Google's Quality Score

Google's New Advertising Policy

Here is everything about the Quality Score you can know, unless you work directly for Google.

So what's all of this talk about Google's Quality Score and why is it so important? Google's Quality Score is everything in Google AdWords. It's a new thing Google introduced into AdWords in 2005 and it is the reason why people are complaining about AdWords.

Basically, Google's Quality Score is a mathematical formula that Google keeps secret from everyone. The Quality Score was designed and created to help Google's search results to only display the text advertisements that meet Google's web surfers needs as best as possible.

Unfortunately, if Google doesn't think your text ad, AdGroup, keywords, Campaign, etc. isn't performing as well as it could be, you will experience things like poor advertising positions, high minimum bids, and of course “Required First Page Bids” for keywords.

Here are the important things that the Quality Score Determines:

• Your minimum required bid
• Your advertisement's ranking
• Whether or not your keywords are displayed on the first results page or not

Here's the actual formula for Google's Quality Score:

Quality Score = (keyword's CTR, ad text relevance, keyword relevance, landing page relevance)

Unfortunately, Google doesn't give us too much information about the quality score. But I can tell you that the quality score formula looks more like this... which is a little bit more than what Google tells you:

Keyword CTR

+ Ad text relevance to keyword + Ad text relevance to landing page + Keyword relevance to landing page + Current max bid (max CPC) + Your ad's performance history + Other unknown factors

+ Your account's CTR history + Your accounts performance in the geographical region where your ads are displayed

_________________________
= Your Quality Score

Here are some of the factors that determine your overall Quality Score explained in a little bit more detail:

Your CPC – The more you pay Google per click, the higher your advertisement's position and the higher your Quality Score. Google sees your bid as the most important thing when determining your Quality Score.

Your CTR – The higher your Click Through Rate, the better Google thinks your product(s) and service(s) are, therefore your ad position will increase as well as your Quality Score.

The Historical Performance of your Advertisement – If your advertisement has been relevant to your website, has had a high CTR, and has performed well for a good bid of time, then your position and Quality Score will increase. Because of this you should NEVER Change the target URL of your Advertisement. If you do, your Quality Score will go to 0.0, and all of the progress you have made will disappear. In case you didn't read what I said earlier about changing your quality score, here's what would happen if you did change your target URL:

• Google would have to recheck your entire website and text ad for relevance.
• This would make almost all of your keywords inactive.
• You will receive about 10% as many impressions as you did before.
• You will receive hardly any clicks.

If you do decide to change your target URL, you should pause the AdGroup which contains your old URL and create an entirely new AdGroup which contains your new target URL.

The Relevance of your Ad Text – Is the overall theme of your advertisement the same as the overall theme of your website? If so then your position and Quality Score will go up.

Other Unknown Factors – Google will not release these to the public.

Ad Text Relevance to your Keyword – This means if you have your keyword in your text advertisement, Google will increase your quality score. This is why you should group your keywords into separate AdGroups by similarity.

Ad Text Relevance to Landing Page – If your text advertisement contains words that are found on your text advertisement's landing page, then Google will increase your quality score.

Keyword Relevance to Landing Page – If your keywords in your AdGroup can be found in the text of your text ad's landing page, then Google will increase your quality score.

Your quality score is calculated for each individual keyword in your account, but at the same time Google looks at the overall historical performance of your account. So if you do have some poorly performing keywords in your account, they can affect the performance of your better performing keywords.

How to Find Your Quality Score

There are two ways to find your Quality Score.

The first way is to login to your Google Account and go to the AdGroup you want to find the Quality Score for. Remember, your quality score is determined by each keyword, so each keyword will have a different quality score.

