The Ultimate Guide to Quality Score: 15 PPC Experts Discuss the Nuts and Bolts of Google AdWords Quality Score and How to Improve Yours

Andrew Goodman: Until Hal posts the entire code for the Quality Score algorithm and lets us look at it, prudent marketers should assume this is largely a public relations exercise. As we know, public relations is not only about what you include, but what you leave out. By and large, minus the fancy equations, many of us have been whiteboarding the same story since 2002. By improving your CTR relative to other advertisers and other CTR benchmarks, in any regime that multiplies keyword CTR (or Quality Score) by your bid to arrive at your ad rank, you will outrank lower-CTR competitors, all else including bids being equal.

Google notes dryly in their help files that the best way to improve keyword Quality Scores is to "optimize your account." Of course, that's true. :)

Dave Davis: I think it's pretty accurate. Almost perfect. In fact, we recommend our clients watch this and his bidding tutorial videos so they can understand why we change certain things in their accounts. Quality score isn't actually that difficult a concept to grasp and with a little experience you get the "feel" for what makes quality score tick. Hal mentions that the "biggest factor by far is click through rate". That is spot on. It's the single biggest factor that the advertiser can influence directly and can literally make or break a campaign. In most cases, relevancy is pretty obvious and is rarely an issue as most advertisers don't want to be bidding on unrelated keywords. Landing page quality score is a WHOLE different ball game.

Larry Kim: This is an accurate high-level depiction of Quality Score. What is omitted are the implementation details, for example:

• Why do keywords with high CTR, high traffic and excellent relevancy get low Quality Scores?
• How exactly are CTR’s normalized by ad position and match type
• How does historical account CTR weigh in calculating the Quality Score of a new keyword?
• How is the “minimum bid” for an auction with no competing advertisers calculated?

It’s somewhat frustrating to read / hear differing information and advice from Google on these implementation details, especially in cases where the high-level advice doesn’t align with what’s actually happening in an account.
 

Marty Weintraub: Thanks for turning me on to the video, as I was unfamiliar with it. Sure, it's an economist talking through mechanics of the AdWords Auction, quality score, etc... Hal makes a fine talking egghead without clarifying anything not published in AdWords Help.

Our experience is that qScore takes care of itself if the ads are all about the keyword's meaning and the landing page keeps the promise well.  We think Hal's little pie chart shows under-emphasis of CTR's actual importance as the primary driver of qScore. We've had ads without the keyword in the ad and a crazy-high CTR have good qScores. 

At the end of the day, "buying into the auction" is all about shipping Google buckets of money.   A high CTR means that Google makes hay because your ad is clicked on a higher percentage of the time. Sure, relevancy matters in the equation. However, we've seen some pretty darn good quality scores for link bait-level hyperbolic ads with nary a keyword and/or shitty landing pages.

Tom Demers: It’s directionally accurate – I think the algorithm is actually more click-through-rate heavy, particularly when you take into account how they’re starting to handle new keywords (inheriting CTR from “head” or broader keywords)

Geordie Carswell: This is accurate insofar as it explains clearly how bid and Quality Score factor into the ad placement auction.  That said, it doesn't really explain clearly that the type or variant of Quality Score that affects the search ad auction is primarily the "Keyword Relevance" Quality Score, which is heavily CTR-driven. The top takeaway from this video explanation by Google should be that Keyword Relevance Quality Score has a bigger effect on your ad placement than how much you bid.

As a result, if you're looking to improve your ad position, or the frequency with which your ad is shown to searchers, the most effective use of your time is spent in testing new ads that could increase your CTR which is the biggest contributor to the "Keyword Relevance" Quality Score.

Joe Kerschbaum: The description in the video seems accurate. The video neglects to discuss the differences between the Search Network and Content Network Quality Scores. However, if this video’s purpose is to serve as an introduction to Quality Score, then discussing the Content Network may hinder its effectiveness. Also, Hal doesn’t mention that the landing page element of Quality Score can only negatively affect your overall Quality Score, as opposed to give it a boost. He states the aspects of successful landing pages but doesn’t mention that all advertisers start with a similar landing page Quality Score, but their score is detracted from when the landing page doesn’t adhere to best practices.

Andrew Goodman: Most accounts run on what we consider a normal Quality Score profile. We glance at Quality Scores in such cases, but in no way do we "optimize" to that statistic or focus heavily on it in our detailed marketing implementations. That would be a bit akin to trying to build your business around toolbar PageRank.

