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Evan Magers, iSearch Media


Quality Score is a grade the AdWords system applies to each of your keywords, a calculation of the degree of relevance between the search terms you're bidding on and the user experience your site actually provides. Building and fostering high Quality Scores is wildly important on AdWords; high Quality Score means lower minimum bids and better ad position.

Quality Score is based on six factors:

  1) Clickthrough rate

➢ The higher the better. A CTR of 1.0% (on search, not content) is typically considered strong.

  2) Relevance of keyword to ad text

➢ Nearly without exception, every keyword you bid on needs to show up at least once within the text of every single ad it triggers. In order to make this happen, you must group your keywords very, very tightly into very small ad groups, and for each ad group you must write unique ads (see ch. 4)

➢ Affects only your ad position

  3) Relevance of keyword to other keywords in its ad group

➢ Another reason to make your ad groups very small

➢ Affects only your minimum bid

  4) Relevance of keyword to your landing page

➢ Basic on-page SEO principles apply here; it's best for each landing page to contain about 200 words of content, with the keyword or keyword theme you're targeting sprinkled (but not stuffed artificially) throughout the text. Having the target keyword in your page's meta tags also helps.

➢ Just as with SEO, the landing page content needs to be original

  5) Landing page load time

➢ Graded relative to the average webpage load times in your geographical area

  6) Historical performance of your account

➢ The longer an AdWords account has been active and running with high Quality Scores, the more favoritism the AdWords system shows it





Quality Score is everything. If you don't understand it, don't waste your money or time on AdWords until you've learned how to build and maintain an account that will deliver consistently high Quality Scores.