How Important Is Quality Score?

Quality Score is a diagnostic tool that reveals the health of your ads and landing pages. It’s reported for every keyword in your account that has had sufficient impressions and clicks.

So, any keyword that has not run or has had few impressions and clicks won’t have a Quality Score. Instead, it will be reported as null Quality Score and will have the symbol “-“ next to it.

Generally, Quality Scores above 6/10 are good and reveal that the ads and landing pages are optimised. And 10/10 Quality Scores are excellent and are what you should be aiming for.

When a user’s experience is good, it then becomes good for everyone: for advertisers, Google and the user too.

There’re three main factors to Quality Score which you should work on to improve your Quality Scores:

Expected Click Through Rate (CTR)
Ad Relevance
Landing Page Experience

Each of these factors is more important than the quality score number that you see for the keyword. The quality score is an aggregate of these three factors and doesn’t in itself tell you as much as each of the contributing factors.

Google is always looking for ways to improve the way that Quality Score is calculated. And that calculation will never be captured by a simple 1 – 10 number – which is why they call it a guide and not a precise metric.

There are other factors that contribute to Ad quality that aren’t directly reflected in Quality Score. And these are:

– Geographic Signals – the country of the Search will affect ad quality

– Users Device – the device whether it’s desktop, tablet or mobile will determine ad quality. This is taken into account when ad quality is calculated and it’s important that your site is optimised for mobile visitors. Try targeting mobile visitors with specific mobile-friendly ads and pages.

Conclusion 
It’s important to realise that Quality Score is a diagnostic tool and not a Key Performance Indicator. Its role is to alert you to any potential problems in your AdWords account and can serve as a guide to fix them. But it’s not a key metric and shouldn’t be a factor in all optimisations that you carry out in the account.