If an account has Quality Score problems in isolated areas, and they're low volume, then why worry? You can simply bid accordingly, or in grave cases, pause those keywords. They're likely rated that poorly because of keyword intent issues. Seasoned marketers factor keyword intent into the way they build and manage accounts.

Sometimes, diffuse keyword intent is endemic to the keywords you use in your industry, especially in B2B. Patricia Hursh has a great take on that: you're still generating high value leads at a certain cost. If your important words come up "3" on QS, don't commit hari-kari: pay the damn money and get the lead!

Of course marketers should tighten up with all the usual best practices including negatives (exclusions) where appropriate, making good use of the search query report and other tools.

I hate to say "it goes without saying," because I've been saying it so long. It's in both editions of my book and in my previous handbook dating back to 2002: a good skeleton & proper categorization are a great start along the road to a well optimized account. Sometimes I have nicknamed the overall process "Build a Powerful Account." If you build a powerful account, usually QS will take care of itself. You are then just going for incremental wins for that profit icing on the cake.

If a whole account is in the doghouse due to Landing Page and Website Quality issues, or it's in a cycle of failure due to an improper (often overly broad, or lazily built, or really weak ads) build from the start, then you need to consider a complete rebuild/reset and your Google reps may even weigh in on the best direction to take -- a fundamental reassessment as opposed to tweaking and losing major bucks in the tweakage process.

Larry Kim: In diagnosing Quality Score problems, I tend to look for:

• Low Quality Scores (duh!)
• Excessive usage of broad matching
• Poor campaign and ad group organization

Since every account will suffer from some elements of the above symptoms, focus your attention on the groups that drive the most conversions, traffic or ad spend.

Marty Weintraub: The systemic things you mentioned, in terms of account structure, segmentation, etc... are all great places to start. Focus on concept as well as structure:

• Get users to click on outstanding ads at a high rate by improving the ad in relation to the keyword and serving compelling messages.
• Raise bids to make sure that ads' creative really has a chance.
• Make sure ads truly answer the question of the query and have a good marketing message and call to action.

Also, keep in mind that Google has a "system" quality score with a bias against certain content areas.  Ask a Google account rep about it. Just try to market glucosamine product keywords and take note that despite great quality scores across the account, a high CTR for the glucosamine keywords and awesome landing page, SOMEHOW the quality score STILL sucks.  Right, Google wants to be paid more for selling glucosamine.

Tom Demers: You really want to cross reference the high spend, low Quality Score areas to identify where your money is being spent on keywords and Ad Groups that could be better structured and segmented.

Geordie Carswell: First, you have to gauge your expectations as to "good" or "poor" Quality Scores for your account.  If you have a 1/10 Quality Score and can't get any traffic, it's likely due to landing page quality issues that can best be addressed by contacting Google and asking for a human review or some specific feedback.  (Important note:  If you are an affiliate marketer using Adwords, contacting Google directly may not be in your best interest for various reasons, caution should apply). 

If your Quality Scores are consistently 3/10 or 4/10, you need to take a close look at your account, campaign, and adgroup structure.  Likely, you could split your campaigns and adgroups into smaller, bit-sized chunks where you can more closely integrate the keywords and themes in your campaigns and adgroups to the ads you're writing.  Cutting your campaign sizes down to a manageable level while you 'rehabilitate' your Keyword Relevance Quality Scores will make this easier as well.  Starting again with a smaller plate can help a lot.

If your Quality Scores are 5/10 or higher, you're likely just a few better ads away from increasing your QS.  Start aggressively split testing new ad copy that's entirely different from anything you've tried before and see if you can get the CTR up.  You'll need to set your ads to "rotate" to get new ads proper exposure, and monitor them carefully to cut losing ads when you have enough data to make a call.

Joe Kerschbaum: At a very high level, advertisers should attack the keywords/ad groups that generate the most traffic/conversions/revenue first. These are the elements of the account that are driving the other core KPIs such as conversions, conversion rate and CPA. By improving the ad relevancy and Quality Score of these ad groups, you can quickly improve the CTR, ROAS, ROI and Quality Score of these mission critical keywords and ad groups. One quick way to determine which areas need attention first is to determine the keywords/ad groups that generate 10-20% of the clicks/conversions and start there (this number isn’t set in stone. This way, you’re gaining ground quickly.  Of course, advertisers need to pay attention to an entire account when it comes to Quality Score and those other core KPIs but this method can help you prioritize.

