What is Google AdWords Quality Score and Why Does it Matter?

If you do any form of reading about Google AdWords, it won’t be long until you come across the term ‘Quality Score’ and realise that when managing an AdWords account, a lot of emphasis is given to getting a high score. So, what is it and why does it matter?

Quality score is a score given to each keyword that ranges from 1 to 10 (10 being the highest). It is a metric that takes into account how relative the ad and landing page is to the keyword as well as the expected click-through rate of the keyword.

Google is putting more and more emphasis on the user experience now, so the better the user experience, the higher the quality score. If you’re providing an ad that is relevant to what the user is searching on and they get to a page where you’re giving them all the information that they were looking for, then they’re getting a good user experience.This increases your likelihood of receiving a good quality score for your keyword.

When you add a keyword to an adgroup, Google will allocate a default quality score of 6 until there has been sufficient searches for it to gather enough data and give an individual calculation.

Why is quality score so important?

Having a good quality score is important to you as an advertiser as it is a good indication that you are providing what the user wants. Most importantly however, it will affect how much you pay for each click. You’ll be significantly rewarded for having a high quality score and penalised for having a low one. You’ll get higher positioning and lower cost per clicks when you improve your quality score. Let’s examine how this works by giving you an understanding of how Google determines positioning and cost per click.

At all times when managing your bid, you need to remember that on every search of your keywords, there is an auction that is carried out. Google looks at each advertiser that is entering that auction and will position the ads accordingly. However, it’s not simply a case of positioning ads relative to how high they are bidding, there are a number of other factors that come into play which levels the playing field for the smaller advertisers that don’t necessarily have deep pockets and could get outbid by larger companies.

Google calculates a score called Ad Rank which is a simple calculation of the bidder’s maximum bid multiplied by the quality score of that keyword. Google will order the advertisements based upon their Ad Rank. This forumla is illustrated in the graphic below;

You’ll see in the table below that by having a higher quality score, you can outrank other bidders even though they may be bidding higher than you.

So how much would you actually pay per click?

It’s important to remember that the bid price that you’ve entered is the maximum bid that you’re prepared to pay, not the actual price that you’ll pay per click. To put this into context, if you imagine that you are at an antiques auction and you’ve got your eye on a candlestick that you’re prepared to pay up to £200 on, if you’ve got one other bidder in the auction who is prepared to pay up to £150, then you could win the candlestick by paying £150.01.

The same principle applies to Google AdWords. You won’t pay your maximum bid, but you’ll pay enough to outbid your competitor once their Ad Rank and your quality score is taken into account.

The price you pay per click is calculated as the Ad Rank of the nearest competitor that’s below you divided by your quality score plus 0.01p.

So if we take the same auction and apply the calculation, you can see the actual amount that each advertiser would pay if they win the click in that auction and you’ll appreciate why a lot of attention should be given to quality scores.

So, you can clearly see how in this example, paying some attention to the quality score has meant that advertiser C and B have been able to appear at higher positions whilst bidding and paying considerably less than advertisers A & D.

Therefore to maximise the number of clicks that you get from your AdWords budget, you want work on getting the highest quality score that you can.