Adwords Quality Score: Dare I Look?

The adwords quality score is now live in my account which makes for interesting reading!

First thing to note is that the quality score column is not displayed by default and as I haven’t seen an account wide default setting (do tell if there is one) I’m having to customise columns in each campaign which is a little cumbersome.

Anyway, it looks like I’ve got a couple of tweaks to do on some landing pages as I’ve got a few “OK” scores and some “Poor” scores too. There are a few surprises. Some pages that I’ve thought were fine aren’t (bugger!) and some that I kind of thought needed some work are in fact “OK” (though not “Great”). A 7 week old personal blog with no relevant backlinks is achieving a handful of “Great” scores for a particular set of related (affiliate linked) phrases whereas a specific niche site that’s 4 years old doesn’t appear to be quite hitting the mark.

Of course, one thing you can now do is to compare the quality score of one landing page to another. So you can find out if the merchants landing page scores better, same or worse than a landing page that you’ve produced yourself. Of course you could do the same with a competing landing page and see how you compare to that too.

It’s early days and more research is required but my first thoughts are that the quality score will make you work on your landing pages in an attempt up the quality score and presumably lower your bids. That’s no bad thing - but you do have to trust that Google is offering a genuinely level playing field here.

It’ll be interesting to read other PPC’ers thoughts.

[edit] Well it’s a couple of hours later and I’m wondering if there are a couple of teething issues with the quality score. For instance, an existing ad for a single exact match keyword is rated as “Poor” with a minimum bid of 20p. As a test I create a new ad group for the same landing page + keyword and currently the quality score is “Great” with a minimum bid of 2p. So something isn’t quite right there.

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