What is Google Quality Score and What it Really Means

Quality Score is at the core of how Google AdWords works, it determines where an ad shows up, how much each click will cost and whether or not the ads will continue to run.

Google defines Quality Score as:

The AdWords system calculates a ‘Quality Score’ for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query. A keyword’s Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).

The factors that affect Quality Score are:

• The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on Google; note that CTR on the Google Network only ever impacts Quality Score on the Google Network — not on Google
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
• The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• The quality of your landing page
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
• Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
• Other relevant factors

The way that I look at this is that Google wants to provide a consistent user experience and provide the best information for each search query in organic AND paid listings.

A recent example we have been using around the office is the search query, “Tiger Woods.” An advertiser could buy this keyword and get massive traffic lately, but unless you own the site TMZ.com, you will get so badly dinged (meaning extremely high price for each click) by Google. Eventually, it will be turned off. This happens because none of the content that an advertiser has on their site has anything to do with the golfer suffering marital problems.

Often, we get asked by advertisers what is the secret to optimizing for quality score, and the answers that we always come back to are:

• Build small adgroups that are highly relevant to the landing page with corresponding, well-written ads
• Make sure your entire website, business or products are covered
• Break up adgroups that have mixed performing keywords. Keep the keywords that are performing well in one adgroup and the poor performing keywords in another and write new ads.
• Test new keywords, new ads, new landing pages and bid pricing. When you are done testing, test some more.

This is just scratching the surface of what PPC is, and what it takes to run an effective campaign. The Internet is a living, breathing, thing and PPC campaigns need to be constantly adjusted, tested, and optimized to get the highest return.

The bottom line is there are no secrets or tricks to optimizing for quality score. It takes a huge effort, tracking and organization to really learn what works for a particular Web site. This is really where Trada can help an advertiser; we have an army of PPC experts that do all of the things mentioned above. These experts (we call them optimizers) compete against each other to build quality Ad groups while optimizing for quality score.

Not Quality