How valuable is Google’s Quality Score? Should it be an influential metric for your PPC campaigns?

According to Google, “Your Quality Score reflects your keyword’s CTR and the relevance of your ad text and landing page. Keywords with high Quality Scores are more relevant for users, more effective for your ad campaigns, and have lower minimum CPC bids.”

Keywords can have one of three Quality Score states:

• Great: Your keyword is very relevant and your Quality Score needs no improvement.
• OK: Your keyword is relevant, but you can still benefit from a higher Quality Score.
• Poor: This keyword isn’t very relevant to users and we suggest you replace it with a more specific keyword. If you would like to keep advertising with this keyword, we recommend optimizing by using more targeted ad text and improving your landing page content.

To learn more about how the quality score is calculated, visit AdWords Help.

To view your quality score, go to the keyword level of your campaigns and click customize columns. There will be an option to ‘Show Quality Score.’

Interested in learning more about Google’s Quality Score, I contacted support. There are several intersting things that I learned:

• The Quality Score is not yet a column that can be added to your reports (So how do I find the keywords that Google considers to be “Poor” and “need optimizing” according to Google?)
• The Quality Score algorithm is constantly changing and if it were on a report you “may not want to make a decision based on that data.”

In our opinion, the quality score is not valuable in of itself. There are so many variables that contribute to the success of a keyword that to perform an evaluation based on this metric alone would be short-sighted.

We recommend keeping an eye on keywords Google deems to have a “Poor” Quality Score (we haven’t found any yet in our campaigns) and evaluate if there is an opportunity for improvement.