Understanding Quality Scores and Ad Relevance in Google Adwords.

When you’re running an Adwords campaign for your business it is vital that it is planned and set up properly, and optimised regularly. If it isn’t set up correctly, you run the risk of wasting a huge amount of money and it will not add any value to your conversion and enquiry rates.

One of the things our campaign managers look at when managing client Adwords campaigns is the Ad Relevance and Keyword Quality Scores.

Google automatically analyses the relevance and quality scores of your campaigns regularly and it is possible to analyse the score to make manual improvements to your ads and keywords. This not only ensures your budget is being used towards the most relevant clicks, but it also helps visitor engagement and conversions.

Client Horror Story

Recently, we had a business come through to us that sold high value products (£1500+) on their own online store. The company didn’t have a marketing department so decided set up their own Adwords account, thinking that they could save some money, instead of engaging with an Agency to set up the campaign. After running the campaign for 12 months, they contacted us to review the campaign. To our horror, they had spent over £24,000 on Adwords in 12 months (£2000 p/m) and had ZERO conversions. On checking the campaign, it was set up completely incorrectly.

What is Ad Relevance and how can I measure it?

The Ad relevance is a ‘status’ that helps you understand how well your adverts and keywords are performing.

Google defines your Ad relevance with three possible statuses; Above Average, Average and Below Average. Using this status you can quickly identify keywords that might not be as relevant as the advert that you’ve written. You may notice that a keyword has a low ad relevance but a high Quality score. By looking at this, it can help identify how your campaign can be improved.

Google themselves outline:

• Having an “average” or “above average” status means that there are no major problems with this keyword’s ad relevance when compared to all other keywords across AdWords.

• A “below average” status means that your ad or keyword may not be specific enough or that your ad group may cover too many topics. Try creating tightly-themed ad groups by making sure that your ads are closely related to a smaller group of keywords.

Within your Google Adwords campaign if you click on the Keywords tab, you’re able to click on each keyword bubble to show your relevance.

What is a Quality Score in Google Adwords?

The quality score of your ads in Adwords is intended to give you an overall, broad sense of how well your ads are working. The quality score Google can give you is between 1 and 10 depending on a few main factors.

The main factors Google Analyse to provide you with your quality score are:

• Expected clickthrough rate
• Ad Relevance
• Landing page experience.

The idea is to get the score as high as possible. The higher you can get it, the better experience you’ll provide to your visitors, and the more chance you have of optimising conversions. When you’re trying to improve your quality score, make sure the Ad text, keywords and the landing page you are pointing the ad too are as relevant as possible. Always try and design a dedicated landing page to push traffic to, rather than just your homepage.

Trust the experts.

As a Full Service Agency, we hear of horror stories all of the time when it comes to Google Adwords. Some businesses think it is more cost effective to set up and run their own campaigns. More often than not, we will review the campaign and work out that even with a management fee, we can raise the engagements and reduce the monthly spend. Adwords goes far deeper than just setting up a few Ads and hoping for the best. It can be a highly effective tool for your business that can become a fantastic source of traffic and leads for your business.

If you would like an audit on your Google Adwords campaign, please do get in touch at www.damteq.co.uk/contact or call us on 0330 010 0321.