Quality Score

Often the most overlooked aspect of a paid search campaign. Quality score is the feedback that Google gives us as to how well you’re doing. Each keyword or key phrase that you assign to your adwords account is given a score out of 10. Google judges each keyword you bid on with the following three criteria. They are relevancy, expected click through rate, and landing page experience.

Quality score dictates how much you must pay for each keyword. For example, if your ad has a quality score of 3/10 you’ll have to pay significantly more to rank your ad higher in google than if it was to score an 8/10. Google has a reluctance to show ads to searches that it doesn’t think are great. If your ad is a 3/10 then Google doesn’t really want to show your ad that much. If it drops any lower, then your ad risk of the ad being banned due to a low quality score. It also means that if you and your competitor are both bidding on the same keyword, but they have a 9 quality score, and you have a 7 quality score, they will more often than not rank higher for you and have to pay less.