After you get into the AdGroup, click on the “Keywords” tab, and near the top of your keyword list you will see a text link titled “Customize Columns”. Click on this text link and a drop down menu will appear. From that drop down menu select “Quality Score”. Then wait for the page to load and you will see your quality score appear next to each keyword. You will want your quality score to say “Great” or “Good”. Anything else means you may need to work on it some. Here's a picture of one of my account's Quality Score:

The second way to find your quality score is to do the following:

• Look at the minimum bid for your keyword. The lower your minimum bid for your keyword, the better your quality score is for that keyword. In my opinion, any average bid below $0.05 is a very good Quality Score. Likewise the keywords which are displayed “Inactive for Search” (Your Max CPC is lower than the minimum bid Google requires) have a very poor quality score, and are most likely irrelevant.
• If you don't know how to see your minimum bids then simply create a custom report for minimum bids in the reports tab. You can search your entire account to find your minimum bids. Remember Google changes these daily, so you may want to search the past 7 days of history to get the keyword(s) average minimum bid.
• Look at the position estimates Google gives you for your keywords. The keywords with the lowest position estimates have the best quality scores.

How to Get A High Quality Score

There is no easy way to achieve an instantly high Quality Score. You can, however, do it rather quickly by optimizing your Search Campaigns the proper way. Here are some things you should consider when wanting a higher Quality Score:

1. Are you putting your related keywords into separate AdGroups and optimizing the ad text to be related to your keywords?
2. Are you putting your high performing keywords into the ad text's title and/or description?
3. Are you deleting the text ads which are performing poorly and replacing them with new text ads so the majority of your advertisements have a high CTR?
4. Did you accidentally adjust your destination URL?
5. Are you increasing your keyword bids so the majority of your Advertisements are displayed on the first search page?
6. Is your daily budget high enough so you are receiving the most amount of traffic?
7. Are you removing the keywords from your AdGroup that have a poor quality score and putting the poor performing keywords in a new AdGroup of their own?

Now you know how AdWords advertisements are ranked, how to achieve a high ranking, and how to adjust the bids for your keywords to help give you more traffic.

Your keywords now should be generating a fairly decent amount of traffic. Of course this depends on how new your Google Account is. If your account is three days old or less, then you may have to wait a few days before Google approves your account. You will still receive some traffic, but you will only receive 100% of the traffic after your Google Account is approved by a Google employee. Unfortunately, Google doesn't tell you if or when an employee will review your account, but it usually takes 1-3 business days.

You should begin to receive sales within a few days. If you don't begin to receive sales, don't worry. I know it would be a difficult thing to ignore but you need to make sure that it is the websites fault with the sales. Here's a good way to determine this:

A good website will bring in about 1 sale for every 100 targeted visitors (targeted visitors means that the people were searching for your product, and didn't just happen to click on it because they were bored). Now, this depends on many things, such as the price, the popularity, and the demand. But most good websites should average 1 sale for every 100-300 targeted visitors. If it takes more visitors than that, it will probably mean that you have spent more than you would have received in commission from a sale.

Make sure your bid prices are not too high. It is easier to determine this when you have more sales coming in, but don't make your bids too high if you have few sales coming in.

The Quality Score Triangle

Occasionally when you know a lot about a subject, things come together and make sense. One of these things is the “Quality Score Triangle”. The Quality Score Triangle is a term I came up with, so you probably won't find it on Google.

This will probably help explain why some of your keywords are inactive for search (if you're a current AdWords advertiser) even though you think they may be very relevant to the website you're advertising. Please note, this may be difficult to do if you're a beginner with Google AdWords. If you are a beginner I don't recommend attempting this yet.

The Quality Score Triangle is something I came up with to better explain how Google's relevancy works. Basically Google looks at three things to determine how relevant your keywords and advertisements are. These three things are: Your Keyword The text in your text advertisement The text on your landing page.

If your keyword is relevant to the text in your advertisement as well as your landing page and vies versa, then you will have a very relevant text advertisement giving you a higher quality score.

So how can you make your text advertisement more relevant? This will be easier to explain in an example.

Let's say you are selling televisions on Google. And you want the keyword “plasma TV for sale” to be very relevant (in Google's eyes) to your webpage. The way to do this would be to put the phrase “plasma TV for sale” and all of the other keywords that contain all the words “plasma”, “tv”, and “sale” into an AdGroup titled “Plasma TV Sale”.

