Quality Score
From Adylitica
Quality score is an opaque score that Google assigns to keywords in ad groups.
This score is combined with bid amounts to determine the position of ad variants as well as impressions share. Quality score also influences bid cost: low quality scores will incur stiff financial penalties.
This number is based on:
- Ad group CTR
- Overall account CTR
- CTR on similar display urls
- Landing page quality (not used for ad Position)
- Relevance of matching ad variant to queries
- Other mystery factors
Account Quality Score
Trial and error testing is a highly effective tactic to find the right keywords, however poor quality score keywords can have effects even outside of their ad group or campaign.
The reason for this is that there is a hidden account quality score that uses the quality score of all ads in an account to influence individual ads in the account. If you have a very poor quality score ad, it can increase the price of all other ads in the account. [1]
Manage this effect by quickly deleting poorly performing tests.
The High Initial Bid Tactic
Some people suggest that you should start new keywords with a high bid, so as to increase their position, which leads to a higher CTR, which theoretically leads to a higher quality score.
This however is a fallacious tactic and is not recommended, Google normalizes the CTR to position when calculating quality score - so increasing the bid should have a minimal impact on quality score.
Bad Landing Pages
Google uses landing pages to help determine quality score, a bad landing page can drastically increase CPC.
What a bad landing page is opaque, however Google has listed examples of what are bad landing pages: [2]
- Data collection: offering rewards for handing over private information
- Arbitrage: showing ads on adwords landing pages
- Malware: pages that try to install software on people's computers
Additionally bad-listed by Google:
- Get rich quick schemes
- Comparison shopping
- Travel advice aggregators
- Affiliate sites
