On your way to master Google AdWords there is one extremely critical thing that you have to understand as good as possible: the Google AdWords Quality Score.

I’m sure you know a lot of it and probably you are a little frustrated about getting a great quality score for your keywords. That will change. If you are not familiar with this concept, please stop and learn the basics, because you can waste a lot of money, if you don’t know the implications of a poor vs. a great quality score.

Why would you want to have a Great Quality Score ?

Answer: Because you will make (much) more money with it.

Just in case you don’t know: every keyword has a Quality Score between 1 to 10 assigned to it:

1-4 is considered “Poor”
5-7 is “Ok”
8-10 is “Great

If you have a poor quality score you can literally pay 10 times more for a keyword as if you would have a great one. This means getting to great is the key to the lowest bid price which is a key to making the most money out of your campaign.

Google has introduced the Quality Score into it’s AdWords to reward good advertisers and “punish” bad ones. In Google’s eyes a good advertiser is basically one that is relevant to what the user searched for.

There are different aspects that will have an impact of a campaign on AdWords: your account history (the quality of all of your campaigns) and also the quality of the whole AdGroup you are in. And you have to get both parts right also, in order to profit the most with AdWords. Here I want to talk mainly about the Quality Score on the keyword level: Google assigns a Quality Score for every specific keyword (regardless of match type, so “keyword” and [keyword] share the same quality score, at least to my extensive observation).

The final position of your ad is still determined by your bid price, but you can lower it drastically by a good Quality Score.

The 3 Parts of the Quality Score

Take a look at this video by Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian, explaining the impact of Quality Score on your bid price (starting at around 2:00):

So the 3 parts for a better Quality Score and therefore a lower bid price are in order of importance:

1. Click Trough Rate (CTR) of the ad per keyword

CTR is by far the most important thing to improve your Quality Score. It is the direct response from the user to your ad, since it measures how many people that search for your keyword, click on your ad. If your CTR is high, Google makes the most money and you get the most possible users to your landing page. It also means your ad relates to the users and is relevant and Google is rewarding you with a good quality score and lower bid prices.

Here are some tips of what you should do to improve your ads CTR:

• Play “Beat the Winner!” by constantly improving your ad copy and split test new ads against the currently best ad
• be different: try to stand out of the crowd of the other ads, be unique
• using special chars in ad copy if appropriate, like (- or “” or TM)
• use Capitalization of the first letter in the ad text (“Learn How To Improve …”)
• include a strong call to action (“Get Your Free Copy Today!”, “Order Here Now!”)
• state the benefits for the user (“Earn 10k More with …”)
• be specific (“Lose 10lbs in 14 Days.”)
• including a question, promise of benefits, problem-solution
• use and talk to emotions (“Feel Great, Be Free …”)
• using the whole ad, i.e. adding keyword to the display URL

2. Relevancy of Keywords with Ad and Landing Page

• make new AdGroups for the keyword(s) with a special ad for it, avoiding to have only one ad for a buch of semi-related keywords (this method is also called “Peel & Stick”)
• include your keyword in ad copy (you can use keyword insertion, but don’t overdo it)
• include the keyword in the domain or path (www.keywordindomain.com/keyword-in-path/)
• create a subdomain of the keyword (i.e. keyword.yoursite.com)

3. Landing Page Quality

• include keyword(s) in best on-page SEO techniques (title, h1 etc.)
• include LSI keywords (from AdWords keyword tool)
• write unique content (Question to discuss: How important is unique here, what about i.e. wikipedia-quotes? Who has experiences?)
• add links to authority sites (.gov .edu and wikipedia)
• add “contact”, “about”, “privacy policy”, “terms and conditions”
• add more content than the landing page (create a whole site with relevant (!) content)

So,

How do I get my keyword to a 10/10 “Great”?

… and pay only half as much per click? If you start a campaign you will get an initial Quality Score for your keywords. This is determined by Google by your account history, especially for this keyword if you have already used it, and on the general performance and quality of this keyword on the whole AdWords system. From the moment on you run your first ad on Google Search your Quality Score will be calculated.

First make sure you don’t make anything totally wrong, like using unrelated keywords of have a landing page without real content. Then …

This is the #1 Factor: Focus mostly on improving the CTR by creating a better ad. If you get a relatively high CTR your Quality Score will move up over time and your bid prices will go down. Also very important to know by the way: CTR’s are measured by ad position. That means a CTR of 1% maybe poor if you are on spot 1. If you are on spot 9 however, 1% may be considered great! So it doesn’t make sense to bid sky high to get a top position and an average CTR for spot #1.

Secondly improve the Relevancy of your keyword (what the user is typing into Google) and your ad and landing page. You can do this by implementing the above bullet points.

Last but not least, you must give the system some time, while you work on your running campaign. I have seen improving my campaigns over a period of 1-2 weeks, constantly getting lower bid prices (“First Page Bids“) and higher Quality Scores.

I wish you the best luck and please comment about your successes, experiences as well as any questions! I will answer them all.

Related posts:

1. How to Start a Google Adwords Campaign
2. Low Impressions on the Content Network ?