Why is AdWords Quality Score important?
If you’re interested in squeezing every last bit of performance from your AdWords campaign and your budget, you should spend at least a few minutes getting to grips with AdWords quality score; so why not grab a cup of coffee and read on!

AdWords quality score is an important measure of how Google perceives the relevance of your keywords, adverts and campaign landing pages. Quality score sets your minimum Cost Per Click (CPC) which is the least you can pay to have your advert appearing for a particular keyword. It also determines how high up the sponsored listings your advert will appear for a given CPC bid.

If you can improve your quality score, you can lower your costs and achieve a higher advert position. Here’s why:

Ad Rank = CPC bid x quality score

So Ad Rank, or advert position, is not just dependent on the maximum amount you are prepared to pay when a searcher clicks on your advert (CPC bid) – it’s also influenced by your quality score.

Ad Rank, actual CPC bid and quality score are dynamic and determined by Google on-the-fly whenever your keyword matches a search query. The advert awarded the highest Ad Rank for a given search query will appear in the first position of the sponsored listings. This is typically the top of the page in the light coloured band above the organic or natural search results (though not always if there are no adverts that exceed the quality score threshold – see ‘Leap-frogging to the top slots’). The advert with the second highest Ad Rank gets slot 2 and so on down the listings.

So if you want to reduce your costs you can drop your CPC bid or you can improve your quality score. Boosting your quality score is preferable: dropping your CPC bid will result in a lower Ad Rank/advert position.

How is AdWords quality score calculated?
Only Google knows the exact detail but the public number is between 1 and 10 and they do give pointers on the main considerations:

• Perceived relevance. Google will factor in how relevant it believes your keyword/advert/landing page combination are to each other and to the matched search query. For example, if you’re bidding on ‘cheap blue widgets’ as a keyword phrase, your ad headline is ‘Cheap Blue Widgets’, your landing page content contains the text ‘cheap blue widgets’ and the searcher’s query is ‘cheap blue widgets’ your perceived relevance will be high.

• Measured relevance. Historical Click-Through Rate (CTR) plays a significant role in quality score. This makes sense: each time a searcher click’s on your advert they are effectively voting on how relevant it is to their query. Google will factor in the CTR performance of this keyword/ advert/matched query combination. It will also use the historical CTR of all keywords and adverts within your account. Due to the recent AdWords quality score changes the CTR contribution to quality score is now normalised to remove CTR skewing that inevitably arises from a higher Ad Rank.

Since June 2008, landing page load time also affects quality score. It’s not clear how much of a role this plays but unless you have a real dog of a server it’s unlikely to be significant.

What’s my AdWords quality score?
Before we look at how to improve quality score, you need to find out what your quality score is at the moment. Fortunately, AdWords provides a few tools to do just this.

For spot checks, the quickest way is to use the keyword analysis tool. Open your campaign, click on an ad group and then open the keywords tab. Next to each keyword you’ll see the magnifying glass icon. Hover your cursor over this icon to see whether your ad is currently showing for this keyword and what is its numerical quality score (between 1 and 10). You also get a general quality score evaluation of ‘Great’, ‘OK’ or ‘Poor’.

For a more detailed look, you’ll need to run an Ad performance report. Within AdWords click on the ‘Reports’ tab. Create an ‘Ad performance’ report for whatever period you want and for the search campaign you’re interested in. Next, open the ‘Add or Remove Columns’ under ‘Advanced Settings’ and select at least the following check boxes

• Placement / keyword
• Match type
• Quality score
• Keyword destination url

Finally, click ‘Create Report’ to review your historical data.

That’s it for now. In a future post: ‘Improving Google AdWords quality score – Part 2’ I’ll go through how to analyse the data in the Ad performance report and what you can do to improve your quality score.