Google AdWords Score & Why It Matters

Google AdWords Score & Why It Matters
Quality Score, used in Google Ads, can seem like a bit of a mystery to new search advertisers. The promise of search advertising is that ads will be shown for selected keywords, so long as the advertiser is willing to pay for the resulting clicks.

But with thousands of advertisers competing for top rankings on the same keywords, there’s clearly more to it. That’s where Quality Score comes into play. The online SEO blog, Search Engine Journal, has recently posted a great piece on Quality Score, what it is and why it matters.

Quality Score is Google’s measure of how relevant a keyword is. As soon as Google has enough data, keywords in an advertiser’s account are assigned a score between 1 and 10, with 10 being the best. This number is a representation of the aggregate relevance of the keyword across the many auctions in which it participates. It is meant to guide advertisers but it is not used to rank ads.

At its heart, Quality Score is really a predicted click-through rate (CTR).

In the early days of Google Ads, before Quality Score, they used CTR to determine if keywords were low relevance and should be disabled, or pay more to get a good position in the ad auction.

Over time, as machine learning techniques became better, Google started to consider more factors when determining expected CTR and the term Quality Score was introduced to replace the CTR component that had been part of the ad ranking mechanism before.

So the simplest way to think about Quality Score is as a measure of how likely it is that users will click your ad for a particular keyword.