Google’s Quality Score is the most complex among the pay per click search engines. It’s designed to weed out irrelevant or misleading ads. A low quality score doesn’t necessarily mean that your landing page is not optimized properly. It could mean a few other things that have nothing at all to do with the optimization of the landing page and that’s probably the biggest mistake new pay per click advertisers make regarding landing page optimization.
Three key components on your Google AdWords Quality Score are:
- Relevance
- Navigability
- Transparency
These three factors are more clearly discussed in a video produced by WebProNews that includes a great interview by Andrew Goodman. You can see the video here.
Your Google AdWords Quality Score is used to determine your minimum bid price, your ad position, and the relevance of you ad to a particular search query. Perhaps the most important of these for new advertisers is the minimum bid price. Your quality score will, to a large degree, determine whether or not you can remain competitive for a particular keyword. If the No. 1 position for your keyword is currently paying $3.50 and your quality score is low then you might have your minimum bid price set at $10.00 just because your quality score is low. That doesn’t mean your landing page isn’t optimized properly.
Other factors that could influence the factor score include pop ups, outbound links to relevance and helpful resources, your website’s privacy policy, your shopping cart system and pay security, and inbound links pointing to your landing page. In other words, are you keeping the interests of your target customer in mind in terms of pay security and customer service? If not then that might be reflected in your quality score.
When it comes to managing your Google AdWords campaign, there is more to it than merely creating a landing page with the right keywords. You’ve got to think on a broader scale and give your AdWords campaign a more thorough plan.
