One of them most import aspects that can have a major influence on the success or failure of your PPC campaign revolve around the issue of quality score ratings. Having top quality scores can make a real difference when it comes to reducing your costs and making your overall campaign more effective.

What is quality score?

Simply put, the quality score principal is a means of assessing and rating PPC (Pay-Per Click) keyword relevance. Quality score evaluations are ranked on a scale of 1 to 10 whereby a score of 1 is the worst possible rating you can have and a score of 10 represents the best.

Quality score is so important because it can:

• Determine the actual cost per click (CPC)

• It estimates first page bids

• Determines if a keyword is eligible for the ad auction at all

• Influences ad rank.

Often when I talk to clients about quality scores emphasise the point that quality scores can have a direct impact on the cost of their respective campaign. Generally speaking the more keywords I’m able to obtain higher quality scores for in a PPC account the more I can cut costs and maintain good ad positions for each of my keywords. For for the most part with good quality score ratings for your keywords you can maintain high ad positions at a lower cost.

Quality scores are shown in PPC engines such as Google Adwords and Microsoft Adcenter at the keyword level in an account. Scores that rank from 1-4 are considered to have a poor rating. Scores in the 5-7 range are deemed relatively OK. Obtaining a 8-10 score is considered to be an excellent rating.

Having good quality score ratings from the outset can be achieved by following some basic PPC best practices when it comes to account set up. Choosing the most relevant keywords and segmenting them into tightly-themed ad groups can have a very positive impact in attracting good quality scores.

Similarly following the best practices when it comes to writing good PPC ad copy can also have a significant influence in obtaining positive quality score ratings. Include keywords, and call to actions and describe benefits and features in your ads. The more relevant your ads are to the keyword and the landing page that you are directing the ad to the greater the chance you will be rewarded with higher quality scores.

The major challenge as far as your PPC campaigns are concerned is to be able to obtain high quality scores for the vast majority of the keywords that you use in each of your campaigns. This can be achieved by monitoring and refining your choice of keywords over time.

It is very likely that you won’t be able to obtain good quality score ratings for all of your keywords. This is where you will need to carefully select which keywords you want to continue using. Some keywords in your account may perform very well in terms of click through rate (CTR) and conversions but are still subject to relatively poor quality scores. This is not uncommon. By analysing your cost per conversion for each of theses types of keywords you will be able to determine which of theses keywords are worth keeping and which ones you should discard.

Conclusion

If you follow the PPC best practices you should be able to garner and maintain good quality score ratings. Testing and refining components that effect quality scores such as ad copy, landing page and keyword relevancy will help improve your quality scores. By making theses adjustments to even just a few of your worst performing keywords can make a real difference in boosting your overall campaign performance

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