(MKTG 297) Week 6 - Quality and Cost of Google Ads

If your ad is of high quality you can expect to see the cost of your ad lowered and the placement of your ad better. Seems like a pretty simple concept that can work wonders right? Well the answer to this question is both yes and no. Sure it seems easy to create a high quality ad but you have to think about how many other people are creating ads and then look at your ad and see how much better it really is. Google does two things when evaluating your advertisement which include Quality score and Ad Rank. Quality score is the estimate of the quality of your ad and web pages that is triggered by a keyword search in auctions throughout the day. Ad rank is also known as ad position and will tell you where exactly your ad will be placed or positioned.

There are a few different components that Google looks at when generating a Quality Score. These components include things such as CTR, ad relevance, and page experience. Each of these items is given a score between 1 and 10. Ad Rank takes several things into consideration when determining placement on search results. Ad Rank not only takes into consideration relevance but also your Quality Score. No matter your bid amount you can still win a higher placement based on your relevance and Quality Score.

In terms of money and paying Google has three strategies you can use for bidding. These three strategies include cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM), and cost-per-acquistion (CPA). CPC is used when you want to focus on driving traffic to your website. If you want to increase brand awareness and increase the amount of time a customer sees your ad then you would use CPM. If you want to focus on conversions or the amount of times some completes an action on your website then you want to use CPA.

You need to set a daily budget for all of your advertisements. This budget is how much you are willing to bid each day for your ads. While you may specify a certain amount of money willing to be spent each day you may not actually end up spending that much in an auction. CPC and CPM strategies will never spend more than necessary to get your ad to the highest placement. However, the CPA strategy may end up costing more because there are factors that google cannot control when it comes to conversions.