Keyword Quality Score Shows Potential Effectiveness of Campaigns

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If you have been following Atria’s blog posts the past couple of months, you may now have a firm grasp of the basics of keyword management and advertisement dispensation from Adwords into real-time Google searches.

This blog has taken you through keyword management, campaign management, and the multitude of ways in which you can define specific keywords and phrases – namely, creating “exact match” and “keyword match” terms and phrases. Take a look at that link if you’re not already familiar with those definitions.

This week, you will get a quick overview of what it means to have a Quality Score. This specific measure of keyword quality helps you determine the effectiveness of your keywords and the campaigns they support. Every keyword and phrase automatically gains a Quality Score of 1 to 10. If you reach a score of 10, you’re a champion.

View the Quality Score

You can easily check the Quality Score of any of your campaigns’ keywords with three steps:

  1. Click the “Campaigns” tab at the top of your Adwords dashboard

  2. Click the “Keywords” tab

  3. Click the white speech bubble that appears next to any keyword

Of course, it could be a hindrance to hover over each bubble for every keyword in a campaign’s list. You can enable a “Quality Score” column in the same dashboard screen by looking at your statistics table and clicking “Columns” -> “Modify Columns” -> “Attributes” -> “Add” (next to “Qual. Score”) -> “Save.”

What Factors Influence Your Results?

There are a number of factors that affect the score of any keyword in question. Adwords considers the expected clickthrough rate (CTR), how well your keywords match your actual advertisements, and the expected landing page experience Google thinks a customers will have after clicking your ad. Atria has discussed CTR before – see the link above – and will provide you with more information about ad relevance and landing page experiences in future posts.

Adwords also considers how well your keywords have performed in the past and how they have fared in various geographical areas and on various devices such as desktops and mobile phones. The higher scores you achieve, the better chance you have at entering an auction for advertisement display, lowering your cost-per-click, and generating high search positions in Google. Higher scores typically correlate with lower costs and better ad positions.

When you choose more appropriate keywords and mold your keyword choices to fit with your ads, Quality Score for each word should improve. Future posts at Atria will continue to reference that score as it relates to the aforementioned advertisement and auction elements. Stay tuned into the new year for a deeper discussion about what’s listed here and how these elements are linked.

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