2. Agenda
2
Why Google Has Quality Score
Why Quality Score Matters to You
Where to Find Your Quality Score
How is Quality Score Calculated
Best Practices
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3. Why Google Has Quality Score
3
Balance the interests of advertisers, users and
publishers
Show the most relevant ads possible (and generate
clicks)
Note: If the search results for a certain keyword don’t include many ads, it
may be a non-commercial query and it is not likely to be a good keyword
for you to try to advertise on
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4. How Quality Score Impacts You
4
Eligibility Position Extensions
Determines whether your Determines the relative Determines if your ad is
ad is eligible to enter the position of your ad in of high enough quality to
auction for that query relation to the other ads use new ad formats
on that result rage
Price Top Slot DKI
A better quality score Only high quality ads Only ads with high
reduces the price you are eligible to appear enough Quality Score
need to bid to maintain a above the natural can use Dynamic
given position search results Keyword Insertion
Did you know: The ad in the top position can pay a lower CPC than the
next ad if it has a better Quality Score.
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6. See Your Quality Score
6
1-10 quality score is just an approximation of how Google expects a
keyword to perform. Actual scores are unique for each query.
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7. How Quality Score is Calculated
7
Quality Score
Clickthrough Rate Other Relevance Landing Page
(CTR) Factors Quality and Speed
Did you know: ‘Relevance’ to Google is measured through user behavior
(click behavior) rather than just through semantic relevance
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8. Clickthrough Rate
8
By far, clickthrough rate is the most important factor contributing to
your quality score.
Account CTR
CTR
Keyword CTR Creative CTR +
URL CTR
More specific aspects of your setup matter the most, however in the
absence of specific data, the more general elements are used
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9. ‘Exact Match’ Clickthrough Rate
9
The Quality Score number reported in your account is a factor of the CTR
when the query EXACTLY matched your keyword
Example Below: If your keyword is broad match ‘blue widgets’ …
Query Impacts Quality Impacts Real-Time Quality
Score Number You Score?
See?
Blue widgets Yes Yes – for ‘blue widgets’
Buy blue widgets No Yes – for ‘buy blue widgets’
Blue widgets for free No Yes – for ‘blue widgets for free’
Take-Away: Quality Score is the same regardless of the match type you
use. Use match types to better target your ads.
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10. “Other Relevance Factors”
10
Signals unique to the specific query determine the real time
quality score: Location, query, time, etc.
java java program
Indonesia island cup coffee C++ java
Take-Away: The quality score reported in your account is different than the quality
score used to rank your ad.
11. Landing Page
11
Landing page quality can help or hurt your Quality Score
Slow page load times can hurt your Quality Score
Certain types of websites with poor user experience are
against policy. Violating policy can get an account banned.
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12. Best Practices
12
Be Patient
Accrue at least 100 impressions to let QS settle
Bid enough to be in top positions at the start
Respond to bad QS
Optimize or delete poor QS keywords
Experiment
Make changes you think will increase relevance, you can
always revert back and still get your old QS
Use broad match to discover new query variations
Add good variations to their own ad groups
Add poor variations as negative keywords
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13. Coming to Terms With Your Quality Score
13
Quality scores of 7-10 are great, 4-6 need work
and 1-3 may be poor keywords for your business
Focus primarily on your business goals like ROI and
use quality score to help guide your decisions
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14. Learn More
14
Download the slides
http://www.toptier.us
Frederick Vallaeys
frederick@toptier.us
@SiliconVallaeys
Notes de l'éditeur
Hello, I ’m Frederick Vallaeys, AdWords Evangelist at Google. I’ve been a member of the ads quality core team at Google for over 6 years and I’m glad to have another opportunity to demistify Google’s Quality Score.
This is an advanced session, so I hope everyone already understands that the QS on Google matters for determining your ad ’s eligibility to participate in the auction when a matching user query happens, together with your bid, it determines your Position, which in turn means it also affects the price you pay for a click, and finally the ability of your ad to move from the RHS of the page to the top. What ’s less known and may be worth mentioning is that QS now also determines your ad’s ability to show ad extensions, such as ads sitelinks. Only the highest quality and most relevant ads can take advantage of this new feature and advertisers who have used it have seen increases in CTR of 30% or more. The QS of your ad also affects whether or not DKI will work. If the ad is not of high enough quality, DKI will insert the default text instead of the keyword. This is a means for us to ensure that our users don’t see ads where DKI creates some weird ad text that is lacking in relevance. Making sure you have great QS is an absolute must if you want to be on the cutting edge of SEM.
So let ’s take a look at what goes into the QS at Google. There are pretty much 3 main factors, CTR, Other relevance factors and the landing page. The combination of these elements results in a 1-10 score that appears next to each keyword in your account. Now keep in mind that QS is not linear, i.e. a QS of 4 is not twice as good as a QS of 2 and hence doubling your QS number does not mean you’re halving your CPC. It’s much more important by the way to optimize keywords with a QS number lower than 7 than it is to try and get your 7s to become 10s. Let ’s look at each factor in a little more detail
When we run the auction, we look at the historical performance of the specific query, keyword, and creative pairing. If we do not have enough significant data on that specific pairing, we may look at the performance of other keywords or creatives in the ad group, campaign or account to help inform the calculation. In general, our system prefers to use the most granular and specific data possible, which the why the specific query, keyword, creative pairing is the primary focus.
We use signals like linguistic processing to determine the relevance of a query to your keyword. So, if your KW ‘java’ performs better against coffee-related queries than it does against programming queries, we can use that information. We also use information like a user ’s location to determine if your ad is more relevant to users in specific locations.
Landing page quality is used as a penalty for low quality pages. It cannot boost your quality score. It is meant to police serious offenders, like phishing sites, doorway pages, pages of just ads, etc. If your ads are showing, the only factor of your landing page that can impact your quality score is the load time. We are not interested in policing the aesthetics of your site.
Sometimes your ad just wont be the most relevant. That doesn ’t mean that you can’t still run a profitable marketing campaign.