Google AdWords Quality Score Explained!

• We finally made the jump to Google Adwords in 2011 and have slowly been trying to optimize and improve our performance. However, our average Quality Scores (QS) are still very low. Can you better explain exactly what QS is, how Google uses it, and what we can do to improve our scores in 2012?

Answer: We wish we could say explaining Quality Score (QS) was a simple endeavor, unfortunately it really is not. Basically, QS is a proprietary system that seeks to serve the most relevant ads to the most qualified audience at the most competitive price.

To see this in action, visualize something like the picture below where Google works to connect advertisers with qualified customers and vice versa:

Google does provide a lot of information on "general" core components that make up the score but to prevent any gaming of the system there is still a lot of leeway in how these factors work together to influence individual ads and advertisers.

Nevertheless, taken directly from Google's help resource page on Quality Score here are the major "core" components that go into this score calculation:

• The historical click-through rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on the Google domain. Note that CTR on non-Google sites (such as AOL.com) only impacts Quality Score on our search partners - not on Google
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
• The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• The qu...