Google AdWords – Importance of Quality Score

Peter A. Liefer II | Posted: February 8th, 2013 | Updated: July 24th, 2019

What is Quality Score? It determines how relevant your ads, keywords, and landing page are to a user’s query. The score is updated from time to time; it is also calculated every time a user does a search that triggers an ad. A keyword gets a Quality Score from a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is the lowest score and 10 is the highest. Below are the factors that determine your Quality Score:

· Click-Through Rate (CTR) of the keyword and its corresponding Ad.
· The relevance to the keywords and matched ad to the search query.
· The relevance of the keywords to its ad group.
· The relevance or quality of the keywords to your landing page.
· The relevance of the keywords on its ad text.

Why is Quality Score Important? It is important because it can make or break your campaign. It determines how much you pay for your advertising and how much impressions or exposure you get. Getting the higher Quality Score, the less expensive you pay per click and higher ad positions for a cheaper cost. That means your ad can show up higher on the page when your keyword has a higher Quality Score.

The best way to improve your keywords Quality Scores is by optimizing your account. This entails making sure that each of your ad groups have descriptive ads all advertising the same product or service, and making sure that each keyword in the ad group are closely related to the ads. Always have tight ad groups, safe to say having no more than 15 to 20 keywords per ad group, must be closely relevant around the topic, and have close match up between the keywords, ad title and landing page. By doing this you will get more clicks and better ROI.

Once you have been working on Pay-Per Click for a while, you will begin to realize that while there are many things that you can tweak or change on your PPC account, Quality Score is one metric that all PPC specialists look to influence, and to produce best returns.