Metrics Spotlight: How Quality Score Analysis Makes Your Paid Search Budget Better

A small business marketer will run into a number of variables to launch a marketing campaign. But one constant a small business marketer can count upon is the need to establish a marketing budget, particularly if paid search ads are included.  When looking at Adwords and Bing Ads in particular, one factor that will influence a given paid search budget is the quality score.   Let's take a look at what influences a score and why it is a factor to establishing a cost effective marketing budget.

What Influences A Quality Score

A quality score is an essential guidance rating in planning Google Adwords or Bing Ads campaigns. It is a keyword rating factor which influences the price for a paid search ad to appear alongside a search query.  Thus an increase in quality score can mean a decrease in cost.

In practice, a quality score is assigned to a keyword. It calculated every time the keyword in a given ad matches a query for the keyword. Thus, an ad with a high quality score usually achieves a better position from a search query, gaining clicks that reflect as better metrics in your analytics referral reports.

View the quality score of your Adwords campaign keywords by clicking in the Adwords manager. Bing offers a similar view and check for its paid search campaigns.

The quality score should be researched when you are considering two keywords that may have similar meaning but can potential attract your intended audience. You can do so in the ad managers for Google Adwords and Bing.  Both platforms have similar factors for a quality score, but with nuanced differences. Here is a summary of those differences:

Google Adwords

Three quality score indicators are used to calculate the quality score in Google Adwords.  These indicators are:

• Expected Click Through Rate (CTR),
• Ad Relevance
• Landing Page Experience

Here's an explanation of each indicator, and how they play into your quality score.

• Expected Click Through Rates  This normalized click through metric is a pure keyword targeting metric - a below average rating could be a strong indicator that you are bidding on the wrong keyword or not providing what people are really looking for when they do this search.
• Ad Relevance is an indicator that examines your ad effectiveness against that from other ads competing for the same emphasized keyword or keyword phrase.
• Landing Page Experience is a reflection of whether or not searchers are really finding what they are looking for on your pages. Create destination URLs for individual keywords to improve this metric and try to remove any obvious roadblocks on the user purchase journey.

Each of these indicators have ratings according to Below Average, Average and Above Average.  The ratings have different meanings according to the indicator. For example, for Ad Relevance, a below average rating indicates that your ad copy should be examined to see what message better answers the user's search query.  Search Engine Watch covers the quality and some of the detail for ratings in its post on Google Adwords quality score.

To view an Adwords quality score, login into an Adwords account.  Navigate to the  Campaign, then click the keyword tab (need image) Hover your cursor over the status bar of a keyword that you want to learn more about its quality score. A dialog box appears with a quality score indicator.

Bing Ads

The quality score for Bing Ads has some similarities to that for Adwords. There is a 10 point score system for the Bing Ads quality score, from 0 to 10 with 10 being the highest score. Bing also follows a similar 3 point quality score indicator system, but with an emphasis on landing page qualities over the expected click through rate. The three indicators  are:

• Landing Page User Experience reflects the degree to which your landing pages follow the Bing Ads editorial guidelines
• Landing Page Relevance -  indicates how relevant your ad and landing page are to the customer's search query or other input.
• Keyword Relevance - is an indication of how well your keyword competes against other keywords targeting the same traffic.

For more on how each indicator can be improved, read this page on the Bing Ads site.