AdWords Tip: How to Boost Your Quality Score (in 24 Hours)

Yesterday, I helped one of our Marketing Breakthrough members clean up his AdWords account.  Together, we ran some reports and quickly saw that some of the keywords had low Quality Scores.  It didn’t take us long to see what the problem was by looking at the Keyword Status and within 24-hours we improved many keywords from a 5/10 to a 7/10 Quality Score.
 
Want to know how we did this?  It was only about 15-minutes of work and is sure to have a big impact on the campaign performance the rest of the month.
 
First, let’s get up to speed on Quality Score…

 

What is the AdWords Quality Score

The best way to think about the AdWords Quality Score is that it’s Google’s grade for your ad campaign.  If Google thinks your ads are not set up properly, then you’ll get a low grade of 1-3 out of 10.  If your ads are above average, then you’ll get a grade of 7, 8, 9, or even a perfect 10/10.
 
Your grade is then multiplied by your bid to determine your Ad Rank.  So a higher Quality Score leads to a higher Ad Rank, which means you’ll be ranked higher on the page.  If you do the math, you can also see that you don’t need to bid as high as your competitors to outrank them if you have a higher quality score.  For example, if you have a 10/10 quality score while bidding $2, and your competitor has a 5/10 quality score bidding $3, then you’ll outrank your competitor.
 

(10 QS) x ($2 bid) = 20 Ad Rank
(5 QS) x ($3 bid) = 15 Ad Rank

 

Again, the higher the Ad Rank, the better ad position you’ll have in the search results.  So in this example, a $2 bid would outrank a $3 bid.  Clearly, quality score is a huge leverage point in any AdWords campaign and that’s why it was the focus of my call yesterday.
 

How to Check Your Quality Scores

To check your current keyword quality scores, go to the Keywords tab in your AdWords account.  Under the “Status” column, you’ll most likely see “Eligible” along with an icon that looks like a speech bubble.  Click on the speech bubble and you’ll see your quality score, along with information about your expected click through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience.  All three of those factors are ranked as “average,” “above average,” or the dreaded “below average.”
 
You can also check quality scores by adding the Quality Score Column to your AdWords report, but you won’t see the grades for the three factors above.
 

How We Improved Quality Scores in 24-Hours

When I reviewed the keyword quality score information with my client, we noticed some of the keywords had below average ad relevance. The click through rate and landing page experience were both average, but the ad relevance was dragging us down.
 
Ah ha! We identify an easy problem to fix.
 
If you find yourself in this situation, then navigate over to the Ads tab in your account to draft new ads.  In the new ads, include the keyword you’re targeting in the ad group.  Now, if your ad group has many different phrases, then you have another problem on your hands.  I recommend you restructure your account so only similar phrased keywords are in a single ad group.  That will allow you to match the ads precisely to the keywords.
 
As I mentioned earlier, by simply drafting ads that included the keyword, we were able to improve our keyword quality scores overnight!  Take a look at your keyword quality scores and follow these steps if you also have below average ad relevance.

Improving Ad Rank to show more relevant ad extensions and formats

When people use Google to research and buy things, they're interested in the most relevant and useful results. Ad extensions help by providing more information to potential customers and additional ways for them to respond. For example, they can call your business number, see your business location on a map, or choose an even more relevant landing page that you're promoting with sitelinks. Ad extensions typically improve clickthrough rate and overall campaign performance because they make ads more useful.

Today, Google announced improvements in the AdWords auction that let us more consistently show more relevant ad extensions and formats.

Ad Rank improvements

 Google system for ordering ads on search results pages uses a calculation called Ad Rank. Previously, Ad Rank was calculated using max CPC bid and your Quality Score. With this update, Ad Rank will also take into account a third component: the expected impact from your ad extensions and formats. In addition, Google have increased the importance of Ad Rank in determining whether your ad is eligible to be displayed with extensions and formats.

Here are some more details and implications of these changes:

• Ad extensions and formats can now influence the position of your ad on the search results page. If two competing ads have the same bid and quality, then the ad with the more positive expected impact from extensions will generally appear in a higher position than the other.
• When estimating the expected impact of extensions and ad formats, we consider such factors as the relevance, clickthrough rates, and the prominence of the extensions or formats on the search results page.
• Because Ad Rank is now more important in determining whether your ad is shown with extensions and formats, you might need to increase your Quality Score, bid, or both for extensions and formats to appear. 
• In each auction, we'll generally show your highest performing and most useful combination of extensions and formats among those eligible. So there's no need to try to guess which extensions will help improve your clickthrough rate the most. 
• You may see lower or higher average CPCs in your account. You may see lower CPCs if your extensions and formats are highly relevant, and we expect a large positive performance impact relative to other competitors in the auction. In other cases, you may see higher CPCs because of an improvement in ad position or increased competition from other ads with a high expected impact from formats.
• For now, this update only affects search ads appearing on Google Search.

Recommendations for using extensions

Extensions make your ads more useful and can improve your campaign performance. So you should add extensions that make sense for your business type and campaign goals. With these improvements to AdRank, Google systems will do even more to automatically serve extensions in the contexts when they're most beneficial.

For example, consider someone downtown searching on a mobile phone for "auto repair." In this example, the user might be most likely to respond to your ad when they can click to call a phone number or tap a link to get directions to visit in person. So Google may show a combination of call and location extensions with your mobile search ad.

Now imagine if someone were searching for "auto repair" on a laptop computer in the suburbs. Say your ad earned the 3rd ad position above the organic results in this auction. Google might show your seller rating and sitelinks because that's the highest performing and most useful combination of extensions that could be shown with your ad in this particular auction and ad position.