What Are Quality Scores and Do They Matter?

   adwords / Google / tips      Posted on February 15, 2012 by Cameron

If you've spent much time in Google's Adwords, you've probably seen a column for "Quality Score" -- but what is it?

In essence, Google runs a given keyword, it's ad, and the landing page through an algorithm. On the other side, the algorithm spits out the quality score.

Quality scores range from 1-10 (though I've never seen anything lower than 3), with 10 being the best and 1 being the worst.

If your keyword was say, "ice cream" and you had an ad that talked about office furniture and a landing page that was all about roller-coasters, you'd be at the low end of the quality score ranking.

Why does this matter? The quality score greatly affects where your ad sits on a page. Google typically shows several ads on each page. Ads at the top typically outperform those at the bottom.

Your ad position is determined by another formula that takes your quality score and your bid, so a high quality score means you can bid less to get that top position.

How to raise quality scores? In short, make sure your keywords, ad copy, and landing pages are tied together and relevant.  In a future post, I'll go into the details of a few tactics that we employ when running campaigns.