Last week I was interviewed by Josh Dreller, a columnist for Search Engine Land. In the interview he asked me a bunch of questions about Quality Score, and why we created SpeedPPC in the first place.

Upon reading it back, and chatting with a few people it struck me that a lot of people in some ways don’t really “get” why quality score is so important. Not only that, they don’t understand how it’s actually an amazingly positive thing.

Put simply, if you know what you’re doing you can make a killing.

Glass half full or half empty

It seems that most advertisers tend to frame quality score from a negative perspective and as a result, it negatively impacts their results.

They keep asking questions like “Why the heck are so many of my keywords getting quality scores of 1 or 2?”

This is a fair enough question, and they are obviously doing something seriously wrong. A subject I’ve covered (and will continue to cover) in other posts.

However, where the bigger opportunity lies is not just getting your keywords active, it’s NOT settling for mediocrity. Don’t see 6′s, 7′s and 8′s in your account and be happy enough. This is a costly mistake.

The Disconnect

If you have a look at the main video on the home page at SpeedPPC.com you’ll see how by doing things in a smarter way, we were able to improve our QS by 56.5% with just a few minutes work.

The problem is, many people don’t connect the dots on how much of a good thing this is. It’s looked at through this glass half empty mindset most of the time. So people think “Oh.. that’s good. I’ll be able to get my ads showing now”. Yeah. . . well that’s nice, but you’re settling for mediocrity.

Here’s why creating high quality campaigns (easily created with SpeedPPC) REALLY matter. You need to read this stuff slowly to let the full impact and exponential nature of it sink in.

1) More Traffic

• In rough terms, if you can improve your QS by 56.5% you can improve your ad position by 56.5%
• Ad position #1 gets 8 times more clicks than ad position #5. So by moving from position 5 to position 1, you get 8 times the traffic for the exact same cost per click.

2) More Profitable Keywords

• In rough terms, if you improve QS by 56.5% you can lower your costs by 56.5%.
• So you can now activate more keywords at the same ad position for 56.5% less. So you have more keywords working profitably for you. Again, dramatically increasing your reach. You could have thousands instead of just hundreds of keywords driving profitable clicks.

3) Better Conversion Rates

• With well structured PPC campaigns, you can drop people onto pages that more accurately reflect what they were originally searching for.
• As a result, you’ll increase the conversion rate and can afford to pay more per click in 1 & 2 above. Creating for yourself a exponential profit snowball.

Can you see the magic of this stuff?

Don’t fall into the trap of settling for mediocrity with you PPC. Go for the throat and you’ll reap the rewards.