What is a Quality Score in Web Marketing?

Quality score is a rating for how Google measures the usefulness or relevance of your Pay-Per-Click advertisement on Googles search platform. Generally, the usefulness and relevance of your ad to those searching a particular term in Google is determined by examining the keywords used and the searchers reaction to your ads. If the reaction is positive (I.e., the searcher clicks the advertisement) then it was successful.

Using Google's Quality Score for an Advertisement

The quality of an add is measured by looking at several factors:

• How closely is your ad content (or text) related to the searched topic?
• What percentage of individuals seeing your ad clicked on it (this is the CTR or click-through rate)?
• What is the quality and relevance of the landing page to which the ad leads?

The most important factor for determining the quality score is generally the click-through-rate. If lots of people seeing your ad click on it, then Google makes money and the advertiser is happy with the result. The CTR is thus used by Google to determine the appropriate cost for displaying the ad. This is expressed as the Cost Per Click, or amount the advertiser must pay for each click on the ad. Th higher the bid price and the relevance of the ad to search terms (some combination of the two) will result in where and when Google displays your ad individuals employing the Google search engine. What these factors are all import in determining the Quality Score, Google does not make public its exact algorithm. Nonetheless, marketers work diligently to improve the quality score of an advertisement, as this yields better return on investment (invested marketing dollars). More specifically, it results in more conversions (meeting your value position, such as sales o customer/client acquisition) for the advertisement. Below are some popular methods generally used to increase an advertisement quality score.

• Keywords - Identifying the relevant keywords that customers use when searching for topics relevant to your ad or value offering. These keywords need to be integrated into the test of your add. They also need to be grouped or organized appropriately.
• Landing Page - An ad ultimately leads to a landing page where a customer will be confronted with the opportunity to take part in the value proposition that your business offers. You can improve your quality of your ad by making certain the landing page for the ad meets the expectations of those clicking on it.

Both of these things improve the relevance of your ad to the individual searching on Google search engine. A poorly planned ad campaign will employ irrelevant keywords or the keywords used will not relate well to the actual value proposition being offered by the advertiser to individuals visiting the website.