Why Does Quality Score on Google Adwords Keep Changing?

[Terry Kyle]

Hi SEO Sages,

Does anybody here know why Adwords' Quality Score keeps fluctuating even though it's pointed at the same page?

Also, in Adwords Campaign Management, is the Quality Score only measuring the quality of the Adwords ad, the website it's pointed at or both? Which one has more weight?

Without many quality backlinks to a page, regardless of whether it's very relevant to the search keyword chosen or not, it always seem to move between "OK" and "Poor".

Many many thanks in advance.

[OldWelshGuy]

I wrote a blog post about this 2 years ago when they made the big cahnge. http://www.oldwelshguy.co.uk/web-mar...osing-the-plot there is some info on there about how it is calculate.

There has been some new deleopments about this though and it is VERY disturbing.

test have been run (naturally), and it seems that it is site dependent! YES THAT'S RIGHT! Tests have been run on a new domain that was not ranking for the phrase, and google gave the quality score the thumbs down. The same page was then used as a landing page, same ad, same group etc, but to a TRUSTED domain that WAS ranking organically for the phrase, and the quality score was FINE!


Do no evil my arse!

[Terry Kyle]

Thanks OWG - good job!

[admagic]

The reason that quality scores bounce is IMHO because part of the formula for quality score includes CTR....it sounds daft, but all anecdotal evidence says it must be true. So as CTR bounces so does quality.

So you can get "great" quality INITIALLY for a landing page provided you follow some simple rules....which is about including keywords in the title and elsewhere on the landing page...incorporating a number of key pages such as "contact" , "privacy"...and the formula I use, copied from one of the american gurus is a hyperlink to an "articles" or "product description" page containing content information on the subect - vital if the page is a name squeeze or just a product sale..

Thereafter.....google look hard at CTR, if the page gets zero CTR or close for the next 24 hours and after several hundred impressions, quality will reduce, and if after 1000 impressions and no clicks, chances are quality becomes poor and you get slapped - despite the fact that the page , ad and keywords have not changed.

Proof that CTR is buried in the quality somewhere.....

The reason they do this I think, is because the Quality system is already linked through to minimum bid...so that by making CTR affect quality , that automatically raises the minimum bid of any poor performing ad.

So it really is vital to eliminate none performing keywords and ads VERY QUICKLY

I also agree with OWG....the name of the domain matters...as does its existing organic ranking.

Re the domain name...I THINK that is two fold reason...part of the reason is domain names directly improve CTR...and part of it is google look for keywords in page titles too...


So the old "subdomain name" trick in display URLs is well worth doing....

However follow some simple rules and you can always get "GREAT" for your landing page....what happens then is down to your CTR...