Defining Ad Quality
People use Google because they find what they’re looking for fast – whether it be the latest news, best candy bar, or closest pizzeria. This is the essence of relevance: Google provides users with the most relevant search results based on their search.
Relevance doesn’t end with Google’s search results, they also strive to show the most relevant ads for every search query. This model works for advertisers as well as users: The more relevant the ads are, the more likely users are to click on them.
AdWords measures relevance for search and ads differently.
- For search results, relevance is automatically determined by many factors, including Google’s patented PageRank algorithm. The more relevant a search result, the higher it will be ranked.
- For AdWords ads, the most important factor in relevance is the ad’s quality is a metric called “Quality Score.” The higher your Quality Score, the higher your ad will be ranked and the lower your costs will be. Learn more about how AdWords ads are ranked below.
Learn more about how Google search results are ranked.
Understanding Quality Score
Quality Score is an estimate of how relevant your ads, keywords, and landing page are to a person seeing your ad. Having a high Quality Score means that the AdWords systems think your ad, keyword, and landing page are all relevant and useful to someone looking at your ad. You can find out your Quality Score for any of your keywords, and there are several things you can do to help improve your Quality Score.
Example
Suppose Sam is looking for a pair of striped socks. And let’s say you own a website that specializes in socks. Wouldn’t it be great if Sam types “striped socks” into Google search, sees your ad about striped socks, clicks your ad, and then lands on your webpage where he buys some spiffy new striped socks?
In this example, Sam searches and finds exactly what he’s looking for. That’s what Google considers a great user experience, and that’s what can earn you a high Quality Score. What’s more, relevant ads tend to earn more clicks, appear in a higher position, and bring you the most success.
Checking your Quality Score
You can check your Quality Score by looking within your Keywords tab. There are a couple ways to check your Quality Score, as shown below.
1. Run a keyword diagnosis.
2. Another way to see your Quality Score is to enable the Qual. score column:
- Click the Campaigns tab at the top.
- Select the Keywords tab.
- Look for the Qual. score column in the statistics table. If you don’t see this column in your table, you can add this column by doing the following:
- Click the Columns dropdown in the toolbar above the statistics table.
- Select Customize columns.
- Select Attributes.
- Click Add next to Qual. score.
- Click Save.
Each keyword gets a Quality Score on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is the lowest score and 10 is the highest. AdWords recalculates your Quality Score every time your ads are eligible for the ad auction, which can potentially happen many times a day. Rather than showing you different Quality Scores throughout the day, they show you a single Quality Score that gives you an estimate of that keyword’s overall quality.
How Quality Score is Calculated
Every time someone does a search that triggers your ad, AdWords will calculate a Quality Score. To calculate this Quality Score, they look at a number of different things related to your account. By improving the following factors you can help improve your Quality Score:
- Your keyword’s past clickthrough rate (CTR): How often that keyword led to clicks on your ad
- Your display URL’s past CTR: How often you received clicks with your display URL
- Your account history: The overall CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
- The quality of your landing page: How relevant, transparent, and easy-to-navigate your page is
- Your keyword/ad relevance: How relevant your keyword is to your ads
- Your keyword/search relevance: How relevant your keyword is to what a customer searches for
- Geographic performance: How successful your account has been in the regions you’re targeting
- Your ad’s performance on a site: How well your ad’s been doing on this and similar sites (if you’re targeting the Display Network)
- Your targeted devices: How well your ads have been performing on different types of devices, like desktops/laptops, mobile devices, and tablets – you get different Quality Scores for different types of devices
How Quality Score affects you
As mentioned above, AdWords will calculate a Quality Score every time someone does a search for one of your keywords. This Quality Score is then used in several different ways, affecting the following things in your account:
- Ad auction eligibility: Higher Quality Scores make it easier and cheaper for a keyword to enter the ad auction.
- Your keyword’s actual cost-per-click (CPC): Higher Quality Scores lead to lower CPCs. That means you pay less per click when your keyword has a higher Quality Score.
- Your keyword’s first page bid estimate: Higher Quality Scores lead to lower first page bid estimates. That means it’s easier for your ad to show on the first page of search results when your keyword has a higher Quality Score.
- Your keyword’s top of page bid estimate: Higher Quality Scores lead to lower top of page bid estimates. That means it’s easier for your ad to show towards the top of the page when your keyword has a higher Quality Score.
- Ad position: Higher Quality Scores lead to higher ad positions. That means your ad can show up higher on the page when your keyword has a higher Quality Score.
In a nutshell, higher Quality Scores typically lead to lower costs and better ad positions. The AdWords system works best for everybody – advertisers, customers, publishers, and Google – when the ads shown are relevant, closely matching what customers are looking for. Relevant ads tend to earn more clicks, appear in a higher position, and bring you the most success.
Learn how you can improve ad quality.
Understanding Landing Page Experience
Landing page experience refers to how good AdWords thinks someone’s experience will be when they get to your landing page (the web page they end up on after clicking your ad). You can improve your landing page experience – and Quality Score – by focusing on three things: relevant and original content, transparency, and ease of navigation.
Many things can affect your landing page experience. For example, is your landing page relevant to what a visitor is looking for? Is it easy to find your contact information? Is the page itself easy to navigate? Your landing page experience affects not only your Quality Score, but also your advertising costs and ad position.
