While it looks primarily like Google’s attempt to replicate Facebook’s “Like” what does it mean for search marketers ? A Plus One vote is a clear indication of human preference and there can be no better judge of a webpage’s quality than a real human user. Google is definitely going to use this as a signal in its algorithm. In fact, this time Matt Cutts himself clearly admits to this , “”When someone recommends something, that’s a pretty good indicator of quality,” said Matt Cutts. “We are strongly looking at using this in our rankings.”

Similarly, on the Adwords front, we already know that high quality score would mean lower CPC and better exposure and this is going to get a shot in the arm with implementation of this Plus One feature. Ads that get a Plus One would likely have a higher quality score, resulting in better performance for the advertiser. This has been further confirmed with the statement by ads group product manager Christian Oestlien, “We will provide reporting in AdWords for plus-ones” “Our belief is that advertisers will see increased performance from ads with personalized annotations.”

Inbound links have been one of the strongest signals for organic ranking for a long time now and now as Google has started to become more social , incorporating personalized search results, real time twitter results etc, Plus One is definitely going to be a big step ahead in that direction and can prove to be a key player in determining relevance for algorithmic search results.

Also, looking at it from Google’s perspective, introducing Plus One has multiple benefits. Besides getting a new powerful signal to tidy up the search results, Plus One can actually give Google a second chance to penetrate the social web. When the user tries to hit Plus One for the first time, they would be invited to create a Google profile and adjust the privacy settings. Also, Google would offer publishers the option to embed Plus One buttons to their content pages, so users can vote on content on other websites beyond search results pages and most webmasters would be more than eager to implement this as they realize that Plus One votes can help them get better with organic search results. A positive aspect of this for webmasters would be that to get this Plus One embed code, they would need to login to the Google Webmasters Tools. So the ones who have not yet registered with Webmaster tools would probably have one more reason to do it now.

Everything said and done, it would be fun to see how BlackHats and spammers use the Plus One votes to their advantage. Though Google has been doing a fair job at fighting them, there has been one too many cases where BlackHats and spammers have gamed the Google results and introducing such a simple, manual signal to influence the search results might throw a new challenge for the Google anti-spam team.

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Google’s inclusion of landing page load time is therefore not at all an unexpected move, rather, this would actually fall in suitably with one of the base philosophies that Google has always preached – “Fast is better than slow”. Google has always worked towards enhancing user experience on their products as well as in other cases where they could have minimal control. Faster loading landing pages are definitely a step towards better user experience for people who click on Adwords ads.

Google defines landing page load time as the time taken for a user to see the landing page after clicking an ad. Slow servers, interstitial pages, multiple redirects can actually increase this time and lower your quality score in Adwords. Keeping this in mind, we will need to wait and see if advertisers who are using PPC management platforms like DART, Doubleclick for Advertisers, Omniture etc gets a relatively lower quality score than the ones who send the advertisers directly to their website. Though the redirection time required by these platforms are very minimal and almost unnoticeable, going by the load time definition suggested by Google they would probably still be a factor to consider.

For those of you who are having a relatively heavy landing page, might see a fall in quality score and higher minimum CPC requirement, however, Google says that their system reevaluates pages on a regular basis and if you make significant improvement in your landing page load time you are likely to see an improvement in quality score as well as a lower minimum CPC requirement.

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Quality Score as defined by Google, “Quality Score is the basis for measuring the quality and relevance of your ads and determining your minimum CPC bid for Google and the search network. This score is determined by your keyword’s click-through rate (CTR) on Google and the relevance of your ad text, keyword and landing page.”

A pretty clean and simple definition but why does Google use Quality Score to display and rank the paid ads and not just display the ads based on highest bids?

To answer this question we will need to understand Google’s objective. Google’s objective or for that matter, any search engine’s objective is to serve the most relevant results to its searchers. If the paid search results were displayed simply based on the highest bid values even unrelated websites with solid financial standing could easily out do the most relevant websites by placing a higher bid on targeted keywords. This would actually disappoint the search engines users, as they would often land up on that unrelated page while searching for their keyword and ultimately lowers the search engine’s credibility to its users. In simple words, Quality Score is an effective technique to ensure maximum relevance between the keywords and the ads displayed for that keyword and prevent unrelated results from appearing in the paid search results.

