Quality Score

Ultimate Guide To Google AdWords’ Quality Score
Everyone is familiar with the Quality Score available for individual keywords in your Google AdWords
account – this is the visible keyword-level Quality Score. What a lot of people fail to recognize, is that
there is more at play here than meets the eye. Most of the time, you can’t solve a Quality Score issue with
just the keyword level QS available to you in the AdWords interface. There is more to investigate, and
can require a bit of digging on your part to solve the overall issue. This guide will help you understand the
different types of Google Quality Score, why they’re important, the misconceptions about Quality Score,
and it will provide you with a checklist of actions you can take to help raise your Quality Score.


Types of Quality Score
Account-Level Quality Score
Account-level Quality Score is the result of the historical performance of all keywords and ads in an
account. Google doesn’t confirm this Quality Score’s existence, but it’s generally accepted that there are
different levels of Quality Score other than the visible keyword-level Quality Score.
If you have a large number of low QS keywords and low click-through rate (CTR) ads with poor
historical performance in your account, they will drag down your account’s total Quality Score, and make
it more difficult to introduce additional keywords, as they’ll start out at overall lower Quality Scores.
Account-level Quality Score is also where we can discuss Google’s favoritism for older accounts versus
new ones. An account with a long history and good performance is going to perform better than a new
one. It can take months to see improvement in a poor-performing account once effort has been made to
improve Quality Score, and it might be tempting to start fresh with a brand new account. However,
starting over is against AdWords policy, so you need to “start over” within the existing account by
restructuring and abiding by keyword, ad, and landing page relevance guidelines.
Most people have different opinions regarding how to handle low Quality Score keywords. Some will
say you should delete them as soon as it’s obvious that they won’t perform well, and others are of the
mindset that you should just pause them. Either option is plausible for low-quality keywords, as they will
stop accumulating data and eventually play a less significant role in your account-level score once you
pause or delete them. However, you need to consider how much search volume and return those
keywords have generated for you before you make the decision to delete. When you delete keywords
from your account, the system will have issues with turning them back on later, as Google will see them
as duplicates. Therefore, before you make the decision to delete something, make sure it’s something you
can really afford to lose to avoid a hassle.

Ad Group Quality Score
Ad Group-level Quality Score is a way to determine which areas you need to work on within a campaign.
For instance, if you have a low keyword QS in one ad group, but your overall average is a 7, versus an ad
group with an average of a 4, you get a clear picture of where you need to focus first. Working on your
lowest average QS areas first helps you achieve a better ROI.
You should look for ways to restructure your campaigns and ad groups, and edit low CTR ads to boost ad
group QS. Restructuring your ad groups is a good way to improve your account structure. Your visible
history is erased when you move things around, but the history for calculating your Quality Score is
preserved.

Keyword-Level Quality Score
This is the Quality Score that Google issues your keywords, and it’s visible in the AdWords interface. A keyword’s Quality Score is scored on a scale of 1 – 10 with 1 being poor and 10 being great. Your
keyword- level score is calculated by the performance of search queries that exactly match your
keyword. Therefore, your Quality Score will be the same for a keyword, regardless of match type.
It’s important to note that keyword’s QS is based on their historic performance on Google.com until they
achieve a significant number of impressions in your account (significant means a high number, in the
multiple of thousands). This is referred to as the impression threshold. Once the keyword receives
significant impressions, its QS will start to reflect how it’s performed in your account, and historic
performance will be a lesser factor. This is important if you have a lot of keywords in your account that have very low impressions: these keywords will not be evaluated based on their own QS in the account.
Until keywords reach the impression threshold, there’s little that can be done to influence their QS.
Here are some recommendations to boost impressions:
• Analyze impression share data. Impression share represents the percentage of times that your
ads were shown out of the total available impressions for which your ads were eligible to appear.
If your impression share is low, you can improve performance by increasing your daily budgets
or boosting bids to rank in higher positions.
• Loosen up restrictive match types or add broad match keywords. Running keywords only in
phrase and exact match will result in slow impression growth and extended rap up times in terms
of QS. In order to roll this out strategically, start with ad groups or keywords that have the
highest click-through rate (CTR).
• Loosen up the themes so keywords are not so niche. You want to be sure keywords are not too
specific so that no one is searching for them. The Opportunities Tab in the AdWords interface is
a good place to find new keywords relevant to add to your current ad groups.
For campaigns whose keywords have received significant impressions, look to CTR as an indicator of
performance. If keyword CTR is low and so is the ad CTR (less than 1.5%) then this is an indicator that
users are not finding the ad relevant to their query, and the ad can be more specific to the ad group theme.


Ad-Level Quality Score
The ads you have running in each of your ad groups will have a different click-through rate, which is a
factor that helps to determine Quality Score. If you have a lot of low CTR ads in your ad groups, they
could be contributing to a low-Quality Score since AdWords considers all of your ads when calculating
your scores.
A way to give your account a natural CTR boost is including Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) ads for
your Search Network campaigns. DKI ads will show a user’s exact search query within the ad, provided it
doesn’t exceed the ad character limits. While you have to be very careful utilizing these ads, it is more
likely that your DKI ad will receive a click than a non-DKI ad because it appears more relevant to the
user’s search. However, you’ll want to be careful to look for ads that aren’t converting despite a high
CTR so that your aren’t ruining your ROI. You can pause poor performing ads without hurting your
Quality Score, but editing an existing one will delete its history.
Quality Score is also a factor when AdWord’s determines if your ads will show extensions. First position
shouldn’t necessarily be your goal for all of your ads, since a lot of the time, it isn’t the most profitable
location, but if you want to take advantage of extensions like site links to help your click-through rate,
you’ll need to have a competitive bid and good Quality Score. Google also recently began testing adding
the domain in the first line of the ad, but an ad must reach the top position to qualify.
Landing Page Quality Score and improve ROI.
Google always touts their big three landing page quality factors: relevant and original content,
transparency, and navigability. Google wants to force advertisers into making quality websites that
Google users will find useful and relevant, which is why they’re the top dog search engine. Landing page
quality shouldn’t only be important for Google, it should be important for advertisers too. Adhering to
the guidelines for a good landing page is also more likely to help an advertiser turn visitors into customers.


The interface will tell you if there is an issue with your landing pages when you hover over the speech
bubble for a keyword’s Quality Score. Google doesn’t openly state that there is a Landing Page Quality
Score (although we have come across this term in older Google help articles), but landing page quality is
a factor in your keyword’s Quality Score.
In addition to following Google’s landing page guidelines, remember that your landing pages are also
being evaluated by a real person, and this happens more than once. Therefore, there’s always another
chance to make an improvement, and having great usability and a fast load time are especially important.

If you feel that your campaign is not performing well nor need to increase ROI speak to Clixpert qualified AdWords partners today