Average Quality Score

This may end up quite a lengthy post, but it addresses something that I think is useful – the need to monitor your quality score. This is an underrated metric that tells so much about the quality of the account, but is rarely used. It is not applied to whole campaigns or accounts and almost never tracked over time. This is not, in fact, hard to do, and towards the end of this post I propose one way of doing it.

What Is Quality Score?

Quality score is a measure of how relevant your keywords and ads are, with a maximum score of 10. Here is the definition by Google: AdWords calculates a Quality Score for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query. A keyword’s Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click.

Google goes on to list some of the factors that influence QS:

• The historical CTR of the keyword and the matched ad
• The quality of your landing page
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
• Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown

How To Improve Your Quality Score

The way to improve your QS is to improve your account’s granularity. Creating unique ad groups around a tight group of related keywords, writing individual ad copy and landing the user on a highly relevant web page all help. Match types also play a role, with exact matching typically performing best. It is all good old common sense PPC best practice that results in better CTR, lower CPC and higher conversion rate. The process is well documented on the web and I won’t go into further details.

The problem with QS though is that it is very hard to quantify and benchmark. There is no readily-available single statistic that tells you the whole story – but I think you can create one. It’s all explained below.

Account Average Quality Score

Now to the main topic of this post – averaged QS. This would be a great overview metric to monitor as your account is being worked on over time. You’ll be able to spot ups and downs following any major changes. Being able to drill down into the report – say, to particular campaigns or ad groups – can then focus your efforts on the bad areas that need improving the most.

I don’t think Google provides you with an averaged statistic that you can track over time, although this is not hard to obtain. Simply go to your Campaigns tab, click on Keywords, and add the “Qual. score” metric from the Columns tab. You can then download the lot and open them in Excel where you can average all keywords’ scores. Here is an example with 4 keywords of what your report may look like:

Why Average Quality Score Is Of No Use

In practice, however, the above is too simplistic. If your account is very Brand heavy, you’re likely to have excellent QS for lots of Brand terms that push your average up. Also, not all keywords are created equal and a simple average presumes all your big traffic keywords are as important as your small 3-clicks-a-day keywords. To help with these issues, here are two ways to create a more meaningful report:

• Introduce click-weighted average. Attribute disproportionately more weight to high traffic keywords.
• Split Brand from Generics. Almost always a good idea for any report!

Creating A Click-Weighted Average Quality Score Report

So you’ve downloaded all your keywords – including their QS and click stats – possibly in the following format:

Now we need to introduce two new columns – one that measures the relative volume of clicks, called Click Proportion, and one that then attributes QS accordingly, called Weighted QS. You can calculate individual Click Proportion using Keyword Click Proportion = Keyword Clicks / Total Clicks. Weighted QS is then = Keyword QS x Click Proportion. You end up with something like this:

Now we can see that our account QS is 9.81 – however, splitting our keywords by Generic / Brand shows that we have two very different sides of the story. In fact, Brand QS is 10 but Generic QS is just 4.56.

And voila, you can immidiately see where the problem is and have a benchmark to improve on.

Using This Report

It may sound a bit long-winded, but actually this is an extremely easy report to set up. Its’ use is two-fold: to aid monitoring and to highlight areas for improvement. The first one is obvious – simply keep track of your monthly Generic and Brand weighted QS and make sure things go up. The second one is also obvious – just sort your keyword list with the worst quality score at the top and filter any small volume keywords. This is now your to-do list. Enjoy!

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