Now that we understand why Google factors in the Quality Score for their PPC listings, we also understand that to improve our paid search listings and lower the CPC it is important to have a good Quality Score. So now comes the big question, How to Improve your Quality Score.

Official – Factors affecting Quality Score

Google on its website declares the Adwords Quality Score formula as

Quality Score = (keyword’s CTR, ad text relevance, keyword relevance, landing page relevance)*

*Where the interactions between the Quality Score variables change as we continue to refine how to measure and define quality in AdWords.

Like all other things Google, this formula is also continuously refined to improve the relevance of ads and people across the search marketing industry today are busy analyzing the secrets of quality score and if there are any other untold factors or sub factors that can improve the factors affecting Quality Score.

UnOfficial – How To Improve Quality Score

The Click Through Rate for any keyword is affected by various factors including presence of keywords in the Ad Title, Ad Copy, in display URL. Proper call to actions in the ad copy can also affect the CTR to large extent.

Create Ad Groups: One of the most effective ways to implement these would be to divide all the keywords with smaller ad groups consisting of related keywords and then create a relevant ad copy for each group. This way it is easy to ensure that the ads displayed for each keyword contain the keyword.

Optimize Ad Copy: It is always better to have more than one ad copy for each of your ad groups. Use different call to actions and language to for each of these creatives. To get a proper feel of the performance of each of these ad copies, turn off the ad serving optimization and then serve these ads manually for equal amount of time and compare the results. This would help you to identify the best performing ad creative very easily. Once the best performing ad copy is selected, play around with it to improve the performance further. This should be a continuous process, because, there is no end to the extent to which you can optimize your ad creatives.

Match Types: Adwords offers various types of keyword matching options the default being broad match. It is important to test the various matching options to see which returns a better quality score. It has been observed that mostly “Exact match” returns a better score compared to Phrase match and broad match.

All the above-mentioned factors would improve the factors like keyword’s CTR, ad text relevance and keyword relevance and ultimately improves your Quality Score. Besides these there are a host of things that you can do on page to improve your landing page relevance and thus again add a boost to your Adwords Quality Score.

Use Keywords: Ensure that you use your keywords in the landing page content.

Title & Meta Tags: Use your best performing keywords in the title and Meta description for your landing page. Try to incorporate the text of your best performing ad into your Meta Description or body content.

SEO: Yes, a little bit of SEO and Link Building would also help to increase the relevance of the landing page for your targeted keywords in Google’s perspective. Improve the navigation and coding, add a few deep links using your keywords as anchor texts. These factors will not just make your landing page more relevant for your Adwords campaign but also would add value to your organic SEO campaign.

Check With Google: It is important to check if Google actually thinks your keywords are related to your landing page. Use the Site Related Keywords Tool to check the keywords related to your landing page and cross check with the keyword list for which you are using that landing page.

Important Site Pages: It might be a good option to add important site pages like, Privacy policy, Terms & Conditions, About Us etc. More than anything these pages would give the confidence in your visitors to do a transaction on your landing page and add to your conversion rate.

Multivariate Testing: This is the ultimate step in optimizing your landing page to improve your quality score. While the above mentioned factors would help to create and increase the landing page relevance multivariate testing helps you to compare variations of your landing page and see which one is giving the best output. Always create multiple variations of your landing page and test each option and their variation by changing the different page elements. Though there are innumerous factors that you can toy around with, some of the major factors that affect conversion are page heading, size of image on the page, call to actions, use of Verisign, BBB seals, readability, color scheme etc. Multivariate testing should be a continuous process and you should test various combinations of page elements to see which works best for your campaign.

Google Adwords has an inbuilt tool for multivariate testing, which makes it really easy to conduct such test, however, it is accessible only after you log in to your Adwords Account. You can view a overview of the Multivariate Testing Tool.

If all these factors are implemented properly the Quality Score is definitely going to improve and in turn would improve your Adwords ROI.A detailed look at the benefits attained through implementation of these factors can be listed as:

• Quality Score would Improve
• Reduction in Minimum CPC
• The CTR (Click Through Rate) would increase
• Increase in conversion Rate

There might be many other factors that contributes to improvement of your quality score, however, the factors mentioned above are the basic factors that goes into the quality score algo for most PPC providers. I would really appreciate if you would put your comments on this and any other factors that you think would help to improve Adwords Quality Score.

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