Introduction:
OK, I thought I’d post this just to show you an example of a website that is attaining a 10/10 quality score as at 1st December 2008. Surprisingly, it does not include all of the elements that you’d normally assume to be present for such a feat. The site and adwords keyword that I will be looking at are in the Car Rental industry, but more specifically, and here is some link love for the owner of the site for allowing me to analyse it, the Costa Rica Car Rentals industry and the site in question is leading Costa Rican Auto Rental firm, Vamos 4×4.
Ok, so what exactly does Quality Score: 10/10 mean?
Well, from the horse’s (Google’s) mouth, “The Quality Score detail gives added insight to each keyword’s Quality Score by rating it on a 1-10 scale. On this scale, 1 is the lowest rating, while 10 is the highest. 1-4 corresponds with Poor, 5-7 with OK, and 8-10 with Great.” A blog post by Reena Shohet over at PayPerClickSearchengines.com cites one advantage of having a higher quality score as, “Account Quality Score has a say in what your minimum bids are when you introduce new search terms where there is little historical data. The better your Account Quality Score, the more grace you get from Google.”
In a nutshell, what this means is that you will receive more benefits from Google’s AdRanking system if you have a higher quality score, which will contribute towards appearing higher in the Sponsored Ads listing. The major benefit of having a higher quality score will be that your ad will rank higher than competing ads if their quality score is less than yours and you’re both paying the same CPC. Ultimately, higher positions for less cost, although that is a simplified view of things.
How One of My Ads Received A Quality Score: 10/10
The keyword in question was exact match ‘car rentals in san jose costa rica’ with a CTR of 25% in a tightly knitted ‘Costa Rica San Jose’ AdGroup. The split/tested Ad Text for the ad was/is as follows:
Rent A Car From San Jose
San Jose Costa Rica Car Rentals
Instant Online Reservations
www.vamos4×4.com/san-jose-costa
And the landing page is www.vamos4×4.com. This is not the only keyword that has a quality score of 10/10 in my campaign but it serves to illustrate how it was achieved (at least for this particular keyword). Some information which I believe is key to understanding this is the information that appears within the title tag of the html code:
<title>Costa Rica Car Rental | Car Rental San Jose Costa Rica | Vamos Rent-a-Car </title>
You will also find the following in the meta keywords/description tags:
<meta content=“costa rica, car rental, san jose, cheap, discount, 4×4″ name=“keywords”>
<meta content=“Vamos Rent-a-Car is the most affordable car rentals company in San Jose Costa Rica offer discount car rental and car hire service with basic insurance and a cell phone included.” name=“description”>
You can see from the code that ‘keyword’ related terms appear frequently (but not spammy) in the page source but what you will also notice, perhaps quite surprisingly, is that the major keyword behind the campaign does NOT actually appear in the body text of the landing page at all but a variation of it (with a spelling mistake no less!) appears within a <h2> tag in the page footer.
Now for all intents and purposes, I would not describe this page as a 10/10 but clearly, there are factors at work here that are slightly out of logical thinking – at least to my little mind.
Be Aware of False Quality Scores!
I have achieved a 10/10 quality score many more times but this was achieved with a brand new campaign in a well setup AdGroup with a historically well performing CTR but it was a ‘temporary’ quality score until Google had a more in depth snoop around, at which time I have seen scores drop minimally to 9/10 and in a few cases substantially to 3/10 (this was an affiliate link which google nailed within an hour of launching), so you need to be aware that when you set up new keywords in relatively new adgroups, you can be given a flase 10/10 score whilst Google figures you out. The thing to take away form this is that if you do receive a QS of 10/10, even if G doesn’t like you, it does suggest to me that somewhere in its algorithms, it does appreciate what you’ve done but that it has overruled it with an iron fist. In short, I guess it means you’re nearly there, but it doesn’t like something.
