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How Much Attention Do You Give Quality Scores?
Posted by on August 7, 2020 at 3:59 pmInterested to know the extent to which you spend time trying to improve quality scores and whether this is something that people with a good amount of industry experience actually bother with.
I have more or less given up attempting to improve them as the results I see for some keywords simply do not make sense to me. I inherited an account with a tonne of broad match keywords including plural versions of the same keyword and found that X would have a different score to Xs.
Also, my understanding is that the QS we see is based on an a scenario where the keyword and search term are the same, which rarely happens for this account. Same for Exp CTR, I may have this wrong but my understanding was that it’s the CTR your keyword gets in occasions when the keyword exactly matches the search term, compared to your competitor.
With that in mind, am I missing something, or is it then kinda pointless bothering to try and improve QS (for broad match keywords at least)?
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3 Replies
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I ignore it. Have for years. I don’t think it’s useful except as a warning light when it’s in the 1-3 zone.
My reasons:
* It’s a blunt instrument.
* It’s a terrible feedback mechanism.
* Nobody knows the QS rules.
* It’s a poor proxy for how well Google Ads serves the business goals.
* Obsessing about QS distracts you from more important work.A lot more ranting / thoughts on it here if you’re interested: [https://pete-bowen.com/troubleshooting-google-ads/quality-score-is-no-longer-a-useful-metric-for-managing-or-optimising-an-adwords-campaign](https://pete-bowen.com/troubleshooting-google-ads/quality-score-is-no-longer-a-useful-metric-for-managing-or-optimising-an-adwords-campaign)
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I actually do look at the scores (I can see direct relation between Top of page CPC and QS). They often have a relatively pretty easy fix too.. Ad relevance: use keyword insertion (headline, description). Landing page: shoehorn the keyword in a paragraph somewhere (and do technical optims you’d usually have to do for SEO anyway). CTR: increase bids for a while to get back into an upward spiral (higher position -> better ctr -> better QS). The last one kind of depends on whether it’s a moneymaker, of course.
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Just as a general thought,
Getting a good quality score, ***were talking something better than a 7 in most markets***,
when your running actual **Modified Broad match** or **Regular Broad match** like you have indicated you are here as a part of the project you’re in…
is going to be very difficult to get in general no matter how hard you try just due to the nature how non “drilled-down” these keywords match types really are and what purpose they serve in getting you the results in your market you need.
There just a different type of tool in your toolshed and shouldn’t be evaluated or used the same way most of the time.
**The really high quality scores generally come in when your mostly running phrase and exact match, as a general rule of thumb (not always but quite a bit).**
*Just thought I would throw that in there as well.*
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Hope this also helps.
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