PPC Tips - Understanding Quality Score

If you are using pay per click advertising to generate traffic for your website and you want to know how to improve your campaigns and become more successful its essential that you understand quality score and how it can effect your adverts.

To determine the position of your advert in the pay per click listings search engines like Google use an advertising ranking formula. A complex algorithm called quality score is used to judge how well your advert is performing. The cost per click and click through rate determine the quality score which is then used to rank adverts.

The higher your cost per click is, the higher your quality score is which then improves the rank of your advert in the pay per click listings. The cost per click is the most important factor for determining the quality score of each keyword in your campaign.

The higher your click through rate is, the higher your quality score is which then improves the rank of your advert in the pay per click listings. The click through rate is a very important factor for determining the quality score of each keyword in your campaign.

How well the advert performs over time is another important factor for determining the quality score. If you consistently have a high click through rate over a long period of time the quality score will increase because of how relevant the advert is to the website. The main aim of a search engine is to provide the most relevant websites for each keyword that is searched so you are rewarded for providing users with exactly what they are looking for.

The quality score is calculated for each individual keyword to ensure that poorly performing keywords will not affect the performance of the best performing keywords (so you don't have to worry about having many inactive keywords in your account because they will not affect your active keywords).

One thing you should never do is change the destination link for your advert because you will reset your quality score to zero if you do and you will have to start all over again. It can also make the majority of your keywords inactive and dramatically reduce the amount of clicks you receive. To avoid this situation just pause the ad group with the link you want to change and create a new ad group that is identical but has the new destination link.

Achieving a good quality score will benefit your campaign immensely. Your advert will be ranked higher, you will pay less per click, you will receive more impressions, and your contextual advertising will improve as well. You can tell if you have a good quality score if the average position of your advert is a low number (from 1.0 to 8.0), and your average cost per click for each keyword is below your actual bid (you bid $0.10 per click but the average cost is $0.06).

There are a few things that you can do to improve your quality score:

It takes time to improve the quality score of your keywords but if you optimise your campaign for best results you will be rewarded with more clicks which will then result in more sales. By taking the necessary steps to improve your quality score you will ensure that your campaign has the best possible chance of succeeding and performs at its optimum level.