Factors Affecting Google AdWords Quality Score

1 CTR

CTR is the percentage value of the number of clicks and impressions of an advertisement. For example, for a particular keyword, if your ad has 100 impressions and 5 clicks, the click-through rate (CTR) for that keyword would be 5%. CTR is a decisive factor in determining quality score; the CTR we use here to calculate the quality score is the click-through rate of the keyword on Google Search. The click-through rate of the keyword on Google partners and the content network (AdSense) does not affect the calculation of the quality score because Google cannot fully control or measure these data.

Also, the CTR here differs from the click-through rate you see in the keyword table. Impressions and clicks are only counted as affecting the quality score's CTR when the selected keyword and the search keyword are an exact match.

2. Relevance of Keywords, Ad Content, and Landing Page

The keywords, ad copy, and landing page must ensure thematic relevance.

For instance, writing words similar to the keywords in the ad copy can improve your quality score, and when the content of the landing page is closely linked to the terms users search for, it also helps to increase your quality score.

One point to note here is that if you use dynamic keyword insertion technology to include keywords in your ad content, it will not help your quality score.

3. Account History

The overall historical performance of your Google AdWords account is also one of the factors influencing the quality score. If your AdWords account performed poorly in the past, Google will automatically judge the quality of your newly created ads to be poor.

Account history means that if there are keywords with poor quality scores in your account, they can indirectly negatively impact the performance of other keywords. Therefore, continuously improving your keyword list is necessary. This also means that underperforming ad campaigns or ad groups can affect the overall performance of the account. Hence, if you want to do some testing, you can open a new account for it, so it won't affect your original ad campaigns or groups.

The "account history" here does not refer to all historical data since your account was established but rather only the data from the last 1000 impressions.

4. Quality of the Landing Page (Destination Page Quality)

Landing page quality was added to the quality score calculation system in July 2006, which once caused many people's minimum bids for certain keywords to skyrocket, famously known as the "Google slap."

How does landing page quality affect the quality score? The closer the relationship between the destination page and the search query, the higher the quality of the search results, and thus the higher your quality score. If your ad has little connection to your destination page content or if you use common techniques to hide or redirect the destination page, it will have a negative impact on the quality score of your ad. Additionally, your landing page should have sufficient content and clear navigation, which we will introduce in more detail later.

The latest change regarding the landing page is that the loading speed of the landing page has been included as a factor affecting the quality score.

5. Other Related Factors

In addition to the five factors mentioned above, there are some other related factors that may influence the quality score. Google hasn’t disclosed much about these, but it is certain that the role these factors play in influencing the quality score is minimal and cannot compare to the factors discussed above. In most cases, we can ignore them when balancing and optimizing.

Among the factors mentioned above, when we discuss CTR and related factors, they only affect the click-through rate of corresponding keywords. However, when discussing ad copy or landing pages, they can affect all keywords within the scope.

Additionally, click-through rate is the most heavily weighted dominant factor. Google uses this to judge the relevance of our ads, but this isn't absolute. Sometimes, we might find that a particular keyword has a high click-through rate, yet the minimum bid is also high (indicating a low quality score). Why is this? Usually, it’s due to one of the following reasons:

- Our account’s historical performance is too poor.

- Although the keyword has a high click-through rate, the absolute number of impressions and clicks is not high. For example, if the click-through rate is 100% but there is only one impression and one click, the impact of the click-through rate will be correspondingly reduced.

- The quality of the target webpage of the ad is too poor.