Google Adwords Quality Score

Every time you enter a keyword into Adwords you will see a score come up. This score is the Google Quality Score. This score affects your campaigns directly. This score is almost like Google’s big watch dog for people trying to target terms that do not match their content. This score keeps our browsers clean of junk and provides users with ads based to their search terms.

Overview of the Google Quality Score

Every time you enter a keyword into Adwords you will see a score come up. This score is the Google Quality Score. This score affects your campaigns directly. This score is almost like Google’s big watch dog for people trying to target terms that do not match their content. This score keeps our browsers clean of junk and provides users with ads based to their search terms.

A Quality Score is calculated every time your keyword matches a search term/phrase.  Every time your keyword has the potential to trigger an ad. Quality Score is used in several different ways, including:

• Determines and influences your keywords’ actual cost-per-clicks (CPC)
• Estimating the first page bids that you see on your account
• Determines and influences if a keyword is eligible to enter the ad auction that occurs when a user enters a search query
• Affects how high your ad will be ranked on search engine results pages

What exactly does the Quality Score do?

Quality Score helps ensure that only the most relevant ads appear to users on Google and the Google Network. The Adwords system works best for everyone on the system: advertiser and users of Google products and networks. When the ads are displayed and match our user’s needs as close as possible. Relevant ads 99% of the time earn more clicks, appear in a higher position, and bring you the most ROI.

How does the Quality Score work?

The key factor that determine a keyword’s relevancy, and this indicates to Google how to rank a given keyword, is its click-through rate. The higher the click-through rate (on the search network), the better your Quality Score will be. Keep in mind, there are numerous other factors that comprise your overall Adwords Quality Score, but an individual keyword’s Quality Score is majorly determined by its click-through rate.

This is why I needed to find out how my new keywords were assigned a Quality Score before I accrued even one impression, much less a click-through rate. After some research and placing a call to my Adwords Representative, I came up an answer that all PPC managers should consider when loading new keywords.

When you load a keyword into Adwords, it receives an initial Quality Score. This initial Quality Score is determined by each keyword’s performance history. Google Adwords has monitored this keyword’s history and performance for all advertisers who have targeted this keyword in their campaigns, Google determines an aggregate score and this is your baseline score. This is your keyword’s baseline in regards to its Quality Score.

If your keyword performance is better than the historical average, then your Quality Score will improve. However, if your keyword’s click-through rate is lower than this baseline score then your Quality Score will begin to decline.

If you load a series of new keywords and they all have a low Quality Score, then you may want to re-think these keywords. This is because other advertisers have not had success with these keywords in their campaigns. However, if the Quality Score for a keyword is 9 or 10, this means that previous and current advertisers are having success with this keyword, and competition could be heavy. You may want to give this keywords special attention and place them into their own ad groups for close monitoring.

How do I improve my Quality Score?

The best way to improve your keywords Quality Scores is by optimizing your campaigns. This entails making sure that each of your ad groups contains descriptive ads all advertising the same product or service, and that each keyword in the ad group closely relates to the ads. The landing page for your campaign also makes an impact on your quality score.

Everything needs to be inline, Landing page – Ads – Ad Groups – Campaigns

The higher you’re Quality Score, the lower your costs and better performing campaigns. This article will help you optimize your campaings.