Quality Score: Check your Adwords Campaigns
The author of this article is Carlos Leon Trinidad (@Thatzad), director of Thatzad, Online Marketing consultancy and Internet Advertising. He has been Director of the agency for 5 years and more than 10 in the sector, working with both Large Accounts and Startups.
Adwords is a deceptively easy tool to use, the first campaigns, at the beginning of the previous decade, were not very complex since you only had to put an ad, a few keywords and the budget you wanted to spend, at that time few words cost more 5-10 cents per click.
Although Google continues to sell it that simple, the rise of competition and the strong fight for a few privileged positions caused Google to impose new rules of the game.
The most important was the Quality Factor or Quality Score (QS), a number that is multiplied by the maximum CPC bid to determine your position in the auction. A high QS allows you to be on top of everything by paying much less per click than other competitors with a lower QS. In other words, it is an essential factor to make profitable campaigns in very competitive environments.
An example of what not to do
An extreme repercussion of badly targeted campaigns is that a low QS made your ad not show or that in order for it to appear you had to pay very high CPCs.
I remember a campaign made by a Client who sold nutritional supplements for athletes and he thought that his ad would be shown thousands of times if he put as keywords "Fernando Alonso", "Valentino Rosi" or "Ronaldinho" (a few years ago).
The starting idea was not bad, if I only pay per click I can make a strong branding campaign at a very low cost. Google, a few minutes after detecting the campaign, saw that there was little relationship between what the advertiser offered and the keywords and asked for a minimum of € 4 / click and when they accepted the offer, shortly afterwards, it was raised to € 14 /click. Logically that made his campaign stop being profitable.
Things have changed and now if you do not have a minimum QS of 3 Google informs you that "Your ad will not be shown because it has an insufficient quality level".
How the Quality Score is calculated
The algorithm has never been made public by Google, but it does recommend maximizing the CTR of the most important keywords and stopping those that, due to their low relevance in the campaign, have a lower CTR.
One of the most critical points is that the QS depends largely on the history of the campaign and the account, therefore, changes and improvements do not have an immediate effect, they require time to be reflected in the QS (Google recommends a minimum 2 weeks, we a little more).
But there are more important parameters, such as the relevance of the keywords in the ads and on the landing page. A quality page that loads quickly and optimized for keywords helps us improve the QS of the campaign (Google once again emphasizes the importance of SEO to improve the results of SEA campaigns).
In the following infographic that we have created from Thatzad we explain in a very visual way what the key parameter of Google Adwords depends on and what are the levers we have to improve it. It is not official data, it is data extracted from many conversations with Google and our experience of many campaigns in the last 6 years.
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