One of the most commonly asked questions about Google Adwords is relating to Quality Score. This article will cover everything you need to know about Adwords Quality Score to start optimising your campaigns.

What is Adwords Quality Score?

Adwords Quality Score is Google’s method of measuring how effective your ad is for a given keyword.

What does Adwords Quality Score do?

There are actually four different quality score calculations on your account. They are:

1. Calculating a keywords minimum bid
2. Calculating the rank that your ad will display on search pages
3. Calculating whether your keyword targeted ad should display on a certain page in the content network
4. Calculating whether your placement targeted ads should display on a certain page in the content network

The most important Quality Scores for most campaigns, and the Quality Scores that we’ll look at in this article are number 1 and number 2.

How is Adwords Quality Score calculated?

Each of the four quality scores I listed above have different factors that are used to calculate the Quality Score.

To calculate your minimum bid, Google uses:

• The Keywords CTR in the search network
• Relevance of keyword to ad text
• Your landing page, and its relevance to the keyword
• The CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• Other factors that Google haven’t released

What’s interesting to note is that Google is tracking the historical data of CTR for display URL’s. Also interesting is that Google have recently enforced that display URL’s have to be an accurate representation of where the landing page actually is (More info).

Calculating quality score for your ads position on a search result page is slightly different. It now takes into account the relevance of the “matched” keyword. This is why it is good practice to use longer keywords and/or negative keywords.

Why should I increase my Adwords Quality Score?

As we just talked about, having a high Quality Score increases your ad’s position on a search result page. If you have a high Quality Score, and a competitor has a low Quality Score. Your ad may outrank theirs even if they are bidding higher than you.

How do I check my Adwords Quality Score?

At the Ad Group level of your account, there is a Quality Score column. If it isn’t showing up, you can set it to show up by clicking on the “Customize columns” link, and then clicking “Show Quality Score”. Google rates Quality Scores as “great”, “ok” and “poor”.

How do I increase my Adwords Quality Score?

The short answer is to increase relevance between your keyword, your ad group, your ad text, your display url and your landing page. The way to do this is to break your campaign down into lots of little Ad groups that have very related keywords in them.

This is an example of how not to set up your campaign:

Ad Group: Widgets
Keywords: Widget, Red Widget, Green Widget, Buy Widget, Furry Brown Widget, Cheap Widgets
Landing Page: Home page

Instead, set it up like this.

Ad Group: Red Widget
Keywords: Red Widget, Furry Red Widget, Cheap Red Widget
Landing Page: Red Widget Page

Ad Group: Blue Widget
Keywords: Blue Widget, Furry Blue Widget, Cheap Blue Widget
Landing Page: Blue Widget Page

It is also important that Ad text is related to the keywords. So you would want to use your keyword in the Heading of your ad, once in the copy, and in the display url.

You can see that the second example is a lot more relevant for their respective keywords, and will have a higher Quality Score. The other advantage of structuring your account like this is that your traffic is somewhat prequalified.

Common myth about Quality Score

There is a common myth going around that you should start your campaign out bidding high to make sure you have a high CTR and then lowering your bids. This is untrue as Google normalizes your CTR based on the position it displays. It follows that you can’t increase your Quality Score by bidding higher in the hopes it increases your CTR.

Learn more about VDP Adwords Management

Visit our website for more information on our Adwords Management services and results.

Related posts:

1. 6 Adwords Landing Page Design Tips and an Example In a previous article I wrote about the Adwords Quality...
2. 5 tips for writing Adwords Ads Ad text is an important part of creating an Adwords...
3. How to spend lots of money on Adwords and not make a cent the Paypal way Paypal are throwing their money away. Just literally burning it....
4. The 10 most expensive Adwords Mistakes Adwords has become the first point of call when it...
5. Impressions of Google Wave On Sunday I was lucky enough to wake up to...