In a previous post I went over the Basics of Adwords Quality Score. While the core principles are somewhat straight forward, several misconceptions often come up. While there is some ambiguity with several areas of Quality Score, I’ve addressed a few of the more common misconceptions I hear.

4 Common Misconceptions about Quality Score

1. There is Only One Quality Score: While there is a Quality Score that you view in your Adwords account (at the keyword level), Google actually has separate Quality Scores for search, for the content network, to rank ads, and to determine whether a particular ad will be served for a specific query. Much of the same important criteria is applied, such as CTR, relevance, and historical account performance, but there are different QSs that will affect your overall performance.

2. Content Network CTR will Hurt my Search QS: False. Google understands that your click-through-rate on the content network is likely to be significantly lower than the search network. Because of this, your performance on the content networks won’t affect your search quality score (and vice versa for that matter). On a related note, the keyword CTR is based on Google Search, not Search Partners.

3. A Higher Position will Benefit my QS: Google actually normalizes Quality Score to take into account differences in position performance. So to improve Quality Score you would need to achieve a higher CTR than average for a keyword in a given position. Long story short; a high CTR doesn’t always mean a high Quality Score. (but you should of course strive for the highest CTR you can get)

4. Optimizing an Account will Remove my QS History: It can be daunting to re-structure your account with hopes of better performance – especially if your current setup is performing decently. However, Google preserves your history of ad text, keywords, and landing pages when your account is restructured. The visible history is reset, but the historical data used to calculate Quality Score is preserved.

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Questions or thoughts? Feel free to leave a comment below or shoot me an email.

Cheers,

Forest

Many of you are probably well versed in quality score, but I’ve had several questions lately about QS basics so I thought it may be helpful to provide a refresher.

Google’s Adwords Quality Score is an automated measurement of how relevant your keywords are to a user’s search query and to your ad copy.  Google’s goal is to provide the most relevant search results so their Quality Score system aims to help with this effort and reward advertisers who have tightly organized and relevant accounts.

Two Reasons to Care About Quality Score

1. Higher Ranking for Lower Cost: Ad Rank takes both your Max CPC and quality score into consideration. The basic formula is: Rank = Max CPC X Quality Score. With this, a higher quality score can off-set a lower max CPC — so your ad can show in higher positions with a lower actual cost per click. This is of course good news and an important reason to care about quality score.

2. A Poor Quality Score Can Hurt You – Big Time: On the opposite end, a poor quality score can mean you have to pay much higher than your competitor for the same ranking. This is bad news. Even worse, if you have some really bad things going on in your accounts (especially if you get off to a bad start with a new account) a poor quality score can make it difficult to redeem yourself when you start implementing better practices after-the-fact.

This post is on the very basics of Adwords Quality Score. I plan to write some posts down the road that dig into the nitty-gritty and cover some more advanced Quality Score concepts.

Fundamental Items to Keep in Mind

• One of the biggest factors in Quality Score is your CTR (click through rate). Consequently this is also quite good for Google.
• Matching adds and keywords improves quality score. For the keyword “Red Jumpsuit” you would not want an ad talking generally about Work Clothes. Instead, you would want to focus it on, well, Red Jumpsuits.
• Having keywords in each ad group that are closely related to each other is good.
• Your landing page for a particular keyword should be relevant and related to that keyword (and the keywords in that adgroup) as well as the ad copy

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Questions or thoughts? Feel free to leave a comment below or shoot me an email.

Cheers,

Forest