What Is Quality Score And Why Does It Matter?
What is Quality Score?
Quality Score is essentially a scoring system that Paid Advertisement Platforms Like Google and Bing use to rate the Relevance of each individual keyword in your Pay Per Click Advertising Campaign (Considering that Google essentially pioneered the paid advertising space, all the other search engines have followed their model). In other words, “Quality score is an estimate of how relevant your ads, keywords and landing page are to a person seeing your ad. Having a high Quality Score means that our systems think your ad, keyword and landing page are all relevant and useful to someone looking at your ad. You can find out your Quality Score for any of your keywords, and there are several things that you can do to help improve your Quality Score.” (Google – Read More)
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Factors in Determining Quality Score (According to Wikipedia)
There are a number of factors that determine the Quality Score of a given ad. While each search engine has released directional information on the factors most important to them, presumably in an effort to guide their advertisers towards making better ads, none has revealed their formulas in detail. Below is a summary of what has been released.
Click-Through Rate
All three search engines have revealed that a major factor – the most important factor to Google – in their respective Quality Score formulas is the historical click-through rate (CTR) of the keyword and matched ad. In fact, prior to its introduction of Quality Score in July 2005, Google determined ad rank by running the following formula against each ad and sorting them in descending order: bid * CTR.
In addition to the CTR of the keyword and matched ad itself, Google takes into account the overall historic CTR of the entire AdWords account as well as the historic CTR of the display URLs in the ad group.
Ad Copy Relevance
All three search engines have revealed that the relevance of the ad copy to the keyword is a factor in determining Quality Score. Therefore, it can be assumed that ads with ad copy that contains the keyword will have a higher Quality Score than ads with ad copy that does not contain the keyword.
Landing Page Quality
All three search engines have revealed that landing page quality is a factor in determining Quality Score. Landing page quality generally refers to whether or not the page contains relevant and original content and the navigability of the site. In the case of MSN, they have revealed that ads with landing pages that don’t contain the keyword may be declined altogether.
Landing Page Load Time
In June 2008 Google revealed that landing page load time impacts Quality Score.
Geographical Considerations
Google has revealed that the accounts performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown impacts Quality Score.
