Keyword Quality Score

Here’s the short version of this post:

Its mostly the clickthrough rate of your exact match keywords appearing on Google.com (not the Search Partners or the Content network) that determines your keyword quality score. Keyword quality score is only a portion of overall quality score, which includes account level quality score, ad quality score, campaign quality score and landing page quality score.

Here’s the long version:

The original formula for ad ranking on AdWords was: CTR x Max Bid = Ad Rank

Later, it was this: CTR x Max Bid x Other Factors = Ad Rank. The “other factors” was not spelled out, and it was widely reported that “other factors” didn’t weigh as much in the equation as CTR and Max Bid.

Google now ranks ads according to this formula: Quality Score x Max Bid = Ad Rank.

Which Quality Score – keyword, ad, campaign or account? Good question. Its mostly the keyword and ad combo that creates the CTR, but also the keywords historical performance in your account, the adgroup’s historical performance and more.

I am watching myself get deep into the quality score mud here, and that isn’t the direction I wanted to go in this post. Let’s just keep it to the keyword performance. Also, let’s think of Quality Score not as Google’s clandestine formula for making your life miserable, but as a systematic way to ensure that their users have a good experience.

Google’s users are the searchers, by the way, not the advertisers. No matter how much you spend as an advertiser, you’re still a second class citizen compared to the innocent searcher who’s just trying to find what they want online. Google’s aim is to please the searchers, not the advertisers.

Reeling this back in to keyword quality score…

Google does track keyword performance on the search network and the content network, but if you have to pare down the complexity of quality score, its much easier to just focus on what’s happening on Google.com for your ads. If you didn’t know that there are 3 networks to show ads on, you should go learn about that now. Your campaigns should be separated out to run on Google.com, the Search Network and the Content Network separately.

If you are having trouble with quality score (ie, most of your keywords have a quality score of 7 or less), focus on the google.com campaign first.

Within that campaign, focus on the exact match keywords. If you don’t have exact match keywords, stop reading this and get yourself a basic AdWords tutorial because you have bigger concerns than just quality score.

The lion’s share of quality score at the keyword level is determined by the click-through rate of those exact match keywords.

So what’s a good click-through rate? Well, several years ago the AdWords system was disabling keywords that didn’t get above a .5% clickthrough rate, so that’s clearly the low end of the spectrum. I’d consider a clickthrough rate below 3% to be in the danger zone. Above 5% is respectable. Above 10% is pretty darn good – but with an exact match keyword paired to a well-written, hyper-specific ad, you should be doing pretty darn good.

When you get lucky, you’ll see a clickthrough rate over 20% for a strong keyword & ad pairing. That usually takes at least a month of ad split-testing, and a single keyword adgroup to get there, but any exact match keyword that gets more than 2000 searches a month warrants its own adgroup.

Keep in mind that the keyword quality score is just a slice of the pie. Theoretically, if your landing page is bad, you could have a keyword with a CTR of 80% and still see a quality score of 4.