Quality Score does not directly impact your pricing and rank, but it is a reflection of your performance. Most importantly, it can indicate where there is room to make improvements that will help you achieve greater efficiency. Quality score is determined at the keyword level, but it’s important to be aware that the performance of a few keywords can positively or negatively impact the performance of an ad group, a campaign, or an entire account. Traffic volume is the main factor that should determine where you focus your optimization efforts.
Where can I find my Quality Score?
The most granular and in-depth quality score data is found in keyword performance reports through the user interface. You are also able to get aggregated quality score data for campaigns and ad groups through the campaign and ad group performance reports.
When running any report, make sure to select the quality score attributes you want to pull under the “change columns and layout” drop down menu (as in the picture below) In the keyword performance reports, you are also able to pull historical quality score and quality score sub-scores for keyword relevance, landing page relevance, and landing page user experience.
Three things to remember when optimizing Quality Score: Account Hierarchy, Time Elapsed, and Impression Volume
Even though quality score is assigned at the keyword level, account hierarchy, time elapsed and volume all impact quality score and overall account performance.
The more volume your account generates from any particular keyword, the more that keyword is going to influence the quality of other lower volume keywords in that ad group, that campaign and then up to the account level. This is true for both good quality, and poor quality keywords. That is why it is most important to focus on the highest volume terms and increasing good (high quality) impressions, while decreasing poor (low quality) impressions when optimizing around quality score. The more you maintain and grow volume in your account, the shorter amount of time the system will look back to determine quality. Our platform places a lot of emphasis on keyword history, and can look back as far as 90 days when determining quality. However, that window is likely to be much shorter (30 days) if volume is high.
Three Easy Ways to Improve Quality and Account Performance
- Match Type Bidding and Optimization – Set explicit bids for all match types, and test both broad and phrase match types as these are not always lower quality than exact. Also, by bidding explicitly, you will be able to determine the quality of each match type independently. Otherwise, quality is lumped into one score, which often causes account impression-weighted quality scores to be lower.
- Utilize Search Query Performance Reports – Pull search query reports from the UI regularly. Look for high CTR queries, which are likely to have high keyword relevance and quality scores, to add as new keywords. Identify low CTR queries as potential negative keywords. This will help you increase good (high quality) impressions, while reducing bad (low quality) impressions.
- Customize Ad Copy and Keyword Landing Pages – The more specific your ads and landing pages are to your keywords, the more relevant they will be seen by the platform. Make sure the keyword appears in ad copy and on landing pages when possible. If that is not possible, generate URLs that contain your keyword and test different ad copy that is likely to generate higher click-through-rates (i.e. calls-to-action, trademark symbols, official site, and special offers).