Today we are going to discuss what is quality score in Google Adwords campaign. First let me give you a quick brief overview of it. Quality score is designed to produce a high quality user experience for Google customers.

The Google’s quality score is broken into 1-10 with 1 being awful and your ad will barely show, and 10 being perfect. And your score is calculated every time ads are shown. You can only see your quality score as of today, you can’t see any historical quality score, account quality scoreand it’s on a keyword basis so there is a tool out there called “optmyzr”. It’s a paid tool and if you want to capture and record your quality scores over time, that tool allows you to do so.

Components of Quality score:

Now a question may arise that what is a quality score made up of? Google keeps the exact calculation under close wraps. It’s essentially a secret that everyone has to understand and interpret. But that being said, CTR (click through rate) is the single biggest component of quality score. It’s supposedly around 65%, the remaining portion is down to relevancy of your keywords to your ad and your account history. So essentially the expected click-through rate versus the actual click-through rate, and this is a benchmark against your peers. The other factor that is important is quality of your landing page. It’s about 10% of the actual quality score metric, arguably more important for your customer. And also, ad extensions, its best practice now. Everyone should be using ad extensions.

So that’s it, the components. Just remember, 2/3 of which is click-through rate, a significant to remember. So what is a good CTR?

AD Rank:

Not a component of Quality score, but ad rank is the final destination for your bids multiplied by quality score.

Here’s an example for this:

In this picture, we can see that the advert with the highest quality score gets the best ad rank so you know how critical is the quality score in ranking your ad rank at the top against other CPC having low quality score.

Quality Score Myths:

Quality score benefitting from higher positions – nonsense. That’s wrong. Google factors that in and it understands that if you’re higher up the page you’re going to get a higher CTR, so don’t be conned into thinking that you can just bid more and get a higher quality score as a result.

A higher quality score doesn’t equates to more sales apparently. What it equates to is, improved CPA (cost per acquisition) because you pay less for your bids. The display network does not affect the search network. They both have separate quality scores.

Another myth is increasing your bid boosts your quality score. That’s another lie. That’s not part of the quality score calculation. Its part of the up-rank that your quality score is times your bid to achieve your ad rank. Ok so what is a good quality score? Here’s a chart to depict it.