Last week, I presented at SMX East in NYC on the adCenter Quality Score. For those of you who couldn’t make it to the conference this year, here’s a quick summary of my session. Enjoy!

In March, adCenter unleashed their Quality Score metrics. Since then, I’ve been analyzing how the Quality Score reviews and assigns value to each individual keyword and match type. By understanding how the adCenter Quality Score works, you can utilize it to optimize your PPC campaigns.

When you mention, “quality score,” within the PPC tribe, most people think of Google. This isn’t very surprising because their Quality Score has been around for years so they have dominated the conversation. In this context, for many PPC folks, a great way to under the adCenter Quality Score is to make a comparison to AdWords:

The adCenter Quality Score doesn’t directly impact your cost-per-click, ad position or keyword eligibility. Rather, the core objective of the adCenter Quality Score is to indicate your keyword’s competitiveness in the marketplace when compared to other advertisers bidding on that particular term.

The adCenter Quality Score focuses on three core metrics:

1.) Keyword relevance: Keyword relevance indicates the competitiveness of your keywords and ad copy in the marketplace for the same search queries.

2.) Landing page relevance: Landing page relevance indicates the relevance of your ad and landing page to search users' queries. Your landing page relevance score reflects the degree of eligibility of your ads to be displayed in response to search queries.

3.) Landing page user experience: The landing page user experience score is an aggregate assessment of the quality of all landing pages in your site. The score reflects the degree to which your landing pages adhere to Microsoft Advertising adCenter Editorial Guidelines.

When you start digging into your adCenter account, there a couple ways you’ll be able to locate your Quality Score metrics. You can see numeric Quality Scores within keyword reports and descriptive indicators within the adCenter UI:

You will be able to see overall keyword Quality Scores, and they are ranked such as:

Now, that you have a basic understanding of how the adCenter Quality Score functions, we’ll cover how you actually use these scores to improve the performance of your campaigns.

Your core KPIs (key performance indicators) should dictate the success of a keyword. If a specific keyword is meeting your click-through rate, cost-per-click, cost-per-acquisition and conversion rate goals, you may not need to conduct an in-depth Quality Score analysis. You should focus your Quality Score analysis on keywords that are not meeting your goals.

The adCenter Quality Score can help you determine where a keyword’s weaknesses reside. You can conduct additional analysis in order to discover root cause analysis as to why a specific keyword isn’t successful, but the Quality Score can provide guidance. This is how you can use the individual metric scores.

Poor keyword relevance

• Streamline your ad group structure: Make sure that you have tightly themed ad groups with closely related keywords.
• Improve relevance of your ads: The core keyword theme of your ad should be highlighted in your ad copy – preferably twice.
• Enhance the quality of your ads: Basically, write better ads! By testing ads regularly, you will enhance your ad performance as you remove weak variations.
• Conduct keyword research (negatives too): As you tighten your ad group structure, you should conduct additional keyword research. Insert new negative keywords as well. This will help improve your CTR – which will boost your Quality Score.
• Analyze your keywords & match types: Each match type possesses its own Quality Score. Also, each match type will generate different results. You should look at your keywords, but you should also analyze how each match type performs. You may find that certain match types of specific keywords work better.

Poor landing page relevance

• Insert more keywords into your body copy: Improve the relevancy of landing page by including more high-volume keywords within your copy.
• Insert keywords into meta tags: The meta tags optimization usually resides in the realm of SEO, but you should make sure that the meta data on your landing pages is optimized for your mission critical paid keywords.
• Insert keywords into image alt tags: Again, this is usually an SEO task but including keywords in your image alt tags can improve your landing page relevance score.
• Utilize specific, targeted landing pages: Send your PPC traffic to the most specific and targeted landing page possible.
• Grouping keywords and landing pages this way will help you manage landing page relevance more effectively.

Poor user experience

• Review for duplicate content: Make sure that you don’t have five different landing pages all with the same content. Your PPC ads should serve relevant, unique content.
• Avoid interstitial landing pages: Don’t use a page that forwards visitors to another location automatically.
• Remove multiple third party advertisements: Your landing page can have a few ads, but it shouldn’t be a huge billboard with no valuable content.

Because the adCenter Quality Score is available for each match type, you may find that certain match types are more competitive than others, and this is also where you may focus your optimization efforts. Our studies have shown that exact match across a number of accounts has a higher click-through rate, and a higher Quality Score:

One of the excellent features of the adCenter Quality Score is that you can monitor your progress over time. You can run keyword reports in order to see how your changes are affecting your core KPIs as well as your Quality Score. This way, as you optimize your account you monitor the progression of your Quality Score. And, if you follow the strategies in this article, you should be able to watch your Quality Score improve over time.

Thanks for reading,

Joseph Kerschbaum

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Joseph Kerschbaum is Vice President of Client Services for PPC advertising agency Clix Marketing. Joseph is a regular speaker at search and advertising conferences (most recently SMX West and SMX Advanced). Joseph was the founding editor of PPC Hero and SEO Boy. His writing on the SEM industry appears regularly in his Search Engine Watch column, and in his columns in Website Magazine and Visibility Magazine. Joseph is coauthor of “Pay-Per-Click Advertising: One Hour a Day,” published by Wiley/Sybex (2010).

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