An understanding of Quality Score is essential to successful PPC management. Quality Score evolved from Google's decision not to rank its paid search results simply in order of highest bidder. Google claims that this is because it wants only the highest quality adverts at the top of the listings. However, Google only makes money from paid search when someone clicks on an ad; if no one clicks on the ad then the company not make any money. It is therefore in Google's financial interests to have the ads that are clicked on the most at the top of the listings. Google created a simple equation to make sure that the ads that were clicked on the most came higher up the listings.
This was the original equation used to calculate Ad Rank:
Over time this grew more complex and began to include the advert's history as well. So now the formula looked like this:
Google then began to add more and more factors into the final part of the equation. Click Through Rate was still the most important factor, but now features of the site ,such as landing page quality and landing page load time, were important factors too. This final part of the equation came to be known as the Quality Score.
Now the Adwords equation for calculating Ad Rank looks like this:
The higher your Ad Rank, the higher up the listings you will appear. Improving your Quality Score is an important aspect of your PPC management because it means that you increase the likelihood that your advert will appear at the top of the search results and you will pay less for each click. A high quality score can put you at the top of the paid search listings at the same time as saving you significant amounts of money on your advertising spend.
For more information on how to improve your Quality Score as part of a successful PPC management programme call PPC Junkies on 0118 380 0204 or email us at sales@ppcjunkies.co.uk.