By: Tyler

Recently I have received many questions about the Adwords Quality Score. I have wanted to write an article that explains the most important aspects of the quality score and which segments you have the most control over so I can use it as a resource with startups I work with.

First, lets discuss the segments that you control when building an Adwords campaign.

1. Keywords - Like keyword research in SEO, paid search keywords are vital to reaching the correct audience. Competition can also be tough for highly searched words, so a long-tail strategy can also be useful to keep cost down. Regardless if they are high volume keywords or long-tail, they need to be relevant to your offering.
2. Ads - One of the most important tasks in paid search is ad copy. These ads are displayed in the search engine results pages (SERPS) and are the only source of information that searchers have when deciding where to click. As you will read below, Google uses click through rate has a major gauge in the quality of your ads.
3. Landing Page - This is the page that searchers will land on when they click your ad. You (should) build and control this page. Google will look at this page to determine if it is relevant to your keyword and ad.

The keyword, advertisements and landing page need to be closely tied together. Your keyword should appear in both your ad and on your landing page (both in the meta data and on the page if possible). Adwords will look at all three when allocating the initial quality score. Over time the click through rate will gain more weight in the overall quality score.

While there are hundreds of factors that make up the adwords quality score, there are a few very important segments that you should be aware of.

1. Ad Group Structure - Create ad groups with keywords that are closely related. This will also simplify the ads and the landing page keywords. I prefer to isolate all major keywords into their own ad group. This will allow to write ads that can use the exact keyword. While your landing page most likely can’t contain every keyword you bid on, those that are closely related will be fine.
2. Click Through Rate (CTR) - This is the percentage of your ads that are clicked compared to the number of times it was shown (impressions). Remember, you are competing not only against the other ads on the page, but the organic results as well. The higher your CTR is, the better your quality score will be.
3. Account CTR - Google will look at the CTR on your entire account. One way to determine the overall quality of your Adwords work.
4. CTR History - Google also compares you to the overall CTR for keywords you bid to industry averages.

The one major aspect that people concentrate on is the bid price. While important, the bid price will fluctuate widely for the same position based on the quality score.

Google also provide tools to help you gauge your quality score per keyword in each ad group. This will help you narrow down which keywords might not be fully optimized all the way through the ad and landing page. To activate this setting click the “Customize Columns” link and pick “Show Quality Score” from the drop down.