In the PPC world, Quality Score has become a popularPPC Optimization topic. From Google having their own Quality Score problems to accounts getting their Quality Score "slapped", to people looking to improve their Quality Score; everyone is talking about it. Recently, I have seen a couple of my quality scores drop from a longtime 10/10 to 4/10 and these changes made me explore what Google may be trying to tweak in their hunt to maximize revenues.
"Relevance, Relevance, Relevance" is what Eric Schmidt touts regularly when discussing what motivates them for making their business decisions. Plus there has also been similar acknowledgement from folks like Matt Cutts about relevance's part in SEO. Google also states that having keywords in Ad text that reflect keywords in Adcopy help google determine relevance. So it is likely that relevance is the starting point for determining a keyword's quality score. This is easily computed for Google. (i.e. an ad group has the keyword "spring flowers" in it, with an ad with a title that says Beautiful Spring Flowers, pointing to a landing page with an H1 tag for "Beautiful Spring Flowers" and some other ad copy with "Spring flowers" mentioned.) As such, Google, being Google, can easily determine their to be some relevance. Let's also assume they utilize a certain amount of page rank to help assess if the value is a 3,4,5,6.
Since Google was programmatically able to determine their was relevance, let's assume Google gives the "spring flowers" keyword a baseline Quality Score of 5/10. Google, though needs an x factor to further determine relevance. Since they cannot determine if the ad is truly relevant with longer tailed terms and of interest to all "Spring Flower" queries they would want to provide another element to further hone a term's Quality Score. Since Google makes money on the ads that are clicked, it makes sense to show those ads which are most likely to be clicked, plain and simple. So the "x factor" in the Quality Score, is likely CTR or click through rate. But it probably is not just the basic CTR you see in Adwords, it would make sense to have it be the CTR relative to your competitor's ads. So if your CTR for a certain kw is higher than another Ad's CTR, your Quality Score would be notched up accordingly say to an 7 or an 8.
While conversion rate is not that inherently important for Google to make money, it stands for argument that a high conversion rate is the penultimate gauge for what consumers really want to see. So if your conversion rate is higher than your competitors as well as having a longstanding high CTR, and relevant page, you are likely able to push that 8/10 to a 10/10. I welcome your thoughts and feedback. For more insights on PPC, please visit www.ppc-optimization-secrets.com.
