Most Google advertisers find trying to understanding AdWords Quality Score frustrating.

You’ll be regularly hammering your fist against the table with anger because your score is stuck at 1 or 2 and no matter what you try, you just can’t seem to get it to rise.

But what is AdWords Quality Score, why is it important and how is it calculated?

Understand the answers to these questions and with this newly learned knowledge you’ll be able to improve the Quality Score for all your keywords and save money too.

What is AdWords Quality Score?

Just think about it, what is the purpose of Quality Score?

Google prides its self on providing users with relevant search results to queries. Quality Score is their way to ensure that only the most relevant AdWords ads appear to users.

Why Is Your AdWords Quality Score Important?

The reality is that AdWords calculates a Quality Score for a keyword every time it matches a search query. In general, the higher a keywords Quality Score the lower your bidding costs and the higher the position your ad will appear.

What this means to you is that the higher the Quality Score for your keywords, the less you pay in bids.

How Is AdWords Quality Score Calculated?

If you’re like most people, when you start using AdWords for the first time you might find the way your Quality Score is calculated and keeps changing very confusing.

What is actually happening is that when you create your brand new campaign, Google calculates a provisional Quality Score for each of your keywords based on how the keywords you choose have performed in the past when used by other advertisers and how relevant your ad is to those keywords.

The right thing to do therefore when setting up a new campaign is to divide your keywords into small ad groups of 10 or less closely related keywords. Each ad group should trigger at least one relevant ad that includes within it the most popular keyword in the ad group, ideally in the title and in the first line of the text.

The landing page of your ad should also point to the most closely related page of your web site for those keywords and not your home page.

As you continue advertising, after maybe a few days, the Google AdWords Bot will visit your web site and evaluate it. It’s worth remembering that the Bots evaluation is of your entire web site and not just the landing page for your ad.

Therefore your entire web site or at least a significant amount of the content on it needs to be on the general theme of the keywords you’ve selected.

Now, as your account starts to mature, so the Quality Score of your individual keywords will change based on their performance. If the ad your keywords trigger has a high click-through-rate then it’s likely that your Quality Score will rise, poor click-through-rate and it will probably fall.

What Is Google Actually Looking For?

The actual formula for calculating a keywords Quality Score is a closely guarded secret. However, we do know what Google looks at when making the calculation.

Your AdWords Quality Score is calculated differently depending on if you’re using Google and the search network or the content network.

For Google and the search network, factors used to calculate Quality Score include:)

+ The historical click-through-rate of your keyword and the ad it triggers.

+ The historical click-through-rate of your entire account. The historical click-through-rate of your domain.

+ The quality of your landing page.

+ The relevance of the keywords to the ads in your Adgroup.

+ Your accounts performance in the region you’re targeting.

+ The ads past performance on the target and similar sites.

+ The relevance of your ads and keywords in the ad group to the target site.

+ The quality of your landing page.

The best way to improve your keyword Quality Scores is by optimizing your account. This entails making sure that each of your ad groups contain descriptive ads all advertising the same product or service, and that each keyword in the ad group closely relates to the ads.

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Adrian Key is editor of AdWords Adviser, a blog dedicated to making AdWords more profitable for you. Find out more about Quality score and how to improve your AdWords campaign performance at:
==>> http://www.adwords-adviser.co.uk/

5 Ways To Increase Your AdWords Click Through Rate

Your AdWords click through rate (ctr) is an important statistic for any advertising campaign. A good ctr will reward you with a higher Quality Score. And the better your Quality Score, the less you’ll pay in bids, saving you money.

It may surprise you to know that improving ctr is easy. Yet incredibly, many advertisers don’t pay it much attention.

What Is Click Through Rate?

You’re probably wondering how Google calculate ctr values for your account? Well, there is no great mystery. Your AdWords Click Through Rate is calculated by dividing the number of clicks on a keyword or ad by the number of impressions.

For example, imagine your ad has shown 100 times and was clicked on 4 times. Your click through rate would be 4/100 or 4%.

Keep in mind that any ctr above 1% is acceptable, 5% is good and a 10% ctr or more is excellent.

If you’re like everyone else, you’ll easily be able to name two instances where Google measures ctr. But, what most people don’t realize is that AdWords measures ctr in five different ways. And each has an impact on your Quality Score.

Keywords

If you’re like me, you’ll know that all your keywords have their own ctr value. To improve this statistic, you need more people to click on the ad that your keyword triggers.

You can achieve higher keyword ctr by:

+ bidding more so your ad appears higher on the results page.

+ writing a new ad that is more appealing to your audience.

Ads

Every ad in your campaign also has its own ctr value.

+ Add more relevant keywords to the ad group so your ad gets seen more often.

+ Write an ad that is more appealing to your audience.

Many AdWords advertisers don’t realize it, but Google also measures the ctr of all your campaigns and your entire account.

The easiest way to improve your campaign’s ctr is to remove keywords that are not performing. Try removing all keywords that have less than 200 impressions a month and don’t convert.

Why is this important? Consider this example:

Picture a campaign that regularly gets 1000 impressions a week and 50 click through’s. Your campaign’s ctr is 5% (50/1000).

Now, let’s suppose that 20 of your keywords get 150 impressions and 5 click through’s a week between them. None of these keywords are converting, so removing them from your campaign is going to do no damage to your sales.

