Quality Score can greatly impact the performance of your Google AdWords account hence ensure that you fully understand its relevance. It is necessary to focus on quality parameters. The score is a measurement of how relevant each keyword, ad group, as well as webpage is from a point of view of the user’s focused search activity. It basically helps decide when and where ads will appear.

Let us now grasp the three main aspects that your Quality Scores can, in turn, impact:

1. Cost factor: The higher your keyword’s Quality Score, the lower the price that you will pay for each click (termed actual cost-per-click)
2. Eligibility of the ad to show: Keywords with a greater Quality Score are more likely to be eligible for entering the auction easily and at a much lower cost.
3. Position of an ad: Ranking of an ad on the page is largely based on Quality Score as well as cost-per-click (CPC) bid.

Before we move ahead, let us see how an AdWords account is organized. There are three broad levels, namely account, campaign and ad group. The ‘account’ is generally associated with a unique email ID, password as well as billing information. The ‘ad campaign’ will have a budget and targeting options to decide where those ads will be displayed. The ‘ad group’ is comprised of a set of ads plus a keyword list.

Factors relevant to keyword bidding

Following are some of the elements that come into play during keyword bidding:

• Keywords help decide how much you actually pay. Each key term will carry a certain CPC bid amount. The bids will specify the maximum amount that you are ready to pay when a user clicks your ad. The method is known as the maximum cost-per-click (CPC).
• Consider resorting to automatic bidding, mostly recommended for those who have just begun using AdWords. You set say, a target monthly budget. AdWords then sets your bids, with an aim of bringing you as many clicks as possible within the set budget.
• If you want to have a greater control over the keyword bids, you can opt for manual bidding wherein you are able to set each bid yourself.

Setting the bid amount

If you wish to set your own independent bids, you may certain tools to gauge the bid amount that will allow you to reach your goals in your account. For example, you may make use of the Traffic Estimator. It will give you an idea of the competitive CPC bids for your keywords. You will get to see your ad’s estimated average ranking on basis of the bid amounts that you enter.

You may make use of the first page bid estimates  to check how much you would approximately have to bid on a particular keyword (based on its Quality Score) to make it trigger ads on the first page itself of specific search results.