Why landing page experience matters
If you’ve ever owned a car, you probably know that getting tune-ups can help you get better mileage, prevent costly mechanical problems, and make your car run better in the long run. Landing pages are kind of like cars – make sure they’re tuned-up properly, and you’ll likely get better performance and savings out of them down the road.
A good landing page experience can help you gain the trust of your customers and keep them coming back to your site. Get more mileage out of your landing page by making it easier for visitors to make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, or do other things you want them to do on your website.
How landing page experience is determined
To determine your landing page experience, AdWords looks at a number of different things, from the actual content on the page to the overall design of the page. Below are some of the things they encourage you to keep in mind when designing your landing page.
- Relevant and original content
- Is the purpose of your site clear?
- Is your site actually useful to visitors?
- What does your site offer that other sites don’t?
- Transparency
- Is your business and contact information easy to find?
- Are you upfront about any information you’re collecting from visitors?
- Can people easily tell what’ll happen when they perform an action on your site?
- Ease of navigation
- Is it easy for people to find what they’re looking for?
- Does your site have too many links that might confuse people?
- Can people easily find information to learn more or answer questions?
Excluding your landing pages from review
By default, the AdWords system reviews advertised landing pages to assess landing page experience. If you don’t want your landing page reviewed, you can follow the steps below to restrict the AdWords system from visiting your site. However, if you do this, you may end up with a drop in Quality Score because they won’t have as much information to determine your landing page experience and relevance.
AdWords strongly recommends against restricting their system’s automatic review of your landing page, however, you can edit your site’s robots.txt file as shown below to avoid a review.
- To prevent the AdWords system from accessing your site, add the following to your robots.txt file:
User-agent: AdsBot-Google
Disallow: /
- To prevent the AdWords system from accessing certain parts of your site, add the following to your robots.txt file:
User-agent: AdsBot-Google
Disallow: /exclude/
(where exclude represents the directories you don’t want the AdWords system to visit)
In order to avoid increasing CPCs for advertisers who don’t intend to restrict AdWords visits to their pages, the system will ignore blanket exclusions (User-agent: *) in robots.txt files.
Mobile visits to your landing page
The AdWords system will also visit your landing page to evaluate your site as viewed by iPhones and other mobile devices with full browsers.
Currently, they use the following HTTP User-Agent header to identify AdWords mobile visits:
AdsBot-Google-Mobile (+http://www.google.com/mobile/adsbot.html) Mozilla (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3 0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari
If you have a distinct, mobile-optimized version of your site, you should configure your server to show the mobile-optimized site when the AdWords mobile User-Agent is detected.
Viewing your landing page experience
Unlike Quality Score, AdWords doesn’t give you a specific number that shows your landing page experience. Instead, they show you one of three statuses: Above average, Average, or Below average.
You can view this status by going into your Keywords tab and placing your cursor over the speech bubble next to the status of any keyword.
- Above average or Average: If you see either of these two statuses, you’re in good shape – your Quality Score won’t be negatively affected by your landing page experience.
- Below average: This means that your landing page experience is in need of improvement, and your Quality Score might be lower as a result. You might want to consider some changes to improve your website’s landing page, like making sure that customers can find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. One way to do this is to create destination URLs for individual keywords.
Landing page experience vs. Site policies
When AdWords reviews landing pages, sometimes they come across pages that don’t follow their policies. For example, if your landing page happens to contain malware (like a virus), that’s a pretty bad landing page. Rather than giving you a “Below average” landing page experience status, you won’t get a score at all. Instead, you’ll see “Not applicable” as your landing page experience status, and any keywords or ads pointing to that website will get a “Site suspended” status. This status means that your website can’t be advertised with AdWords because it doesn’t follow one or more of Google’s site policies.
Site policies refer to the Advertising Policies that AdWords uses to evaluate your landing page (and overall website). If your landing page or website contains something that Google doesn”t allow, like malware or illegal products, they might suspend your website to protect their users. When a website is suspended, that means you won’t be able to advertise that suspended website until you remove any unacceptable content.
Improving your landing page experience
If you’re trying to improve your landing page experience, it might be time to give your landing pages a tune-up. Try reviewing the general guidelines below to help you think of ways to improve your landing page experience and get better performance out of your landing pages down the road.
- Relevant and original content.
- Make sure your landing page is directly relevant to your ad text and keyword.
- Provide useful information on your landing page about whatever you’re advertising.
- Try to offer useful features or content that are unique to your site.
- Consider adding reviews that show real opinions from people who’ve used that product.
- Transparency
- Make it easy for visitors to find your contact information.
- Distinguish sponsored links, like ads, from the rest of your site content.
- Openly share information about your business and clearly state what your business does.
- Ease of navigation
- Don’t make people hunt around for the information they might need.
- Make it quick and easy for people to order the product mentioned in your ad.
- Make sure people can easily find information to learn more about the advertised product.
The AdWords system visits and evaluates landing pages on a regular basis. If you’ve made significant changes to improve your landing page experience, it could lead to higher Quality Scores over time. You might not see an impact within the first few days, but you may see results over the next several months.