You now get 45 clicks per week and 850 impressions. The ctr for your campaign is 5.3% (45/850).

This represents an increase of 0.3%. A small rise, but every increase in efficiency can be significant. And if the keywords are not contributing to your sales, then they are not useful anyway.

Domain

Many advertisers, when they experience problems with their Quality Score, believe they can fix the problem by closing their account and opening a new one, They are shocked when this makes no difference.

The fact of the matter is that AdWords tracks your domain performance and will apply a low Quality Score to all the keywords in your new account if you haven’t fixed the underline problem.

The reality is that you should never try to trick AdWords into giving you a good Quality Score, it won’t work.

Earlier on, I told you that there were five instances where AdWords measured ctr values. The fifth instance is the historical performance of all your keywords.

Millions of people use AdWords, and trillions of keywords have been tried in advertising campaigns. There are few keywords that have not been tried previously by other advertisers.

The ctr that others have achieved with any keyword you select will have a big influence on your Quality Score.

I know what you’re now thinking, how do you know if the keyword you’re about to select has a poor historical ctr?

Start by typing the keyword into the “Traffic Estimator” tool. This will tell you how many clicks your keyword might expect per day. Multiply this value by 30 to determine how many clicks your keyword will get per month.

Now switch to the “Keyword Tool” and enter your keyword again. This tool will return the number of searches you’d expect per month.

Divide the number of clicks a month by searches and you’ll get Google’s ctr for that keyword.

If a keywords ctr is low then beware. Google is trying to tell you that your chances of success are small.

The important thing is that if your keyword has a low historical ctr, but you’re certain it’s right for your campaign, then you can still use the keyword. And if you start to achieve a good ctr, then your Quality Score will soon rise and your bid prices drop.

All five measurements of ctr are important to the success of your AdWords campaign. And each can be improved by the changes you make.

The 2 most important things to remember when using ctr to improve Quality Score are:

+ Ctr is only part of the Quality Score equation. To improve, you’ll need to work on every part of the equation.

+ Google reviews performance over time. If your AdWords click through rate for any keyword or ad has been poor to date, then it may take a week or two for any changes you make to fully take effect.

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Adrian Key is editor of the AdWords Adviser, a blog dedicated to making AdWords more profitable for you. Learn how to make your AdWords marketing a success with the resources, ideas and tips at:
==>> http://www.adwords-adviser.co.uk/

When a potential buyer is attempting to find out whether he or she will buy a certain business operation, there are quite a few factors to carefully consider. When a prospect arises, besides the essential questions of suitability, location and longevity, the point of real-world business valuation should be the primary focus. When it comes time to begin negotiations, the seller will provide you with detailed financial documentation – and it is, of course, very much in their best interests to “paint the picture” of their business for sale in a rather luminous light. In such situations, the issue of “add backs” is probably going to represent one of the more difficult problems to deal with.

In a majority of cases, add backs are included to try and present the operation from a real world perspective. As a set of rigid principles must be adhered to when compiling traditional accounting reports, there may well be additional footnotes to consider and these can be either negative or positive depending on your perspective. It is very important when you buy a business to scrutinize each add back as they can often make a considerable difference to your valuation.

When conducting a process of due diligence, it can be a fairly straightforward procedure to check recorded sales and purchases against ledgers and against reconciled bank accounts. Very often however the outgoing owner will be keen to draw your attention to items which may be “one-off” or to additional income which may not necessarily appear on the books at all. You should be open to all suggestions of course but maintain a degree of skepticism at all times until you are able to validate the claims, or otherwise.

Remember that for an item to be claimed as “one time” it must not have appeared during preceding years. Seller could argue that a particular expense is much larger than it should be due to a particular incident or requirement, but if you see a pattern of any kind then the add back must be discounted.

One of the most common add backs, especially when the business can be owner operated, is to suggest the value of a manager’s salary. You need to establish that the outgoing owner was not actively involved in the operation of the business in this case and this figure is only of interest to you if you intend to assume the role of the redundant manager.

Add backs may not be asserted whenever they represent intangibles, such as the prospect of additional revenues due to a new marketing initiative that the outgoing owner has just put in place, for example. Nor should you believe an owner claim that you can reduce a certain category of expenses through renegotiation or other initiatives. After all, if the outgoing owner has not being able to do so to this point it seems reasonable to assume that an incoming “newbie” is likely to have even less ability to affect short-term change in this regard.

Be particularly wary when you are told that a business retains a lot of cash sales. You must essentially discount this notion from a strict valuation perspective, even though such a claim made, after review, may be seen as reasonable. If the owner has not entered the cash sales on the books, he or she will not have accounted for taxes correctly and it’s not fair for them to expect to receive a double benefit in this way, a net tax saving and enhanced business value.

When you have reviewed the complete list of business financials, treat each claim for add back on an individual case basis and never roll them into an inflated value. At this stage you must be particularly diligent to enable you to arrive at a real world price for this prospect.

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Richard Parker is the author of the How to Buy a Good Business at a Great Price series. As President and founder of Diomo Corporation – The Business Buyer Resource Center, his materials, seminars and consulting have helped thousands of business buyers realize their dream to buy a business. Want to find out more about business buying strategies that really work, then look no further than=> http://www.diomo.com/