The most common question I receive as an AdWords Specialist from new AdWords users is why are my quality scores so low?
In order to understand why your quality scores are low you first need to understand how Google generates them. Quality score is an estimate of the quality of your ads and landing page based on the keyword that triggers them. So then how does Google estimate the quality of your keywords?
Let’s take a look at a real world example I just dealt with. I was working with an auto mechanic who was using AdWords and one of his keywords was break repair, yet his quality score was 3/10. Meaning Google did not think his ads were relevant for people searching for break repair – which is obviously not the case as a big part of his business is break repairs.
The first thing to look at is the ad itself. Does it contain the keyword, in this case “break repair?” If that answer is no, you should be creating ads with break repair somewhere in the ad. Secondly, Google will crawl your landing page reading your meta tags. First they will look at your Title, secondly they will read your description, and finally they will read the content. They are looking for the instances or variations of the keyword. If they can’t find it at all on your landing page there system will determine your landing page is not very relevant to the keyword you are targeting, and thus will hurt your quality score.
With two simple changes: adding “brake repair” to this mechanics ad text and simply changing his landing page from his home page to his services page where he goes into great detail about his break repair services his quality score went from 3/10 to 7/10 and cut his cost per click in half.
In sum, when trying to diagnose why a keyword may have a poor quality score, you need to make sure the keyword you are targeting is ideally in the ad, and in the title and/or description of your meta tags on the landing page.
John Shaw
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