Quality score is officially determined by the relevancy of your keywords to your ads, your landing page, and your click-through rate of the ads. When speaking with Google representatives on the phone and at conferences, they always say that the click-through rate is only a small part of the quality score formula. Not only that, but there has been much industry speculation on the element of keyword relevancy in quality score. Many say that using a keyword in the headline of your ad text will only help your quality score before it has a chance to perform in the market. I have used landing pages that are uncrawl-able by search engine spiders and had great quality scores on all the keywords I am using. So where is the truth in all of this experience? What really determines what your quality score will be?

To better understand the illusive quality score, one would have to get into the mind of who created it. Google, as a business, is first and foremost interested in making money. The good thing about that is the way they make money actually provides a quality service to their consumers (a novel approach many businesses could learn from). So it’s as easy as this- provide a superior product and enjoy success. In the search engine business, bringing the most relevant results to the searcher is the Holy Grail. But how could Google possibly remain omniscient in an ever growing market? They don’t hire thousands of college students to manually look through every landing page. They use leading indicators like click-through rate and keywords being mentioned in the ad text. Think about it; would you want to keep products in your store that never sell? That would be a waste of space. The same goes for Google and their first couple pages of search results. Theoretically the more someone clicks on an ad, the more relevant that ad is to the average searcher’s life. Google gets to provide the most relevant search result (sponsored and natural) which continues to broaden their market share and perpetuate success.

Sound good till now? Here is the flaw in the current quality score model. Click-through rate is not the Holy Grail to the advertiser. After all, we are the ones paying the bills. We could care less if our click-through rate is terrible; we only care about the conversion rate. Since we have to pay for every click, we don’t want just anyone to enter our website. In a perfect world we would have ten clicks with ten conversions.

Let’s take the high-end web design firm, for example.

One of our clients designs and develops high-end websites starting at about $50K. They drive a lot of their business through paid search listings. The majority of their competitors in the sponsored listings are firms who sell cookie cutter templates for websites. Their prices are hovering around $500 for a website. We use negative keywords like affordable and template to try and weed out people looking for a cheap website. Unfortunately, most people don’t enter anything more specific than “website design.” Most people are not market-minded enough to conveniently pre-qualify themselves with search queries like “high end web development” or “professional custom web design.” Unfortunately, both the mind of a CEO of a national company and a small struggling business works the same when searching the internet. Each one of them will enter “web design.”

What we are left with is the flaw in the quality score model; it falls short when advertisers try to qualify the visitor in the ad text. If I qualify someone in the ad text “Professional High End Websites” instead of using a CTR booster like “$500 fully custom website,” I will have a much lower CTR (which is what I want at $7-$13 per click) because the fact is true there are much fewer executives searching the internet than mom and pops with shoe string budgets. When those executives finally see our ads, they are much more compelled to click than the spam-like $500 website offer. We are offering the right people a service. The problem is that we are using Google’s shelf space for the people who are searching for cheesy websites as well. If the CEO knew that they were looking for a “high end professionally designed website” then the quality score model would be virtually flawless. In the mean time, we get a less than perfect quality score for doing what we are supposed to.

So what does this mean for your business?

Weigh out the pros and cons. You will be paying more for each click, but you will be paying for fewer clicks. Do a month to month analysis. We did, and found that paying more per click (using a class qualifier in the ad text) was much more worth it in terms of bottom line.

So how big a role does CTR really play? Well in the case of the premier website design firm, CTR was king. We grouped their keywords ultra tightly in ad groups with highly relevant ad text and still received an “ok” if not sometimes “poor” quality score. In addition, we used highly relevant, highly crawl-able landing pages that all mentioned relevant keywords. All of the elements of quality score were in line but CTR and the quality score was severely affected.

We ran an experiment to see if taking out the qualifier in the ad text could up the CTR and lower the CPC enough to offset for the undoubted drop in conversion rate. Over the next month the quality of leads dramatically dropped and our client pleaded for us to change things back to the way they were with the qualifier in the ad text. In this case, quality score is not doing a service to the advertiser; only Google.