As you might already know, Google published yesterday a white paper called “Settling the Quality Score”. Leaving other beautiful things apart, I will tell you exactly what you need to know and what you can use from that paper.
Settling the Quality Score – compressed misconceptions and advice:
1. Focus on 3 main components – ad relevance, expected CTR and landing page experience.
2. Google does pay attention to: the user’s device, the performance of the keywords that you already use in your account when you add new related keywords, and relevance to the user’s intentions.
3. Google doesn’t care about how you structure your account(campaigns and group names etc.) as long as it doesn’t change the user’s experience, the performance in other networks(like Google Display Network or Google Search partners) and your ad’s position. There is no need to pay more to increase your CTR and thus, your quality score, this is just a misconception regarding quality score. In fact, Google normalizes your expected CTR for your ad’s position, ad extensions and ad formats. The higher the ad’s position, the higher the expected CTR is.
4. Quality Score is only a general metric for diagnosis, it is the 3 main components that you need to pay attention to. Even though the quality is calculated for every auction, the quality score does not directly reflect all the components of a real-time auction such as the user’s exact query, device, location and time of the day. Other factors that are not reflected in the quality score are the differences between multiple ads in an ad group and non-exact queries matches. So, even though you add negative keywords and match types to your account, they are not captured in the quality score. Those numbers are only a representation of query that exactly matches your keyword.
This is a quick summary of Settling the Quality Score which includes only the most relevant misconceptions related to quality score calculation. Here you can find the full text. We are happy to see more transparency from Google AdWords and we hope this compressed version above will help you work less and earn more.