Andrew Goodman: It's all good, but I'm a fan of advanced forms of ad testing. I suppose that *assumes* tight groupings. Whether it be improved granularity or better ad response, I'm greedy. I want to win twice: I want account improvements to have a shot at improving *both* CTR and conversion rates. When you can do that, there is no better feeling.

Dave Davis: If it's just a small subset of keywords/ads with a low quality score, it's nearly always a CTR issue. In the majority of cases, it's simply a matter of pulling the keywords out of the ad group, creating a new adgroup (or more) for them and carefully crafting and testing a new, more relevant ad. This can take time and money as it usually entails bidding higher on the new ad to get the exposure which in turn gets the CTR up. Over time, the quality score improves with the CTR. If this proves fruitless, it's possible that Google has determined that this keyword is not relevant at all and this problem may be effecting all advertisers, not just you.

A little "trick" we use for new accounts is to leave a "brand term" campaign running on it's own for a few weeks. This builds up historically high CTR on your account and "primes" the account for new campaigns.

For an account/site quality score issue (known on the AdWords help forums as the "QS dropped to 1/10 overnight" issue), sometimes referred to as a "Google Slap" the problem is very easy to spot and is quite serious. In the majority of cases when all keywords in an account have dropped to 1/10 overnight, the account/site has been flagged and it's Google's way of saying "No, you can't advertise that site with AdWords". If there is even a sniff of a violation of the landing page and site quality guidelines, this is Google effectively booting you out. There is no way around this.

There are however MANY instances where either the manual review of your account was incorrect or the algorithm incorrectly flagged your account (Last November, Google purged many affiliates and bridge pages but also flushed out some genuine advertisers who followed the guidelines perfectly). If this is the case, you need to go through your site with a fine tooth comb and make sure you comply with the guidelines then ask contact support for a manual review. You will not get you're account back to what it was before the "slap" under any circumstances by yourself. No amount of ad text changes or landing page changes will help you here.

Google has a massive team of outsourced "Ads Quality Raters" who judge the quality of your ad and landing page in a very similar way the remote quality raters do.

Larry Kim: The biggest component of Quality Score is click-through-rate, so simply focus on PPC account optimization activities that tend to raise CTR, for example:

• Be more specific: Choose specific mid-tail keywords that are more relevant to your website. Use negative keywords to reduce unwanted impressions.
• Micro-Target: Organize your keywords into smaller, specific keyword groupings – for an example of what this looks like in practice, try out the Keyword Niche Finder.  Once you’ve selected your keyword niches, it’s critical that you theme your ad text and landing pages specifically to those keyword groupings.

Improved keyword selection and micro-targeting should simultaneously improve your relevancy score, which is the second biggest part of the Quality Score algorithm. For longer term Quality Score success, it’s critical that you establish a strong foundation for account organization to enable for future, incremental account expansion – this in a nutshell is the overall product philosophy behind WordStream for PPC.

Allan Mitchell: Since Quality Score doesn't actually sell anything, I rarely make changes to an AdWords account with the sole purpose of increasing Quality Score. If higher Quality Score was the sole aim, you could simply write a overly-enticing ad, watch your CTR skyrocket, and sit back as Quality Score suddenly rises to 10/10. But with so many 'time-wasters' clicking through to your site, and then immediately bouncing, conversions would be low, so your ROI would suffer.

From my experience, it's sometimes more profitable to pre-qualify visitors at the expense of Quality Score, with restrictive messages such as "1 Bedroom Apartments From $950,000" or "Cheap Car Insurance for Women". Of course, CTR would drop, Quality Score would fall (perhaps to 6/10) and CPCs would rise as a result, but since visitors are now more qualified, overall ROI could be considerably higher.

I don't think an account can under-perform because of a low Quality Score; rather a low Quality Score could be a sign that an account is under-performing. I see Quality Score as more of a tool to help achieve other goals (such as ROI), rather than the end goal itself. A high degree of relevancy at every step of the user journey will always pay dividends, whether or not Quality Score reflects this, so its important to ensure that relevancy, rather than Quality Score, is the underlying motivation during campaign setup and optimisation. I think that if you provide relevancy, Quality Score will naturally follow, but relevancy won't necessarily follow from a high Quality Score.

