want to talk about is based upon information provided directly from Google. But secondly, my own tests have shown that the secret to the magical “10″ Quality Score, isn’t actually all that difficult to obtain and can easily be achieved if you put your copywriter’s hat on.

But first, what does Google say about how the quality score is calculated? I think this video sums it up very nicely and will clear up some of the major misconceptions: {click to continue}
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7l0a2PVhPQ

Ok, so now that you’ve heard it from the horse’s mouth, let’s discuss some of these quality factors in detail.

1) Click Thru Rate – The grand daddy of the quality score equation, being given probably in the neighborhood of 60% of the quality factor. Google doesn’t tell us the exact percentage at which CTR is weighed, but as the video explains your Ad Quality matters most. Obviously your CTR is going to be determined by a factor of your bid, position, and your ad copy. You can bid high, paying for premium positions and try to get enough clicks to eventually keep you there at a cheaper price.

Focus on your ad copy though by split testing ads, and evaluating the ad landscape. If everyone seems to have the same type of language in their ad, attempt to do something different and stand out. By all means, definitely use the keyword in the headline. Use weird characters, numbers, and be over the top with your ad copy.

By pulling in the clicks, you’ll eventually be able to improve your quality score, which will help lower your bids while keeping you at premium positions. Aim for CTRs at 20-40% over most keywords and you’ll soon see your quality scores start to rise.

2) Relevance & Campaign Structure – Keeping tight relevance between your adgroups, ad copy, and landing page copy is key. In fact, due to building smaller but more tightly focused ad groups & keywords, (along with a  little content stuffing), I’ve lately been having great success simply iframing my affiliate links, achieving 7 – 10 quality scores across all keywords in the campaign.

You might think that this would be temporary and eventually the Google bot would come back and score me lower: but a 6 month old iframing campaign has yet to drop below a 7 in quality score. Again, CTR is why I am able to hold these high quality scores over time.

In my opinion, gone are the days of 2000 adgroup / 10,000 keyword campaigns. They are very time consuming to setup, and even harder to maintain.

Remember, Google wants relevance, not resource intensive bloated campaigns. The 80/20 rule applies to Adwords, just as it does to many areas of life. 80% of your conversions will come from just 20% of your keywords, so stay tight and relevant and focus on those 20%.

SamuraiTips: If you’re in a big market, find 10 of the highest volume keywords related to your offer and work on just those. Bid only on the exact match variation, 1 keyword per adgroup, split testing your ad copy. Bid high in the beginning to get your CTR up, then drop down in small increments. Your goal should be to get a quality score 10 on all of these keywords, because once you do…you’re now simply in a bidding war with other advertisers.

This is great because you don’t need to bother with negative keywords and tracking is much easier. Once you have your quality scores at 10’s and have built up some campaign history, you can then expand into the phrase and broad matched keywords.

3) Account History - Though I’ve recently had more successes with small direct link iframed campaigns vs big content landers, this doesn’t mean that you will also.  A lot of this has to do with my account history. Like many affiliates, some of my campaigns do well while probably 7 out of 10 tank.

But I’m gonna let you in on a little secret: Find a small niche, dominate it over time, keeping your CTRs high. Even if you have a small niche campaign that really amounts to only a couple hundred or thousand dollars each month, the fact that you can achieve and maintain 10’s across the entire campaign will go a long way in helping you achieve high quality scores with future campaigns.

I proved this to myself to be very true when copying a very successful campaign (all 10’s) and running it under a separate account. All things being equal…my bids were about 30% higher, and I couldn’t achieve more than a 7 on most keywords. Keep your campaigns tight and your account history clean and you’ll see that achieving better quality scores won’t be as difficult.

4) Landing Page Optimization - Try to make sure your landing pages load as fast as possible. Optimize your images and CSS, remove unnecessary code and calls to external sources. You can go crazy and do things such as compressing your css, javascript code, etc…but normally that’s not needed. Just keep your image file size down and external script calls to a minimum if possible.

Also, use Google Analytics or GetClicky (better than GA in my opinion) to monitor your bounce rate. If you’re in the 80-90% range, try sticking a relevant 2 minute Youtube video somewhere on your page (preferably above the fold). I’ve noticed that by using video and optimizing page copy, I am usually able to get my bounce rate in the 40-60% range, also helping with my quality scores.

Dynamic Insertion (Specifically for Speed PPC users): Here’s some code you can insert at the top of your landing pages to call all the necessary Speed PPC (save $100 with this link) tokens you might use.

I’ve shortened the syntax to keep the URLs short ($seed=s) Also note the Tracking202 “t202kw” variable which you can easily insert on your landing pages using <? echo $keyword; ?>.

<!—place at top of lp, above opening <head> tag—>
<?php require(“tokens.php”);?>

<!—creata file called “tokens.php” with this code—>:

<?
$seed = $_GET['s'];
$seed = ucwords(strtolower($seed));
$expansion = $_GET['e'];
$expansion = ucwords(strtolower($expansion));
$final = $_GET['f'];
$final = ucwords(strtolower($final));
$keyword = $_GET['t202kw'];
if ($_GET['OVKEY']) { $keyword = $_GET['OVKEY']; }
$keyword = ucwords(strtolower($keyword));
?>

5) SEO – By following some of the standard SEO practices, even though you’re doing PPC, you can further improve your quality score with on page and off page optimization. I won’t go into too many of the details, but you should be optimizing your meta data such as page title, keywords, and description.

Throw in some hidden site navigation to make the spiders follow any links you have to interior pages, while hiding them from your users. You can even go the SILO site route, optimizing your landing pages around a particular keyword theme.  Gauher Chaudry from PayPerClick Formula had some good tips on creating a SILO structured website in his CoolCashEzine.

Once you’ve optimized your onpage SEO, you’ll want to get some inbound links from social bookmarking sites (or use bookmarking demon) and Web 2.0 portals like Squidoo and Hubpages. Not only can these sites bring you some good quality traffic and sometimes even pagerank,  you might also rank multiple times in the search engines for the same keyword.  Who doesn’t like a little free traffic?

As you can see, there are quite a lot of factors that influence the Adwords quality score. But it’s not as mysterious as some make it out to be. Focus on CTR first, and I think you’ll see that sometimes a QS 10 is only a few tweaks away.

I’m considering blogging about my iframing structure to achieving 7-10s on direct linking iframed campaigns, but haven’t yet decided. I’ve been putting off building a list, so perhaps this strategy will be a signup incentive if I decide to go that route.

Leave me some feedback and be sure to tell me your quality score woes and successes.

Peace!

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Filed under: Google Adwords • Pay Per Click

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