by Chris Sisco
on July 16 2010
in Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Directly from Google’s Adwords help section as to what effects quality score
- The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on Google; note that CTR on the Google Network only ever impacts Quality Score on the Google Network -- not on Google
- Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
- The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
- The quality of your landing page
- The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
- The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
- Your account's performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
- Other relevance factors
Click-through rate is mentioned 4 times in this section alone which clearly means it has a huge impact on quality score. Click-through rate is calculated by dividing the amount of impressions (how often your ad is triggered) vs. the number of clicks (how often someone clicks on your ad when it appears).
So how do you achieve the #1 spot on Google PPC ranking? Remember in the previous blog we mentioned that ad positioning is determined by the equation
CPC x Quality Score
So how is your quality score determined before CTR? As mentioned above, your quality score is initially based on landing page quality, keywords, unique content, and other factors. If you bid on the keyword “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” and your webpage doesn’t have any of those words listed, theirs a good chance Google will give you a low quality score for said keyword. This does not mean you will pay an absurd amount of money but it does mean you will need to prove to Google that your site is indeed about the TV show based on how well your ads perform.
Missed a previous post?
SEM Campaign Part 0 - Hurting your Site? (Quality Score)
SEM Campaign Part 1 - Keywords
SEM Campaign Part 2 - Ads and Adgroups
Sem Campaign Part 3 - You are here