- It’s a big topic. Quality score is not one simple thing nor does it have one simple impact. It’s complex and pervasive in AdWords. Way moreso than it first appears.
- Google hasn’t fully explained it. They’ve said a lot about it, but they had left a lot of big obvious questions unanswered.
- It’s subtle and complicated – Therefore it’s a bit difficult to explain clearly. This was probably the biggest time sink, trying to boil down the material to be comprehensive and not confusing or just plain dull.
- This isn’t my full time job. Life at ClickEquations and outside of it takes up a little time.
- My attention wanders. Bob Dylan has played 188 shows since that first post was written, for example.
Why It Matters
Of course, none of that matters. What matters is that every time someone does a search where one of your keywords might match and one of your ads might be shown, quality score determines if it’s shown, where it’s positioned, and how much you pay. Your success in paid search is literally defined by how effectively you earn good or great qualty scores. It’s something we all should understand. The role of quality score in paid search is unique: it is both grading your past (quality score is a measure of the success of any keyword) and at the same time influencing your future (quality score is a prediction of future success which it then plays a role in making come true). Anything that accurately tells you how well you’ve done and then determines how well you’re going to do should be paid a lot of attention. I argue in the book that quality score should drive which keywords are in your account and which ones get deleted. It should drive the organizational structure of your ad groups. It should drive the copy in your text ads. And it certainly has a lot to do with how you’ll have to bid. It doesn’t make sense to spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per month advertising via paid search and not deeply understand such a core aspect of the paid search process. Imagine playing a game every day – for money – and not knowing all the rules?
Google’s Role
At which point we have to stop and praise the truly amazing copywriters at Google. There are dozens of extremely well written posts in the AdWords help system, and blog posts and responses in the help forum, and still they managed to not explain to us precisely how we’re being rated or what we should do to score higher and do better. The broad strokes are extremely clear, but the details are entirely lacking. To be fair, their job is to provide an overview to millions of advertisers, the vast majority of whom need exactly the level of detail they get. And I genuinely believe their writing is incredibly accurate, clear and concise. But it doesn’t go as far as serious advertisers spending real money need or I think deserve.
Get Yours
In any case, I believe and hope this book will be useful to all of us who who have been craving more depth and details about how quality score is calculated, how it impacts the account, and how to manage it more effectively. ClickEquations clients will be getting a free copy. Learn more and order your copy today. If the wind holds up, books will be out in time for SMX Advanced in Seattle. Maybe we’ll have a little QS-Geek party.