How I Achieved a Quality Score of 10/10 – Summary:
- A CTR of 25%
- Exact matching keyword
- Keyword also present in source code title, meta keywords and meta description tags
- Tightly grouped Keywords in tightly knitted AdGroups
- Keywords in AdText but not exactly the same keywords as the actual keyword you are targeting
- Keyword did not appea rin body text of page but did appear in a <h2> tag in the landing page footer
I believe there are a few ways to achieve the almighty 10 out of 10 but I hope that this post helps you to apply its contents to your own campaigns and hopefully get that all important 10/10 Great!
June 22nd, 2009 at 9:46 pm
Great post on how to achieve a great QS. You were tops in the search engines when I pulled it up. Keep up the great work.
September 1st, 2009 at 5:27 am
Wow! Thanks for these great tips..I’m gonna start applying it now and hopefully I’ll be able to reach the ‘all important 10/10′ too!
September 16th, 2009 at 9:25 pm
Good stuff. I heard that quality score was governed only by your click through rate (CTR). The higher the CTR the more clicks you get which means the more money your are spending which makes your ad more profitable to Google which means it is of higher quality to them.
This is why you should bid high in the initial phase of your campaign to get a higher CTR and in turn get the higher QS. Then you can lower your bids and reap the benefits of a high CTR and get a well positioned add for less than your competitors are paying.
Thats what I hear anyways…
September 17th, 2009 at 2:21 am
@Joe:
I am going to make an updated post about this shortly because this post alone drives maximus trafficus to my website…
Quality Score is definitely not only governed by your CTR. Since this initial post at the end of last year, I’ve been doing a lot of PPC studies within my own AdGroups and I can quite confidently say that I can hit a 10/10 quality score on pretty much all of my AdGroups now and it’s not through producing a high CTR – although that’s nice too
November 17th, 2009 at 9:45 am
I have been using Adwords for the last 2 years and i can only say that it increased my online sales by about 20%. The pay per click cost of Adwords is even cheaper than Adbrite. I love Adwords.
January 4th, 2010 at 3:48 am
Adwords is really good for promoting a product that you want to sell online. It is very important that you geoatarget your intended audience so as to avoid wasting your advertising funds.
January 18th, 2010 at 12:20 am
The tip about meta tags is really great. It helped me increase my score from 7/10 to 8/10
February 15th, 2010 at 2:58 am
Adwords is a really great tool for promoting your website, forum or affiliate link. the ppc cost of adwords is even cheaper than Friendster or Facebook. before, i used to advertise on facebook but the ROI is so low. Adwords gives me a much better ROI compared to Facebook ads.
February 15th, 2010 at 12:01 pm
Musketer’s orig post was before many changes to quality score algo’s… so most of it is still true it has just gotten a lot more refined in my opinion. I have about 10% of my account at 10/10. It is true that you don’t need the exact kw in your content (for long tail stuff) like i have house in some of my kw’s and i don’t think house appears anywhere on the landing page yet it gets 10/10 i think because home is there.? The KW’s need to be in the meta data for sure and in the title but if you have 4 words you may only need 3 of them… go figure. The part from @Joe is wrong i have some high volume KW’s with 35%-48% CTR and a QS of 7/10 that may have been true in the past but not in 2009-2010. Musketer, give us an update for 2010 your past info was real good and post the whole meta section that is getting 10/10’s for you mine is like 10 lines long and i think it may hurt me on qs but i still have 28 10/10 out there so maybe it is just overly targeted landing pages don’t know…
February 15th, 2010 at 12:06 pm
PS for anyone reading all this info, a lot will also depend on the level of competition in your vertical if there are 5-7 top marketers playing in your space for 2-5 years and they know what they are doing you will have a harder time in general. If you are up against 1-2 others and no pro’s you will feel like a king and can easily rule the market.
February 17th, 2010 at 4:51 am
Steve – I do still have many 10/10s and continue to be able to duplicate it for most keywords providing all my content is in sych. I will try and fit in an update to this post over the coming weeks. Currently, I’m running a series on my new affiliate site which is taking up a bit of time. I will certainly revisit quality scores though shortly.