What is Your Google Quality Score?

Written by Zac Johnson
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Recently I’ve been spending a decent amount of time on setting up new landing pages and campaigns for Google Adwords and some PPC marketing. I get emails all time about what offers to promote and how it all works. One of the very important factors to successfull marketing on Google Adwords, is to know and manage your "Google Quality Score". I’ve been playing around with PPC for a while now and knew about "Quality Score", but for the longest time I was sure how to actually check it. Let’s make sure the same problem doesn’t happen to you!

First, let’s refresh our memory on what Google defines their "Quality Score" is:

Quality Score for Google and the search network is a dynamic metric assigned to each of your keywords. It’s calculated using a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad group and to a user’s search query. The higher a keyword’s Quality Score, the lower its minimum bid and the better its ad position.

The components of Quality Score vary depending on whether it’s calculating minimum bid or ad position:

  • Quality Score for minimum bid is determined by a keyword’s clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google, the relevance of the keyword to its ad group, your landing page quality, your account’s historical performance, and other relevance factors.
  • Quality Score for ad position is determined by a keyword’s clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google, the relevance of the keyword and ad to the search term, your account’s historical performance, and other relevance factors.

Now that we know what components make up your quality score, it’s time to find out your grade.

1.) Login to your Google Adwords account and select one of your active campaign. Then navigate to the keywords tab in your AdGroup. Click on the ‘Customize columns’ option shown below.

2.) Once you click on the "customize columns" link, a pull down menu will appear. Scroll down and click on "Show Quality Score".

3.) With "Show Quality Score" now selected, your Google Adwords stats chart should look something like the following, with Quality Score now added.

Amazingly enough, this was a super simple walk through, but the knowledge of knowing your "Quality Score" is priceless. Please keep in mind, Quality Score rankings will only show for Adwords campaigns on the SEARCH network and will NOT appear on your campaigns on the CONTENT network.

For more information on setting up a campaign through Google AdWords and advertising with PPC marketing, please refer to my "Super Affiliate’s Guide to Pay Per Click Marketing".

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20 Replies to “What is Your Google Quality Score?”

  2. it's surprising to me that showing the quality score isn't a default. it's definitely the first thing i activate when i go into a new ad group. now the challenge is optimizing quality score to get .01 or .02 min bids. 🙂 good luck on all your campaigns!

    1. I know Dave Davis over at RedflyMarketing.com wrote a great piece about increasing your quality score . . actually, Danielle is the one that told me about it . . personally, I love the aspect of the quality score as it makes it more of a challenge to make money through PPC campaigns . . .

  3. That's amazing info. I have trying to find this elusive quality score for the longest time. Thanks Zac.

    This reaffirm my belief you can blog about any information you have, as there will always be new guy on the block like me who doesn't know this information.

  7. Thanks for the helpful info. I immediately was able to see why some campaigns I ran had done so poorly – Google had used keywords for which I was ranking as 'Poor' for most of my traffic, also costing me the highest minimum bid.

    Now I've paused the Poor and OK ranked keywords and will focus on the Great keywords, and hopefully my campaign will see better results – thanks!

  8. Since the Quality Score doesn't apply for Content network, I wonder how could one manage to lower the bids on content, in order to get to the $0.05/click and still get enough impressions to be worth trying?

  9. Zac that was a great post. Has any body had this happen to them. I am getting .05 per click and some very good keywords then when I went to add more terms to that group Google raised some of my .05 terms to .50 per click and made them inactive for search.

    Which messes me up because these words were converting for me. Please post and let me know.

  10. It is amazing how many people didn't know they could view their quality score as this has been around for quite awhile now, good post.

    Another interesting tidbit is about when the quality score is calculated and how that relates to bids increasing after a day or so. My theory is that they calculate it intially on the adgroup setup, (by checking your ad and landing page). Then they check the keyword component later once they start serving your ads and you start receiving clicks. Then I think they check it a third time about 2-3 days later. I do not think it's just a one time calculation based on one or two variables, it's more like several variables being measured at different times which explains keywords going from $0.05 to $0.50 and up after the account is active for awhile.

    It's a shame we'll never know exactly what it is, but there's lots of great experimenters out there who are getting close… 🙂

  11. Hm. Didn't know about that. But of course I'm not a Super Affiliate either. (#):) Hopefully in the next couple of weeks as I try to up my affiliate game your blog will continue to help me out. *nod*

  12. Thanks for the tip… Off to go check out and tinker with my AdWords account now. I guess I never really looked that closely nad passed over the score.

  14. One thing that drives me crazy about Quality Score and Adwords in general is the inability to route out relevant sites that provide terrible user experience.

    I'm sure you've all seen those sites that just list paid results from netorks such as Overture and Infospace….they include some content based around that keyword to keep the Adwords bot happy and bob's your uncle click arbitrage is possible.

    These serve no real purpose to the user and yet if they are designed right they are able to rank very well on Adwords for competitive terms.

    I think I have found a possible solution to this problem by using time on page as a factor, you can read about it here

  15. Thanks for the information about Google Quality Score. I'm just starting out about PPC and this article you wrote really gave me an insights about how to approach Adwords.

    Thanks a lot Zac. Keep it up

  17. I would like to know if I need to make a separate landing page for each keyword in order to boost my quality score. I would imagine that my main keyword would do better in terms of quality score than my secondary and tertiary keywords. Is it beneficial to have more landing pages to boost the quality score?
    My recent post PPC Coach Interview – Will Haimerl

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