What is Quality Score you might ask. To some, it’s an enigma wrapped in a mystery, let’s take a look at AdWords Quality Score in more detail.
Quality Score is a key aspect of all AdWords accounts and can make or break an account and your success with AdWords.
Here is a Google introduction to AdWords Quality Score in their video:
What is Quality Score?
Google describes Quality Score as ‘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’. See their article here.
Each time someone performs a search on Google that shows your ad, AdWords calculates Quality Score. Google shows Quality Score in your account at the keyword level and every keyword is assigned a Quality Score that is represented as a whole number between 1 and 10, 1 being the poorest and 10 being the best. Quality Score can be optimised by improving aspects related to your account organisation, keywords, ad copy and landing pages.
Google lists the following factors that influence Quality Score:
- Keyword – past click through rate (CTR)
- Display URL (the URL that shows in your ad) – past CTR
- Overall account history – the overall CTR of all keywords and ads in your account
- Landing page quality – relevance, transparency and ease of navigation
- Keyword/ ad relevance – the relevance of your keyword to your ads
- Keyword/ search query relevance – the relevance of your keyword to the search query used on Google to display your ad
- Geographic performance – account performance in your geographic targeted areas
- Site ad performance for the Display Network (ads on 3rd party sites such as blogs and other informational sites) – how well your ad has performed on these sites
- Device performance – ad performance on a range of devices including desktop PCs, tablets and mobile phones
How Does Quality Score Impact You?
Quality Score is important because it affects the following:
- Eligibility to appear in the ad auction and have your ad show – a higher Quality Score enables your ad to show at a lower cost
- Ad Rank (more on this below) – this is the position your ad will show on the page and is calculated by multiplying Quality Score by maximum CPC (your bid)
- Cost per click (CPC) – when your ad is clicked for your keyword, higher Quality Scores result in a lower CPC
- Your first page bid estimate – an approximation of what you need to bid to have your ad show on the first page of Google – higher Quality Scores result in a lower bid estimate and make it easier to appear on the first page
- Your top of page bid estimate – an approximation of bid required to appear towards the top of the page – higher Quality Scores result in lower estimates
- Eligibility to appear on sites in the Display Network – Quality Score is one factor used to determine whether your ad is eligible to appear on a specific site in the Display Network such as a blog
- Managed Placement targeting eligibility – Managed Placements allow you to target specific sites in the Display Network – Quality Score is a factor in determining whether your ad will show on these sites
How Does Ad Rank Affect Quality Score?
When your ad shows, it is assigned an ad rank number. The higher the ad rank, the higher your ad will show on the page. Google calculates the ad rank of all ads that are eligible to appear for a search query and the one with the highest ad rank is shown in position 1 and the second highest in position 2 and so on.
Ad rank is calculated like this:
Ad Rank = Quality Score x Maximum Bid
This is very simple and also very important, because as you will see from the formula above, if you increase Quality Score or bid then your ad rank will increase and your ad will be shown higher on the page. In other words, your ad rank will increase if your Quality Score increases and your bid remains the same. As you will see from the table below, this means that you can show higher than your competitors even if you are bidding lower than them, by having a higher Quality Score. There are many scenarios when you should not raise bid, but attempt to increase Quality Score in your account instead, for example, if you have a specific profit goal for a keyword, there is potentially more profit available by increasing Quality Score rather than bid.
Table 1: How Quality Score Affects Ad Position
| Advertiser A | Advertiser B | |
| Maximum CPC (bid) | £0.50 | £1.25 |
| Quality Score | 9 | 3 |
| Ad Rank | 4.5 | 3.75 |
From Table 1, you can see that Advertiser A has a higher ad rank than Advertiser B. Even though Advertiser A is bidding less, their ad will show higher because they have a higher Quality Score for their keyword. In this scenario, Advertiser B, could beat Advertiser A by increasing their bid further, but it is not necessarily a good strategy to pay more than your competitor, so it is a good idea here to raise Quality Score.
How to Work Out Actual Cost Per Click from Quality Score
Your maximum cost per click (CPC) is your keyword bid, whereas actual CPC is the amount you actually pay. So, you might bid £1.00 but you actually pay £0.72. You only pay 1 penny more than is needed to appear just above your competitor as per the formula below.
The Actual CPC formula is:
Actual CPC = (Ad Rank to Beat / Your Quality Score) + £0.01
Using figures from Table 1, (if you are Advertiser A), we get this:
Actual CPC = (3.75 / 9) + £0.01
Actual CPC = £0.43
So, Advertiser A is bidding £0.50 but only paying £0.43.
How to view your Quality Score
Login to AdWords and click on the keywords tab. By default Quality Score is not shown, so you need to click on the ‘Columns’ drop down and click ‘Customise Columns’ and then add Quality Score as shown in the image below. When you apply this, you will then have a Quality Score column for your keywords.
In the Status column, you will see a speech bubble, click on this and you can view more detailed information about Quality Score for that keyword as shown below. When you have a low Quality Score, this is the first thing you should look at to diagnose the problem.
If you need help improving your AdWords Quality Score, please contact me today.
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