Quality Score & on-page optimisation

Recently I've been a bit of a Quality Score fanatic, trying to get it as high as possible in my Google based PPC campaigns.

Although this has been a quest to find out the best way of optimising marketing budgets, it's also been a method for understanding just what does and doesn't affect on-page Quality Score.

As you probably know, Quality Score is calculated by Google via a mysterious combination of the advert, keywords used and the page you're directing users to. The more relevant Google thinks these are to each other, the better your QS. The best is 10 and the worst is 1. 

A quick point, if you want to find out your Quality Score, you can by looking at the 'keywords' tab in the 'campaigns' tab in your PPC account. Clicking on the white speech bubble  next to any keyword's status will reveal this calculated figure.

So what on-page attributes makes a difference? Well officially the three important factors affecting landing quality score are: relevant & original content, transparency and navigability (although page speed has been mentioned in several blogs, I'm uncertain about its actual influence in this metric).

Helpfully Google publishes its own advice on how you can optimise your site to make your Adwords efforts more cost effective:

http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2404197&from=46675&rd=1

Google Instant - a impact on impressions

As the more astute of you may have noticed, with the introduction of Google Instant search a couple of weeks back, your search query impressions would have increased in your Google Analytics. As per the recent post on Google Webmaster Central blog, you apparently see an increase due to the way impressions are counted.

Apparently the method used for counting impression has changed significantly and if the user stops typing so that the results are displayed for a minimum of 3 seconds, then Google also counts that as a search results impression.

I have to admit I was a bit foxed by this announcement at first, until I realised that it was not page impressions on the target site that had increased, but just the number of search results that contain your URL.

Google has also stated that they haven't changed the way pages are indexed and ranked. So that's OK then.... isn't it?

Well...I'm not so sure. Aren't Google going to factor in the change in impressions (and therefore the reduction in Click-through rate) when calculating things such as the quality score (which is calculated every time your keyword matches a search query)?