Google AdWords™ For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Idolizing Quality Score

Quality Score (QS) tells you how much you must bid in order to show your ad at a certain position for a given keyword. A low QS theoretically puts you at a huge competitive disadvantage in your market. It makes sense, therefore, to spend vast amounts of time and psychic energy fretting about QS, right?

Not really, for two reasons. First, we've seen lots of cases where low QS keywords outperform keywords with much higher QS. Keywords seem to have an inherent QS, and because Google is grading on a curve, a QS of 5 for one keyword may actually be quite good compared with your competitors, who all have QS of 3 for the same keyword. So trying to raise the 5 to a 7 could be both pointless and impossible.

Second, although QS is determined based on a number of factors, experience strongly suggests that the overwhelmingly most important one is CTR. The best way to improve QS is to raise the CTR by writing better ads and matching keywords more closely to relevant ads. Focus on this, and QS will take care of itself.

We need to mention one exception: A QS of 0–2 is a different animal altogether from QS 3-10. When your QS is less than 3, Google is telling you about a serious problem with your website. A QS of 2 is putting you on notice that your AdWords account will be suspended if you don't quickly comply with Google's rules. At this point, you're seeing only 10–20 percent of the traffic you would otherwise be getting. When QS drops to 0 or 1, you won't get any traffic ...