One of the biggest and most hotly debated aspects of pay-per-click advertising is quality score. Quality score is a search engine’s measure of relevance — how well your keyword, ad copy, and landing page relate to one another.

More importantly, quality score determines your ad position and the quantity you pay for every click. Many novice PPC advertisers mistakenly think that PPC is a pure auction, where the best bidder gets the pinnacle spot. In actual fact, ad position is determined by ad rank, which basically is your bid multiplied by your quality score.

Ads with higher quality scores can and infrequently do appear higher in search results than advertisers with higher bids and lower quality scores. For example, an advertiser with a $2 bid and a top quality score of 10 would rank higher than an advertiser with a $10 bid and a high quality score of one.

In other words, it helps advertisers to take a look at to enhance their quality score. But it’s not as easy as you may think.

Complicating matters is the truth that Google recently changed its quality score algorithm. This ended in higher quality scores for some keywords and plenty lower quality scores for others. If you’ve noticed a huge change for your quality score during the last 6 weeks, this algorithm change is probably going the rationale.

If you’re using Bing Ads, it’s important to grasp the variations between Bing’s ad quality score and Google’s. Often, Bing offers more transparency into quality score with tools like Quality Impact that help advertisers understand the justifications for his or her scores and easy methods to improve them. Actually, when you have low quality scores, i like to recommend looking to improve them in Bing, after which replicating your campaigns in Google. While this doesn’t always work, it’s worth a try.

Quality score also has quite a few oddities. This text by Brad Geddes explains a lot of them. It says, to summarize, that advertisers in certain industries and advertisers with keywords or domains which have a couple of meaning often be afflicted by low quality score.

So if you worry about quality score? In the event you optimize for quality score? Opinions within the PPC community vary.

Those who don’t optimize for quality scores claim that it’s not productive. They contend that in case your return on investment is suitable, then quality score is irrelevant. I accept as true with this point — ROI is prime. Your entire wonderful scores on earth don’t matter in case your website doesn’t convert visitors or in case your keywords have such low search volume that they don’t generate any traffic. If you’re ok with your ROI, why do you have to care that you’ve low quality scores?

One reason is that quality score impacts cost per click. In case you could pay less to your PPC ads, why wouldn’t you? That’s the purpose that Michael Wiegand makes during this post. He analyzed several PPC accounts and showed that cost per acquisition improved dramatically with higher quality scores. It’s a compelling argument.

Larry Kim of WordStream is another proponent of optimizing for quality score. On this post for Search Engine Journal, he outlines a pleasing process for optimizing for quality score. On this post for Search Engine Land, he offers a case study of an advertiser with an outstanding average quality score of 8.8.

In short, there are different opinions within the quality score world: people who are for it, and people who are against it. What should a business owner do?

First of all, take a step back and review your goals. I address goals usually because they regularly wander off in tactical conversations about such things as quality score. Achieving an excellent quality score shouldn’t ever be your PPC strategy.

But improving quality score could be a method to succeed in a business goal corresponding to improving your ROI from PPC. In case you find that your ROI isn’t pretty much as good as you’d love it to be, and your quality scores are poor, then working to enhance your quality score is sensible.

On any other hand, if you’re pleased with your ROI, you then don’t have to do something about quality score. Turn your attention to other pursuits, along with optimizing your landing pages or testing new PPC avenues, inclusive of Bing Ads — if you’re not using them already — and social PPC. Don’t waste time fixing something that isn’t broken.

Quality score may be confusing and frustrating for PPC advertisers. Keep your discuss your goals, and you’ll be for your technique to PPC success.

For a more technical discussion of the finer points of quality score, hearken to this Webmaster Radio interview by Brad Geddes of Frederick Vallaeys, a former Googler and quality score expert.