Quality Score Transparency Improved in Google Ads (AdWords)

As we’ve discussed in previous issues of our newsletter, Quality Score is a core component of a Google Ads (AdWords) campaign and indicates the relevancy of each keyword, which in turn determines the ranking position of your adverts, based on your bid level. Google has just announced a change within the AdWords management interface to show more information about Quality Scores.

Quality Score is measured for each keyword and is an important metric to consider as it’s a measure of how relevant a campaign’s keywords are, based on clickthrough rate performance, advert content and landing page content. A high Quality Score means that Google’s systems think the ad, keyword, and landing page are all relevant and useful to someone looking at the advert, whereas a low quality score means the opposite. A high Quality Score also means that the advertiser needs to bid -and pay – less to achieve the same or better ranking position.

You can read more about the Quality Score system here. Although this is a key measure of the performance of an AdWords campaign, Quality Scores are hidden from the default view within the AdWords interface and you need to select the column to be displayed to show the scores for each keyword. There has been the option to hover over the keyword status “bubble” to view more information and this is what Google has just improved.

By using the status hover for a keyword in the Keywords view, you can see the 1-10 score level for the Quality Score for that term, plus the new ratings which have just been added in a new format. These ratings have a relative scale so advertisers can see whether their expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance and landing page experience is average, above average, or below average compared to other advertisers.

Although we recommend viewing all Quality Scores for your keywords by adding the extra column in the keywords view, this status hover option can provide more insight for individual terms that aren’t performing so well. The actual labelling against the 3 main criteria is mainly a renaming of the previous status levels, but allows advertisers to consider what aspects need to be improved – whether better focus for the keyword, improvements to the advert content, or the landing page.

If you’d like to know more about how Quality Score can be viewed and managed to benefit your AdWords campaign, contact us now for more details.

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