There is one less mystery in the world of Paid Search today, thanks to Google AdWords providing additional insight about the elusive Quality Score (QS) metric. Quality Score as defined by Google is:
“An estimate of how relevant your ads, keywords, and landing page are to a person seeing your ad. Having a high Quality Score means that our systems think your ad, keyword, and landing page are all relevant and useful to someone looking at your ad. Having a low Quality Score, on the other hand, means that your ads, keywords, and landing page probably aren’t as relevant and useful to someone looking at your ad”
This was predominantly a “black-box” metric driven by several factors but largely by Click Through Rate (CTR). Much like Google’s Pagerank scaled metric it’s something to improve but very little insight has ever been directly given by Google. It’s been on many advertisers’ radars for years as Google rewards high quality score with often a lower Cost Per Click. There have been plenty of myths and legends on how to improve QS, but until today there was no way to know which element was dragging you down.
Starting today you’ll be able to get some insight on which element to focus on: Campaign Structure, Ad text, or Landing page experience. QS is still done on a Keyword Level and according to Google there has not been a QS algorithm change at this time. Getting this data it’s a bit “clunky” with having to individually roll-over each keyword to assess the new Quality Score elements ranking. As a QS Algo change is inevitable, NOW is the time to review this new insight. AdWords is still only providing elementary data of Low, Average, and High to describe the rank for each of the three elements; nevertheless it’s exciting to see if all the speculation these years have been correct.
