It’s been a while since my last post, We’ve been busy rolling out new features to BrandWatcher, expanding our Pay Per Click services and Free Adwords Health Check has been very busy too, and in addition to that basically I’ve been spending more time relaxing once work is done for the day so blogging hasn’t been on my mind so much, having said that we have implemented some new systems so I should have a bit of time to blog now and then more in the day.

So without further ado I thought I’d share a pretty straightforward video from Google themselves about how the Google ad auction works and in particular the quality score  as it’s such a mystical subject to most people so I’ll let their chief economy boffin Hal Varian explain the Ad auction and quality score :

Hopefully that clarifies things but in summary :

Quality score is determined by CTR (Click Through Rate),  Relevancy between the keyword and ad copy,
Landing page quality: Relevant and original content , good easy navigation on site with a fast load time, no pop ups or unders and a transparency to the nature of the business.

Getting a good CTR is key to a healthy, profitable adwords account, but so many accounts we see have poor use of keyword matching and virtually no negatives in use which in turn affects the quality score.

If you are pressed for time and could only do one thing in your adwords account this week it should be to run search query reports and use them to find negative keywords to use in your adgroups to cut down the irrelevant traffic and boost that CTR as it really is important to get this as high as possible as it makes life so much easier.