Now that you have all your keywords grouped you will need to find some relevant text on the landing page you're using. You will want to see the words “plasma”, “tv”, and “sale” in text somewhere on the landing page. If you can't find any of these words on your landing page then this keyword isn't going to be very relevant to your website. Ideally the most relevant websites would have this somewhere in the destination URL (like: websiteexample.com/plasma-tv-sale.html), the title of the website (in the title bar), and bolded. But this can't be the case unless you're designing your own website (which we will talk about later).

So now you have your keyword relevant to your website which is very good. All you have left to do is finish it by making your text advertisement relevant to both your website and your keyword.

The easiest way to do this is to include this keyword into your text advertisement. Doing this will let Google see that the keyword is relevant to your website as well as your text advertisement, which will give you a very high relevancy score, thus increasing your Quality Score.

Here's an example of what this advertisement may look like below:

Online Plasma TV Sale Name Brand Plasma TVs for Sale Limited Quantity - Free Shipping

Now this text advertisement would be even more relevant if the webpage also contains the words “Online”, “name brand”, “limited quantity”, and “free shipping”. This is because your text advertisement would be even more relevant to your website.

You can easily replicate what I've done above on other websites and text ads. Just replace the “plasma TV sale” keywords with those of your own.

How to Beat Google's New Policy Change

Most people didn't know what to do about the policy change, and several advertisers profits fell dramatically. Here are four things advertisers did to fix their problem:

1. Wanting a “Quick Fix” most advertisers simply changed their URL, which activated their ads for a day or two until Google caught on (if you keep on doing this, you will agitate Google enough to where they will ban you from AdWords).
2. Other advertisers increased their bids to what Google recommended (this isn't a good decision either, because if Google didn't think your site was desirable enough to start with, then they certainly aren't going to suddenly think it's going to be desirable when you increase your bid. Keep doing this and Google will keep increasing your required bid).
3. Some people simply left Google AdWords completely.
4. Those remaining were either unaffected by the policy change or knew exactly what to do to fix it.

So...How Do You Fix the Policy Change?

You can fix the policy change and completely reverse the negative results by giving Google exactly what they want out of a website. You give them both Quality and Content.

One Thing Everyone Needs to Remember…

Although the new policy change makes it look like your account is not performing well at all by inactivating a large majority of your keywords, you can still receive massive amounts of traffic. Even though your keywords are Poor Quality, you will still receive traffic through Google's Content (Contextual) Network. Remember, you can specify different bids for the content network and the search network, so if you're having to increase your bids to $0.20 per click in the search network, you can still keep your bids at $0.10 per click for the contextual network. You can access this feature by going into your campaign settings and click on the check box that says “Specify Different Bids for Contextual Network”.

Easier Said Then Done...

You may think that doesn't sound difficult to do, which if you think about it, it's really not. But your idea of a content full and high quality website is probably very different from Google's idea. Since this book is read by both Affiliates and Website owners, I'm going to tell each exactly what to do to begin receiving the highest amount of high converting traffic possible. The first section is for Affiliates only, and the second section is for Website owners (this include those of you who create your own landing page).

What Affiliates Need to Do to Beat Google's New Policy

First off, you're going to need to stop promoting the websites that Google hates. That means you should try to avoid the following:

• Websites with little or irrelevant text on their home page
• Websites that have AdSense advertisements on them
• Websites that are already being heavily advertised
• Websites with duplicate content on each page
• Websites that force you to sign up for an email news letter
• Websites without a privacy policy
• Websites that are confusing or tricky
• Websites that are borderline illegal
• Other factors you may want to avoid

Websites with little or irrelevant text on their homepage – Don't advertise for websites which have little text or irrelevant text on their landing page. This includes websites which place a large amount of text in their pictures. Here's an easy way to figure out how much text is on a website: If you can't highlight it, it means Google cannot read it. WebPages should have at least 150-250 words on their home page.

Below I show you how to use the following tool to tell you how many words are on the webpage, and how find how relevant the words on the page are to their product.