Are you wasting money on PPC?

Quality Score is a phrase that gets thrown around in PPC (Pay-Per-Click) circles and there’s a good reason for that. It can mean you pay less for your ad and get a better ad position. Worth looking into eh?

So how exactly does Google use the Quality Score of your ad? Google’s website states the following: "Quality Score is used in several different ways, including:

• influencing your keywords' actual cost-per-clicks (CPCs)
  
• estimating the first page bids that you see in your account
  
• determining if a keyword is eligible to enter the ad auction that occurs when a user enters a search query
  
• affecting how high your ad will be ranked
  

In general, the higher your Quality Score, the lower your costs and the better your ad position." So it seems like a no-brainer.

If you use PPC then you should be concerned with Quality Score. So how can I tell what the Quality Score of my ad is? Well, Google is a little more coy on exactly how that side of it works except to say that "a Quality Score is calculated every time your keyword matches a search query … that is, every time your keyword has the potential to trigger an ad."

If that’s all you knew about Quality Score then you could end up burning a hole in your pocket with your AdWords campaigns, never quite sure if your ad measured up to Google’s standards of Quality Score. But before you cry yourself to sleep, step into the Affilorama tool shed of wonder.

It’s easy to forget just how many great (and free!) tools are available – designed to help you achieve affiliate success.

Save money with the free Quality Score Checker

Under the PPC section on the Tools page is the Quality Score Checker. The Quality Score Checker is designed to help you improve the price you pay for PPC ads by checking the relevancy of your ads for the keywords you intend to bid on. Not only will it tell you what your quality score is going to be, giving you a much better cost per click but it will also give you suggestions and advice for ways to improve your ad or your website to increase your quality score.

Search network versus Content network

The way Google calculates Quality Score does vary for ads placed on their content network (AdWords that display on websites who have AdSense) and the search network (AdWords that display on Google’s search results) however the main ingredients for a Quality Score remain the same, which is why the Quality Score Checker is very helpful in making sure you are on the right track.

How do I use the Quality Score Checker?

It’s as easy as falling off a log, possibly easier. For starters you'll need to be a registered user of the Affilorama site.

As soon as you’ve done that and you're logged in proceed to the Quality Score tool in the Affilorama tools.

The form that appears allows you to enter details of your PPC ad so it can check both the ad and the page you are sending clickers to. You can experiment with the words you enter to optimize your Quality Score.

Please note that the Display URL must be the same domain and same TLD (Top Level Domain, e.g. if your site is a .com you can’t display it as a .co.nz). For more information on Google's AdWords advertising policies, refer to http://adwords.google.com/support.

In the Keyword Phrase box enter the phrases you are planning on bidding on. Click Submit to process your details and return the Quality Score for each Keyword Phrase you have entered. When it has finished calculating your Quality Score, a report appears below the form with a score for each Keyword Phrase you entered.

To find out how you can improve the Quality Score for any of your Keyword Phrases, click View Factors and a more detailed report explaining the reason for your score appears. The report will help you to finetune your both your ad and your site to improve your Quality Score and enjoy lower advertising rates and better ad placement with Google.

For future reference you can save the report, which can be accessed at a later date from the Reports link at the top of the Affilorama site (it appears when you're logged in). The report can be viewed or even updated to see if your Quality Score has improved after making changes to your website.

The time spent in tweaking both your PPC ads and your site is definitely a wise investment.

Has optimizing your ad’s Quality Score helped boost your AdWords campaign? If you made changes, what do you feel had the biggest impact?