Understanding Quality Score Optimization

We’re all told to optimize our websites for a quality score, but you did you know that this isn’t always the best plan?  In reality, you should only optimize in this way when it works in your favor–otherwise you may actually be defeating your own efforts.

Below you’ll learn more about how quality score optimization works and when and when not to use it, from an internet marketing company.

Quality Score Basics

The quality score for any AdWords account can show the health of that account.  Account health is important, but improving your quality scores may not actually benefit your business.  If you’re focused on how to improve your quality scores, but the ways in which you do this don’t actually benefit you, you’ve wasted a lot of energy.  Before you spend a lot of time and effort trying to improve your quality score, you’ll want to think about whether it will help you reach your business goals.

Connecting Your Account and Business Goals

If your quality scores aren’t as high as you’d like, before you start scrambling to improve them in any way possible, slow down.  Your first step in the process should be to think about what you want to achieve with your AdWords account.  Why do you want to improve your quality score?  What are your overall business goals?  Whether your goals are to generate leads, generate sales, increase your ROI, or to increase revenue, your quality score will likely not, in reality, be a direct way to reach this goal. 

Learning from Your Quality Score

Your quality score can still tell you a lot about your business including relevance, landing page experience, and anticipated click-through rate. 

While these are important, it’s possible that if relevance is dragging down your quality score, there could be more important issues to take care of, such as keyword choice.  Check your search terms report and make sure you’re using the right terms for your products and services.  Then adjust your keyword strategy if necessary.

When Quality Scores Can Help

In some cases, your quality scores can be important for optimization.  If a keyword that generates a high number of conversions has a low quality score, improving your quality score could improve your average cost per acquisition on many conversions.  In addition, if a quality score is extremely low, it can be hard for a keyword to rank.  In this case, focusing on keywords could increase your reach.   

When Quality Scores Can Harm You

If you’re trying hard to increase your quality score, you may be ignoring other essential performance metrics.  For example, ads with dynamic keyword insertion often show increases in click-through rate when compared to ads that don’t have DKI.  However, it doesn’t necessarily mean their ad is better. 

As we all know, even if the CTR goes up, it doesn’t mean conversions also increase.  So just because your CTR is higher, if you aren’t converting more, it doesn’t really matter because the higher number is not supporting your business goals.  This is why your quality score shouldn’t always be your top priority.

In addition, optimizing your quality score may not always improve your keyword performance.  If your keyword is low-volume for other reasons, if it already drives traffic but doesn’t convert, or if it already has a high quality score, it won’t help you much.

None of this is to say that you should avoid improving your quality score, but when you do, it should be to help you move toward your most important business goals.  To learn more about when optimizing your quality score can help boost your business, contact Blueprint Internet Marketing at 1.888.533.4886 or info@blueprintim.com.