What is Quality Score?

ByDoubs Team

No matter how much experience you have with AdWords, you’ve probably heard the term Quality Score (QS)… and you may or may not understand the mystery behind it. This article is designed to give you the knowledge necessary to understand what QS is, how to benefit from it and how to incorporate it into your ad testing strategy.

Definition

Quality Score is a numerical value that Adwords associates to your ads for certain keywords within your AdWords account. According to Google “Having a high Quality Score means that our systems think your ad and landing page are relevant and useful to someone looking at your ad.” QS is used to determine your cost-per-click and is multiplied by your max bid to determine your ad position during the auction process.

Quality Score is made up of many things:

  • The quality of individual keywords compared to its ad group
  • Your click-through-rate
  • The relevance of your ad text to the user search inquiry
  • The quality of your landing page in respect to your selected keywords and ad text
  • The Quality Score of your overall AdWords account

…So basically the better your ads are and the better your ad experience is, the higher your Quality Score.

What Impact Does it Have?

Having an optimized quality score will:

  • Lower your Cost-Per-Click and can ultimately help improve ROI (by decreasing cost per conversion)
  • Improve the page positioning of your ads, so more people see them

What Experiments Can I Run to Improve Quality Score?

Uncovering which ads drive the best results for key Quality Score metrics can have a huge benefit on the overall Quality Score of your AdWords account.

Test Keywords & Keyword Groups

Test keywords that drive the highest click through rates. Maybe keyword groups work best, maybe SKAGs do (Single Keyword Ad Groups). The only way to find out is to test them.

Ads vs. Landing Pages

Knowing which ads perform best for driving conversions to specific landing pages will help improve Google’s interpretation of your “ad experience”.

Test Your Ad Copy

Testing and and spending money on ads that have the highest relevance and drive the most engagement from users is a great way to improve Quality Score. Once this is established, spend more money on the “winning ads” to drive up your Quality Score.

Got it? Good. Learn more about ad experimentation.