Quality Score Myth Buster

[Mary Ann Johnson]

Quality Score Myth Buster

In the PPC world, a Quality Score is a measure which tells you the relevance of your keyword to the users search query. Specifically, quality score is a score given to a particular keyword taking historical data of the keyword’s Click Through Rate, quality of the landing pages, relevance of the ad with the keyword and several other factors.

Why quality score is important for a PPC professional? Not because it gives a rating on a scale of ten but as a score which reduces your CPC when your quality score moves up, which affects your First Page Bid Estimates and your Ad Position.

Today I would be breaking 5 myths about quality score.

Restructuring your account does not cause you to lose your historical quality score data. We will not lose the historical performance of keywords, ads and landing pages, all these data is preserved, so feel free to restructure your account to optimize for higher conversion goals.

Quality score does not suffer when your ads are paused or shown infrequently. Quality score is determined by the performance of a keyword in combination with its ads. So pausing an ad or showing it infrequently does not affect, as these ads are not accruing any performance data. Showing your ads seasonally wouldn’t reduce your quality score.

A higher bid will not improve your quality score. A higher bid will increase your Ad position but will not increase your quality score, as it is determined by a number of factors like CTR, Ad Relevancy and others.

Changing a keyword from broad to exact will not improve its quality score. For example a keyword like schools in broad match will show ads for variations of it like B schools, Animation schools etc. Even though your ad might show up in these instances, its performance will have no impact on quality score. The keyword’s quality score would only be affected by how your ad performed on the search term schools since it exactly matches the keyword. So changing a broad match to exact match will not affect its quality score.

Ad conversion rate does not affect your quality score. Setting an easy conversion event on your landing page to artificially boost conversion rates will not have any effect on quality scores of a keyword. So let the landing pages have the required set of fields to collect all the details of the prospective customer.

On the whole it becomes mandatory for a PPC professional to always look into quality score as a measure of how his keywords, ads and landing pages are working as whole but not as individual entities and make corrections to increase relevancy between these.

http://blogs.position2.com/keyword-quality-score