So to help improve relevancy, highly-granular ad groups, a focus on long-tails, and ads which include the searcher's keywords are the key essentials, while ongoing relevancy-improvement techniques such as the Broad Match Generator can help to manage broad match refinement, and help cater for the growing demands of searchers for a more relevant experience.

Richard Cotton: Tighter groupings and better themed adverts go hand in hand - being able to write better ads often comes from having tighter keyword themes. I think that  this used to be more effective in itself, quality scores could be improved very quickly by creating new ad groups with tightly written ads, but now the benefit seems to come from the clickthrough rate improvements that this will bring, rather than the greater relevance. Obviously CTR has always been the biggest factor for Google but it seems to have gone even further that way.

Sometimes a higher CTR is not a productive move, for example if a keyword has a dual meaning then an ambiguous advert would attract those searching for both meanings, whereas a well written ad, relevant to the offering on the landing page would only attract the right half of the searchers. In this case the higher CTR would burn money without any additional value. You may get a higher quality score but you would not get better value - in that case 'fixing' it may make the keyword a worse performer.

Joe Kerschbaum: Usually, creating tighter ad groups with re-vamped, more relevant ad texts is a very good start. These tactics will fix 2 of the 3 major components of the Quality Score: CTR and ad relevancy. Again, these are quick changes for the account. To fully rejuvenate the Quality Score, the landing page will need to be optimized as well.

Andrew Goodman: Hello! It's all about bids. :) I would ignore QS and bid my keywords to appropriate goal metrics, and QS would largely take care of itself in most cases.

Dave Davis: I'll assume you're talking about a "rule based" lever. In 99% of cases I would actually use a bid to CTR rule but there's a fine balance to be struck. The the higher the CTR, the higher the quality score which in turn reduces your click prices. However, you have to always be testing and optimizing your ads as your CTR is "normalized" or measured against other ads in any given position and historically in that particular position. You have to bear in mind too that more clicks can drain your budget so you have to pay very close attention to conversion rate too and always be testing your landing page conversion rate. They all lead into each other.

Larry Kim: Quality Score, because:

• Quality Score is a more “foundational” lever to pull: Optimizing for Quality Score implies doing a good job at keyword selection, and micro-targeting of specific keyword groupings to relevant ad text and landing pages your website – and I really think you should focus on this first.  Put another way, if you’ve picked irrelevant keywords and have a poor account structure, it really limits the effectiveness of any bid management strategy.
• Quality Score is Bid Management: Optimizing for high quality scores improves your ad rank and lowers your actual CPC (as opposed to your maximum CPC).
   

Marty Weintraub: Quality score is more important, because the immediate effects on cost and ad position are more of a detriment than the incremental improvements gained by first automation. That's not to say that PPC automation does not rock the tails. Still quality score threatens the entire endeavor with ruined accounts and serious budget bloat.  There are plenty of amazing campaigns run by hand, though most would agree that some degree of automation is prudent, especially towards the ultimate goal of transparent attribution.

Richard Cotton: A horrible question as the two are so inter-related. However, having just watched a whole election of people evading straight questions I'll go with this;

Quality score is not the ultimate deciding factor of a keyword's worth. If a keyword is producing conversions at the right cost then that is the most important thing so I'll go with bid management. (Although clearly I want to pull both levers...and even answering the question without hedging and fence sitting based on account by account specifics is uncomfortable...can I just pull the quality score lever a little?)

Josh Dreller: Interesting question. At first glance, my thought was Bid Management for sure.  I always think people obsess too much about Quality Score because some of the variables are out of our hands, but Bid Management is as vital as keywords and ad text.  However, as I thought more about it, optimizing Quality Score is basically great Bid Management. You’re ensuring that you’re not paying a premium on your keywords while increasing your Ad Rank at the same time. Click costs are going to be whatever they’re going to be based on the value of the term, so basic Bid Management is simply playing in that space--Quality Score helps you change the rules in your favor. So, I gotta go with Quality Score on this one.

Joe Kerschbaum: This is a difficult question to answer. This would be on an account-by-account basis. If the ad groups are in pretty good shape, then I would focus on bid management. If the ad groups are in disarray, then I would work on the ad group structure first. Overall, I would work on ad group structure. This is because bid charges are only that, bid changes. However, Quality Score management can help improve CTR, conversion rate, CPC, and Quality Score when done effectively.