Instructor: Quality score, in order to first understand
what quality score is and how it came to be,
it's important to first understand what Google is
at its most fundamental level.
Google is a massive referral service.
People come to Google looking for referrals,
when people need to find information on the internet.
They ask Google this question by typing in a question
into the search box and Google provides websites
that hopefully contain the information
that Google's customers, which is you, was looking for.
So it stands to reason from a business perspective
that Google cares a great deal,
how relevant their suggestions or referrals
are to the customers.
The better of a webpage gives you an answer to your question
and provides you with the information you were looking for,
the more likely you will be to use Google again
in the future.
If you carried out a search for Blue hat,
and then Google returned results for Red hat,
you aren't going to be happy.
And in the future, you may even use another search engine
such as Yahoo or Bing.
This is why it's super important for Google
to ensure the results it returns to users
are indeed relevant.
This applies to both the paid ad section
and the organic section too.
So as you can see from the screenshot,
we have lawyer London, and we have three ads,
London lawyers, award-winning law firm
that is relevant to why search for in Google,
same with the second and the third ad.
If you look at the organic results on the right-hand side,
you can see the top results that says
the best lawyers in London,
which is super relevant to what I typed in, lawyer London.
And then we have a second result below.
So this says in London, Duncan Lewis solicitors,
which is obviously a local lawyer firm in London as well.
So the result that Google serves up,
it needs to be relevant
to ensure the customer has a good user experience.
Now, if you remember what I said at the beginning
of the course, ad account to 97% of Google's revenue.
So quality score in a basic form
is Google's way of ensuring
that customers had the same high quality referral experience
from a paid ad, as they do organic results.
Now, we understand what quality score aims to do
at a conceptual level.
Lets talk about how exactly how it works
and how it's calculated.
So one of the first things you need to be familiar with
is something called ad rank.
Ad rank is a number which determines
which page your ad will show in.
The advertiser with the highest ad rank
gets their ad placed the highest on Google SERPs,
which stands for Search Engine Results Page.
The question is, how does Google calculate your ad rank?
Great question.
Let's look at how Ad rank was calculated
before Google introduced quality score,
which for those who are interested was in 2005.
So the auction before quality score existed.
So just to confirm, this is the way Google used to operate
before they made quality score.
So let's imagine we have three people.
We have Ben, we have Sally and we have Tom.
Now all three of these people,
both own E-commerce stores and they both sell men's hoodies.
And as a result, they all run Google ads
and they tell Google show my ad,
anytime someone searches for men's hoodies.
So Ben goes his Google ads account
and he sets his maximum cost per click at $1,
Sally goes into her account
and sets her maximum cost per click at $2,
and Tom sets his maximum CPC at $3.
In this scenario, we have three different advertisers
with three different maximum cost per clicks.
So back in the day,
Google would literally give Tom the highest ad rank,
which would be ad rank number three.
And because he has ad rank number three,
his ad would show at the top of Google.
Sally with the second highest max CPC
would get ad ranked number two.
And as a result be in position two
and Ben with his $1 maximum CPC,
he would have added rank number one
and as a result would be in position three.
So as you can see back in the day,
Google only really used to take into consideration
what your maximum CPC was.
Now not to confuse matters that are no longer relevant,
but CTR, which stands for click through rates
did in fact play a role
in determining ad rank back in a day as well.
And essentially ad rank was calculated
by your maximum CPC times your CTR.
And the reason why Google added the CTR element
into the Ad rank calculation,
because a keyword with a very high bid but no clicks
was not only relevant to users,
but it also wasn't making can Google any money,
no matter how much that advertiser was willing to pay
for a click.
But what's important to know
is that before quality score was introduced,
the highest ad rank was essentially given
to the highest bidder.
But when quality score was introduced,
everything changed and things got a little more trickier.
So as we saw in the last slide,
calculating ad rank
based solely on the advertiser's maximum CPC,
isn't a great way to go.
And it can result in a very poor user experience.
As long as your pockets were deep enough,
you could appear on the first page
with highly irrelevant ads.
You could literally go onto Google
and search for office chair
and then see a bunch of ads
all to do with car insurance.
Google being the premium search engine,
it didn't want this to happen.
As a result, they introduced quality score in 2005
to try and combat this.
Before we dive into how Google calculates quality score,
let's run through some important key things
you should know about first.
The first is every single keyword in your account
has a quality score on the one to 10 scale.
To view your quality score,
you simply need to add the column to your data overview.
Let's head over to our Google ads account now,
and I'll show you exactly how you can add this.
So why once you're logged into your Google ads account,
what you need to do is go into the campaign
and then go into any ad group.
This will now take you on a page
where you can see all of your keywords.
So once you're on this page where you can see your keywords,
you need to go over to the right-hand side,
where it says columns, give that a click
and then click modify columns.
This is now going to open a page,
which looks similar to this.
So what you want to do is go to the bottom,
second from the bottom and click quality score,
expand the menu,
and then make sure you have this box checked.
And once you've done that,
you want to go down and click apply.
This is now going to add a column to your overview,
which is going to show your quality score.
If you'd like to move this column to the front of your data,
all you need to do is go back into the columns,
click modify, and then simply pick quality score
and drag it up to the top of the data like so,
you can see it's now between clicks and impressions.
Let's click apply,
and that's now going to move the quality score column
to the front of our data overview.
Another important thing to note
is that historical keyword level quality score
is not available inside a Google ads account.
In other words,
you can only see what your quality score is at present,
and you can't see what it was in the past.
So you can't see what your quality score was last week
yesterday, last month, last year,
you can only see what it is at present.
Whilst Google has never officially confirmed this themselves
it's generally thought that your overall account
has a quality score in some way or another,
which affects your overall performance.
In any case, the better your keyword level quality score,
the better your account will be.
The display network quality score is another murky area.
And it's known that improving your click-through rate
on any known search campaigns can improve the efficiency
of your display campaigns as well.
However, for our purpose here,
we're going to be focusing on the tangible data,
which is quality score for the search network.
In the next video,
we're going to look at the four main components
that make up quality score.
I'll see you there.