You may have noticed “Quality Score” among the metrics reported in Adwords accounts. Have you wondered what it means, or why it matters?
Google’s objective is to serve only the most relevant ads to searchers, of thousands of possible and competing ads. Quality score attempts to help with this targeted delivery, and will apply a high quality score to ads which result in positive user experience. i.e. I search for a relaxing hotel with a pool. The goal is to serve me ads for hotels with both pools and which claim a “relaxing” atmosphere. If I and others click through a relevant ad and book right away, this demonstrates the ad was extremely relevant for me, and this behavior contributes to a high quality score. Other factors involved in this calculation include CTR for individual ads, and landing page quality. In other words, if browsers, searching for something specific, arrive at your page and find exactly what they were looking for, this will be reflected in the quality score.
Quality score is calculated as a value “out of 10”, with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest. It should be noted that while this metric can be useful, it is not the most reliable indicator of overall ad health. The keywords used to search for something that a browser is looking for, are not necessarily the “most relevant” or predictable! That being said, quality score is just one of the sum of parts which make up a comprehensive PPC outlook.
