Google Quality Score Problems

Quality Score flaw?

Receiving a great Quality Score for your keywords ensures you’re not paying more than you need to for each and every click you receive in your Google AdWords account.

Google AdWords Quality Score is one of the most important aspects to get right when you’re setting up or refining your Google AdWords campaign. Obviously the holy-grail is to obtain “Great” Quality Scores for every single keyword in your AdWords AdGroups.

Occasionally when you’re trying to do the right thing, you can blow your quality score out the window and end up with the dreaded “Poor” QS.

We’ve experienced this recently a couple of clients, one in particular who advertises globally. We set up the campaigns to target various countries, and each AdGroup was created for each of the services the organisation offers. When we set the account up, we used a Country approach so we could geographically tailor our message; for instance in the United States and Canada, they use spellings like ‘check’, whereas we use ‘cheque’.

So far so good.

We got into trouble when we tried to ‘filter’ the clicks to obtain genuine referrals. We did this by specifying the Client’s location in the Google Ad itself (it only offers its services in Melbourne).
By doing this it meant our Click Through Rate (or CTR) was quite low, but the quality of the clicks for the client was very high (and converting really well). Sadly though, Google doesn’t care about the quality of your clicks. CTR is one of the metrics Google uses to decide the “Quality Score” of your Google Ad. If your CTR is low (in our client’s case) Google deemed the Ad (and associated keywords) to be less relevant, therefore assigned nearly all our keywords with Poor Quality Scores. OUCH!

It’s also often a good idea to show a price in a Google Ad to filter out clicks from people who may not be able to afford the product or service you’re offering (price sensitive customers). But with Google’s Quality Score system you will decrease the Quality Score of your keywords because your CTR will likely drop. But the quality of the visits to your website will be much higher and more likely to convert!

It’s a catch 22.

Personally I think Google should try and tie in conversion rate metrics into the Quality Score system. Although to be fair to Google, it would be a very easy thing to manipulate by advertisers.

So what do you do?

You have a several options, the first of which is to do nothing and watch the price of your clicks go from 50c to $1.30, to $6.50 to $13.00 until you go completely broke.

The second option is to kill the Google Ad’s, and go with banner ads instead.

Perhaps a more practical solution is to remove the offending “filter” in the Ad, (like a ‘price’ or ‘location’), so your Quality Score improves and you pay less per visit (but your conversion rate may drop).

Lastly, you can also focus your efforts more heavily on the content network (where Google doesn’t use CTR metrics to assess Quality Score of keywords) and what with Google’s (old but) new ‘Placement Targeted’ system, you get to pick which websites you want your Ad’s to appear on.

So if you’re trying to do the right thing to improve user experience using price or location filters in your Google Ad’s (but getting pinged for the trouble), try the solutions above to get around Google’s sometimes inflexible Quality Score system.