Conversion Rates and Adwords Quality Score

As a follow up to my blog post on Wednesday about Adwords quality scores and click through rates I wanted to address in more detail what I said about conversion rates and quality scores.

Randall brought up the point that conversion rates would not affect quality score because it would be too easy to game by black hat PPC managers. In my ‘opinion’ quality score definitely looks at conversion rates, and here’s why.

1. 99.5% of adwords users are not trying to trick Google by inflating their conversion rates. Therefore it would be foolish for them not to use this data to determine quality scores (it is one of the most important indicators they have).
2. Every keyword search happens in an eco sphere relative to the other ads around you, Google is tracking them all. If you were to outperform them on conversion rates by 10% it would indicate that your ad and offer is better than the others and should be rewarded with a higher quality score. However if you were to out perform them by a larger percentage (outside a range set by the eco sphere), then the quality score algorithm should automatically give this aspect less importance relative to the other aspects like ad copy, CTR, time on page, bounce rates etc etc. So you see conversion rates can be included in quality score even if there are black hat PPC managers trying to game it.

In conclusion, conversion rates matter. If you make better landing pages, convert more visitors, you will get better quality scores.